Arunav Sarkar

Sylvia Plath’s Imagery: Injury at Work

In her poems, Sylvia Plath makes significant use of imagery. In particular, imagery related to injury is used in some of her poems. In the poems “Spinster” and “The Colossus”, Plath uses imagery relating to injury to show how she feels regarding the subject she is talking about in the poem. The imagery she uses in these poems are intended to convey to the reader the pain that she feels when talking about certain things that have affected her personally in her life.
In the poems “Spinster” and “The Colossus”, Sylvia Plath uses imagery to depict the emotional injury she feels. The poem “Spinster” is about a woman who is in a relationship with a man. She feels really depressed when she is with him, and she is blinded to the beauty in her surroundings that she would normally see. She writes “petals in disarray, The whole season, sloven.” (Plath 11-12). This reflects on how her depression is leading her to not see the beauty of the season. On top of this, the season in question is Spring, which many consider to be a season of great beauty. This further shows how Sylvia is deeply affected by the man, and how she does not like to be with him. It is also important to note that she writes about how she will create a barricade so that in the future no one can ever cause her emotional turmoil. In the poem “The Colossus” she talks about her father’s passing away. She relates to the loneliness she feels through the imagery she uses because words cannot describe it. In the quote “My hours are married to shadow” (Plath 28). This expresses how after her father’s passing, a large void has been created in her life, where her father’s place previously occupied. Plath is significantly injured by her father’s passing because he was an important figure in her life, and she expresses her emotional injury through imagery.
In addition, she talks about the effects of love, and how she is traumatized by them. In the poem “Spinster”, Plath writes about how the woman creates an emotional barrier around herself because of her failed relationship. Plath is reflecting on her own life when she writes this, because she herself had a failed relationship with Ted Hughes. After her divorce from Hughes, she was left feeling lonely and depressed for the second time in her life. She creates an emotional barrier to prevent herself from loving anyone ever again, because she does not want to feel the pain that is associated with broken love. In “The Colossus”, she talks about her father the entire time, and it can be inferred that he played a significant role in her life, and she really mourns his passing. Now that he is gone, she says that she is going to be depressed and lonely now that he is gone from her life. This shows her emotional pain as a result of her father’s death.
In conclusion, Sylvia Plath uses imagery related to injury in her poems to relate to the pain that she feels from real life occurrences that have scarred her. The two main poems where she uses injury-related imagery are “Spinster” and “The Colossus”. By depicting injury, Sylvia Plath is able to convey to the reader the pain she feels regarding the subjects she writes about.