Michelle Chen

Star Gazing: Plath’s Way Inside
The terrible, insecure belief in the heaves became the very story of a poet, Sylvia Plath’s life. This instability derives from the absence of concrete evidence of an afterlife, and leaves room for imagination where twisted representations are allowed to exist. Albert Einstein quotes “For while knowledge defines all we currently know and understand, imagination points to all we might yet discover and create”. In her two poems “The Colossus” and “Edge”, Sylvia Plath creates the heavens to provide the sole purpose of connecting to her past and herself.
To lose a person close to heart is one of the worst hardships to go through. “The Colossus” places Sylvia Plath’s deceased father in the form of a giant Roman symbol of strength at such a level Plath can only find hopeless to catch up to while she still exists in life. She calls him “an oracle, / Mouthpiece of the dead, or some god or other” (Colossus 6-7). Her father provides himself as Plath’s bridge between life and death after arguably killing himself. The heavens begin to be described in lines 21 to 23 when she says “In their old anarchy to the horizon line. / It would take more than a lightning stroke / To create such a ruin”. It appears here that Plath is ascending upwards from initially describing understood memories and facts on Earth to hypothetical guesses of the heavens. It is for this reason that she needs her father to be that great oracle, the close in the distant gap between concrete life and imaginative heavens. The escape to the heavens after death is something extremely remote to Plath, especially when it involves a close parental figure. She is shown to continue holding onto this particular image of her father until the last few lines when Plath shows she has accepted the chaotic mayhem of the concept of death and how it is simply something that must be left to be misunderstood. The heavens both take her father to an intangible place so far and it only up to Plath to wait for her time to come when she can reunite with him once more, but her raging thoughts on the appealing escape from life are not quite silenced yet.
As Sylvia Plath’s time passes, the lust for her own death becomes stronger, evident in the confessional poems she writes. The supposed last poem she wrote, “Edge”, speaks specifically of her own death. She pictures the perfect ending of her life where “Her dead / Body wears the smile of accomplishment,” (Edge 2-3). It is clear that death paints an extremely appealing picture for Plath’s escape from pain, creating the tone of “Edge” not to be somber, but exhilarating and free. This freedom is even more highlighted when the presence of a “Greek necessity / Flows in the scrolls of her toga, / …We have come so far, it is over” (edge 6-9). The Greek necessity, which later reappears in the poem in the form of the moon, provides the secure path of Plath’s escape. The moon that is mentioned later on in the poem is most likely the representation of Artemis, the greek goddess of a woman’s independence. Plath points out that “The moon has nothing to be sad about / Staring from her hood of bone. / She is used to this sort of thing” (Edge 17-19). The moon, showing the end of the day, provides the light to show her the way to a peaceful death that celebrates life as her greatest accomplishment. Her ability to overcome many years of pain has been rewarded by Artemis as a reminder that Plath still stayed true to herself through it all.
The heavens are a closing gap between life and after life. In her poems, Sylvia Plath utilizes this abstract bridge to her comfort of knowing there is always another destination ahead of her. She finds it to be an incredibly far away place, making her decision on whether or not to leave harder to make, but in the end, the choice is clear. The two poems “The Colossus” and “Edge” bring about celebration of the afterlife, reflecting her triumph over finding the balance between both and discovering time in its entirety.