Joe Yoo

Childhood Injuries: Physical Pain to Emotional Struggle
Injury is physical or emotional damage or harm done to or suffered by a person or thing. In addition, imagery is a description of a noun that can be visualized and appeals to your five senses. Thus, Sylvia Plath, who was a pessimist, uses this literary device to enrich her poems and enlighten her readers. Furthermore, in reference to her damaged childhood, Plath’s emotional insecurity and troubled persona reflects on her poetry in the form of physical and emotional injury imagery.
Sylvia Plath was born on October 27, 1932 in Boston, Massachusetts to Otto and Aurelia Plath. However, her childhood was anything but normal. She had a bizarre husband-wife relationship with her father, which put a lot of pressure on Sylvia to please him. She was also the only person allowed to talk to him about his day after a hard day of work. Her mother Aurelia and brother Warren were not the warmest of people either. Her mother was very controlling which influenced her to resort to her less criticizing parental figure. Subsequently, Sylvia’s dreadful family life affects her personality. She never had anyone to she could count on. So, certain traits such as her cynicism continue even later in her life.
Injury images are used in “The Colossus” to describe Physical pain her family brought her. “The Colossus” by Sylvia Plath is primarily about her relationship with her father. The colossus itself is a great statue that symbolized her father after his unfortunate death. Otto Plath died from untreated diabetes in his toe but ultimately from embolism in 1940. She first describes, “I crawl like an ant in mourning / Over the weedy acres of your brow / To mend the immense skull-plates and clear / The bald, white tumuli of your eyes” (“The Colossus” 13-17). This particular imagery shows her physical pain after her loss. Although she loathed her father for he things he did she still feels responsible for him even after his death. Sylvia feels “Thirty years now I have labored / To dredge the silt from your throat. / I am none the wiser” (“The Colossus” 10-11). This explains that Sylvia worked for thirty years to try to please Otto. However, the depressed tone shows that she felt like she never could. The “silt” in her throat was an injury which shows her handicap of speech and what she felt she lacked in. “Counting the red stars and those of plum color. / The sun rises under the pillar of your tongue” (“The Colossus” 31-32). This is an injury imagery of someone being knocked out and seeing stars, which is evidence to her abusive house life as a child. The “sun rising out” of the tongue is a visual imagery which shows life coming out of Otto Plath’s body. The significance of the mouth is because that is where Sylvia felt she lacked the most and disappointed him with her conversational skills.
Unlike “The Colossus” the “Mirror” has more emotional injury rather than physical to illustrate her cynicism. Mirror is a poem that expresses the harsh reflections of Sylvia Plath which lead to self-hatred. Her depression is severe and noticeable in this poem and it led to her suicide attempt in 1963 at the age of thirty. The mirror is significant because the emotional pain she feels is within her, and the mirror is the tool which displays her all her flaws. Sylvia believes that “I am not cruel, only truthful” (“Mirror” 4). Therefore, she lets antagonists, such as her dad, affect her own attitude. Sylvia writes, “She rewards me with tears and agitation of hands” (“Mirror” 15). This imagery is the transition from expressing her emotional suffering to physical through the tears and hands. She calls her suffering a reward because she feels like she can get the pain out of her. Consequently, since she does not feel comfortable expressing her own emotions, she uses another person to do it for her.
All in all, vivid images of emotional and physical injury allow Sylvia Plath to represent her current life within her poetry. Injury images allude to her damaged childhood. Thus, “The Colossus” contains physical imagery to describe her tainted relationship with her father; and in “Mirror” she uses emotional imagery to show effects of the abuse. Ultimately, both poems comprise a cynical persona attributable to her discontent for herself.

Word Count: 706