Drew Cylinder

Dead Babies and Roses: Children in the Poetry of Sylvia Plath

Poets, philosophers, and psychologists are all drawn to babies and young children. In much of literature, babies are seen as a blank slate, innocent and helpless. Sylvia Plath, however, twists these images into nasty, disturbing images and sometimes goes overboard in her metaphors. Plath uses the image of babies in “Stillborn,” “Morning Song,” and “Kindred” to represent innocence, life, and the writing of poetry.
Like in many other poets, babies stand for all things innocent and good, but Plath twists this image around in the poem “Stillborn.” In the passage, “They stupidly stare and do not speak of her” (Stillborn, 14), the babies sound as if they are mocking the mother. On the other hand in the poem “Kindred,” Plath says:” You hand me two children, two roses” (Kindred, 20), a clear contrast to the images of pickling babies presented in “Stillborn.” The children in “Kindred” are presented as living (again a difference from “Stillborn”) and are seen as a gift or blessing. At one point in Kindness she states: “What is so real as the cry of a child? / A rabbit’s cry may be wilder/ but it has no soul” (Kindred, 6) Here, she is explaining why a child’s life is so precious. A child has a soul and is a conscious being, explaining why their passing is so tragic. In “Stillborn,” Plath compares the babies to fish, but reminds herself that they are not, and they had the potential to be something alive and with a conscience.
In the “Morning Song” Sylvia Plath expresses her wonder of the newborn baby. “All night your moth-breath,” she says, “Flickers among the flat pink roses. I wake to listen” (Morning Song, 10). The quote shows her almost disbelief that this is something that she created, a new life and she is willing to do anything for the new baby- “One cry, and I stubble from bed” (Morning Song, 13). She expresses similar themes in “Kindness” in the line “You hand me two children, two roses” (“Kindness, 20). Children are the highest gift that must be treasured along with their childhood, which is only temporary like a rose which wilts. Plath is even intrigued by a newborn baby’s appearance, “They are not pigs, they are not even fish, / though they have a piggy and a fishy air” (SB, 12).
Sylvia Plath uses the image of dead babies as a metaphor for her own writers block. She says blatantly in the first line of “Stillborn,” “These poems do not live, it’s a sad diagnosis.” In the quote “They grew their toes and fingers well enough/their little foreheads bulged with concentration” (SB 2) Plath express her confusion with the babies/poetry. She can’t figure out why she cannot write or why the babies are not alive. The gruesome images in “Stillborn” may have come from Plath’s own miscarriage, and in the last line of the poem, she expresses her suspicion that the babies are playing a cruel joke on her, “…their mother is dead with distraction, /And they stupidly stare and do not speak of her” (SB, 15), or it could be interpreted as her poetry remaining elusive.
Sylvia Plath used baby and child imagery in many different ways, from the wonder of “Kindness” and “Morning Song” to the morbid indifference of “Stillborn.” No matter what poem, Sylvia Plath’s use of child and baby imagery certainly makes a point, especially in “Stillborn.” Her shocking images of babies floating in pickling fluid have sometimes been considered excessive and unneeded, but it is this excessiveness that makes her poetry so powerful.