Sylvia Plath, "The Times are Tidy"

Unlucky the hero born
In this province of the stuck record
Where the most watchful cooks go jobless
And the mayor's rotisserie turns
Round of its own accord.

There's no career in the venture
Of riding against the lizard,
Himself withered these latter-days
To leaf-size from lack of action:
History's beaten the hazard.

The last crone got burnt up
More than eight decades back
With the love-hot herb, the talking cat,
But the children are better for it,
The cow milks cream an inch thick.

(1958)


I'm writing as a guest -- not only to The Poetic Quotidian but in many ways to poetry itself ('up the novel!' says this prose girl). I own Sylvia Plath's collected works (I nearly wrote 'woks', which would actually be a far more impressive and unique Plath collection to own) but never spend extended time reading poem after poem. I dip infrequently and see what's to be found. The title of this one caught me first, and the rest of the poem mirrors its timeless and yet neatly specific feel: Reading it gave me whiffs of the Salem witch trials, Guantanamo Bay, a nameless fairy-tale kingdom, the unemployment line in Los Angeles ... Her line breaks are punchy without feeling contrived, especially in the first stanza. Her imagery throughout is vivid without being specific -- rich, sensual moments (rotisserie, leaf-size lizard, cream, love-hot herb) could be allegories for any number of things, or nothing. Whether or not the poem is read as political (the ennui of a would-be revolutionary?) it has a deftness and obliqueness that appeals more than anything with a finer point on it. The blunted references and pictorial sensibility remind me a lot of Wallace Stevens' "The Emperor of Ice-cream". Both poems share a compactness and confidence that hit hard and bolt-clear.

Sylvia Plath, "Metaphors"

I'm a riddle in nine syllables,
An elephant, a ponderous house,
A melon strolling on two tendrils.
O red fruit, ivory, fine timbers!
This loaf's big with its yeasty rising.
Money's new-minted in this fat purse.
I'm a means, a stage, a cow in calf.
I've eaten a bag of green apples,
Boarded the train there's no getting off.

~

From The Colossus (1960)

This poem moves us into the riddle territory of this week's theme; in fact, its title does not provide a clue so much point to the fact that its various images take the place of something else. The solution to the riddle is 'a pregnant woman' - the metaphors being a mix of inventive images and figures 'pregnant' with meaning. In case you hadn't noticed, the first line refers to the number of syllables (9) in each of the poem's nine lines, reflecting the nine months of pregnancy. Not also other subtle (or not so subtle) hints - a house is something that a person lives in (like a womb); the red fruit is also like the womb; the fifth line's coy allusion to having 'a bun in the oven'. While some of this cleverness is slightly cloying, that effect reinforces the muted grotesquerie of many of the images, as the pregnancy is almost something monstrous, as it is also mixed with the potential for sickness and rotting ("a bag of green apples") and an undercurrent of doom ("the train there's no getting off").
At the same time, the title suggests another level, playing off the traditional trope of comparing writing and giving birth. Metaphors are indeed a way of giving birth to new meaning; and if it's not going to far, I'd like to point out the conceptual similarity, the root "meta" meaning "beyond", and that a metaphor involves two parts, the imaginative potential of one being dependent on the concreteness of the other.
Plath's poems often draw upon the dark, traumatic, violent, even sado-masochistic - so it seems appropriate that her metaphoric pregnancy of creation would be conceived as something gortesque, sinister, perhaps uncontrollable.

(More about Sylvia Plath [1932-1963], including a few additional poems: www.poets.org/splat/)