Nsima Inyang

Nsima Inyang
Mrs. Poulsen
English
2 November, 2008

Plath’s use of Animal Poetry

Sylvia Plath has abundant use of animal imagery in many of her poems. Most of which are poems discussing her father and also having links to feminism. Plath uses animal imagery to show instances of hardship, the pain of having to conform to societal norms and the tragic lass of her father.
In the poem “The Colossus” Plat uses the image of barnyard animals to show the pain of having to conform to society, and also the pain of having lost her father. Social conformity comes into this poem when she states in the first line, “I shall never get you put together entirely”, this quote is society saying that they will never be able to get her to conform entirely. That she is not willing to conform fully to what society wants her to be. In the next quote, “Pieced, glued, and properly jointed. Mule-bray, pig-grunt and bawdy cackles proceed from your great lips”. The quote here is a showing of the pain that Plath goes through as she is being forced to conform. The use of the animal sounds shows the loud sounds of anguish she makes as she is being put together as another one of societies typical females. The barnyard sounds make it clear that she is not willing to conform , but they force her to.
Another instance in the poem “The Colossus” Plath uses the same images of barnyard animals to show the pain of losing her father. The images are the same. “I shall never get you put together entirely”. Plath uses that to show that she will never be able to revive or bring her father back. Again the sounds of the mule, the pig, and the cackles show her pain that she is not able to resurrect her father and bring him back. In the next stanza we see the image of an oracle, one that can tell the future. Plath uses this because her father could have prevented himself from dying if he chose to take it, but he didn’t, thinking that he would be better off without it.
Lastly in the poem “Stillborn”, more animal imagery is used to show just plain hardship. Stillborn is about a baby that dies at birth and she describes the mothers pain se she sees that her baby is dead. Plath uses the images of a pig and a fish to show the baby’s death. In the quote, “They are not pigs, they are not even fish, though they have a piggy and a fishy air”. It seems that Plath knew what she was doing when she used this quote because when she said piggy air, she knew that pigs had very small lungs and found it hard to breath, and she also knew that fish could not breath on land. She uses the images of the pig and fish to show that the baby could not breath when it was born. After this line she then shows the pain of the mother as she witnessed her babies death, “near dead with distraction”.
In both poems, “Stillborn”, and “The Colossus” Plath used animal imagery very specifically to show different aspects of life. “The Colossus” could be viewed as either social conformity, or the death of her father, and “Stillborn” was showing the pain of her mother while she was watching her child die. Plath never used animal imagery in any of her poems to show anything positive, ore relating to life meaning that the use of animal poetry in all of her poems is meant for dark instances and things pertaining to pain and hardship.