Nidhi Vakharia

Flower and Plant Imagery in Plath’s Poems: Love Hurts or Bites
When Sylvia Plath first met Ted Hughes, the man who would become her husband within a year, she passionately began to recite all his poems and then she proceeded to bite him. While love is usually depicted as heaven, Plath makes it a point in her poems “Spinster” and “Two Sisters of Persephone” to make love seem like hell. By using the imagery of flowers and plants, Plath shows the theme of romantic pain for both of the poems. The intimacy that the flowers show, the colors of or associated with the flowers and plants, and the role of the flower in the poem overall each give a different effect to each respective poem whilst retaining the theme of romantic pain.
The imagery of flowers has a varying effect on the intimacy shown in the two poems. This quote, “Of petaled blood/ Burns open to the sun’s blade,” (“Two Sisters of Persephone,” 18, 19) directly refers to a sexual relation. In “Two Sisters of Persephone,” the message of intimacy is stressed and nearly an entire stanza is devoted to it. However, it is not the type of intimacy that is often portrayed in love; rather it is a frightening and violent way. Plath uses language like “poppies/…burns open” (“Two Sisters of Persephone,” 16, 19) to show a stereotypically sweet experience as painful. In “Spinster,” romantic pain is shown through the lack of intimacy. The flowers, instead of being close and in harmony with one another, are “in disarray” (“Spinster,” 11). Plath shows that the lack of closeness and intimacy cause the woman to barricade herself away from romantic pain. Both of the poems use flower imagery in varying ways to show the romantic pain of intimacy.
Color plays a crucial role in the message portrayed by the flower and plant imagery. In “Two Sisters of Persephone,” the flowers are colored blood red; while red often signifies passion and love, there is also a reference to the poppies as “petaled blood” (“Two Sisters of Persephone,” 18), implying a cut or wound of some sort has been inflicted. Here, romantic pain is being compared to the throbbing pain of an open wound. In “Spinster,” the lusterless, colorless or at times wildly blossoming flowers denote the pain of love in a much different way than in “Two Sisters of Persephone.” In “Spinster,” the flower spends most of its time under the snow, “ice and rock” (“Spinster,” 15), and when it is blooming its color is too wild and jarring to be appreciated, “a rank wilderness of fern and flower” (“Spinster,” 11). The woman receives no love at all, but when she does it is too disgusting and revolting for her to accept it. “Spinster” shows the romantic pain of never having experienced true love at all.
The flower imagery, as a whole, contributes to the overall message of romantic pain within these two poems. In “Two Sisters of Persephone,” the woman first experiences love “near a bed of poppies” (“Two Sisters of Persephone,” 16), but then later the “petaled blood” (“Two Sisters of Persephone,” 18) of the flower shows the injury she is later caused. In this poem, the flower’s role is primarily to show romantic pain in a deceptive manner by first depicting the flowers as lulling but later revealing them as a source of intense pain. In “Spinster,” the flower is ignored in the winter and when it blooms it is foolish to look at. The “petals in disarray” (“Spinster,” 11) make “the whole season, sloven” (“Spinster,” 12). Comparing these two, the main difference in the romantic pain shown between “Two Sisters of Persephone” and “Spinster” is that one has received love, but it was not fulfilling and scarring, while the other has only received love by fools much below her standard and to her this is similar to not receiving true love at all.
In conclusion, Plath often used the theme of romantic pain in her poems. Perhaps, because in her own life she has often dealt with both types of the pain she shows in her poems. As a young woman she dated an elder man who she said had raped her, much like the type of experience shown in “Two Sisters of Persephone.” However she still would not leave, again much like the poem where the relation is shown as binding seeing as the woman is pregnant. Then similar to the woman in “Spinster” at times Plath experienced closing herself to the world and failing into depression. Often in literature, authors put much of themselves into their poems and it seems Sylvia Plath, too, has invested many of her personal feelings into the poems “Two Sisters of Persephone” and “Spinster.”