Donald Tan

“In her dark wainscoted room”: Sylvia Plath’s Struggle Through Light and Darkness
How better to express a conflict of emotions than to separate them into stark black and white? The confessional poet Sylvia Plath certainly took to heart the poetic contrast of light and dark. Inherent of confessional poetry Plath uses her poetry as a medium to reflect the conflicts and hardships from which she suffers. Using images of light and dark Plath’s poems “Two Sisters of Persephone” and “Black Rook in Rainy Weather” tell two different stories of Plath’s inner turmoil.
Darkness, which is defined as the complete absence of light, provides the perfect means of comparison in Plath’s poems when pitched against light. Her poem “Two Sisters of Persephone” compares the lifestyles of two women. “The first works problems on/ A mathematical machine./ Dry ticks mark time” (Persephone 6-8) while “Bronzed as earth, the second lies,/ Hearing ticks blown gold” (13-14)The reader perceives these two as entirely different because of Plath’s usage of light and dark imagery. “Daylong a duet of shade and light” The shade is the woman who lives alone and dies alone. She is not only darkness by predicament, but also by her descriptions such as “In her dark wainscoted room” (5), “graveward with flesh laid waste” (27) and “worm-husbanded, yet no woman”(28). Darkness in Plath’s sense is not simply blackness, it is the complete lack of good, or love, or life. The light is the woman who is married and bears children. She is also light by her descriptions, such as “Like pollen on bright air”(15), “red silk flare”(17), and “sun’s bride”(21). Thus in Plath’s sense light is represented by a contented married life with children. This interpretation is similar to that of “Black Rook in Rainy Weather”, in which she describes her “fear/ Of total neutrality” (Rook 31-32). In this poem the light and dark is more literal: the dark being “a wet black rook/ … in the rain” and the light “a celestial burning… bestowing largess, honor/One might say love” (17-21) The blackness represents the bleakness of the oppressive boredom Plath is suffering from. Suffering in fact, to such an extent that “a rook/ Ordering its black feathers can so shine/…and grant/ A brief respite from fear/ Of total neutrality” (26-32) This usage of light as a respite from darkness is different from light as a stark opposite of dark in “Two Sisters of Persephone”.
The different usages of light and dark imagery give their respective poems different effects. In “Two Sisters of Persephone” the stark contrast between light and dark coupled with her bitter feminist tone makes the poem an excellent criticism of the role of women in society. It portrays the woman who works towards her education as the one who dies a worm infested virgin, and the woman who has sex and lives in lazy contentment bears a king. However, in “Black Rook in Rainy Weather” the darkness is no longer on equal grounds with the light. The usage of light as a respite from the darkness creates a transition from bleakness to a subtle hope. The poem begins in darkness, and Plath confesses her wish for “some backtalk/ From the mute sky” and ends the poem with her decision to wait, “the long wait for the angel”. In both poems light and dark are used for their contrasting imageries, but to different effects for different purposes.
In conclusion, the images of light and dark are varied within Plath’s poems, and come together loosely under the category of stark contrast. This contrast is used in her two poems “Two Sisters of Persephone” and “Black Rook in Rainy Weather” and they both serve to separate their respective poems into portions of light and dark. But they work to different effects, one to create a harsh social commentary, and the other to outline trying to fight depression by searching for faith.