Sujay Pathak

Seasons: Sylvia Plath's true emotions
Sylvia Plath had a very troubled and challenging life . She was married to the reknown pet Ted Hughes but once having a secondf child, the two seperated. Not ever a year later, Sylvia Plath successfully committed suicide in the room next to her children. This was not the first time she attempted suicide, however. She has attempted suicide twice before, once when she was very young and another when she was in college. Plath incorporated some of these troubled evenets into her poetry in both imagery as well as themes. It is also siad that Plath was always very affected by the seasons and weather changes that would occur. She incorporates this idea into her poetry as well. In the poems Spinster and Two Sisters of Persephone, Sylvia Plath uses images of weather and season to portray the certain mood that is felt in the poem.
The use of the season and weather throughout her poetry was best resembled in the poems Spinster and Two Sisters of Persephone. She uses the image of spring in both these poems to portray happiness. In Spinster she uses this image in the first half of the poem to show happiness of a particular girl, “During a ceremonious april walk” (2). The happiness is evident due to the idea of a ceremonious walk. The adjective ceremonious is always in a happy and enjoyable manner. The indea of spring comes from the fact that it is an april walk, and April is the month which most resembles springtime. She uses spring in Two Sisters of Persephone to show happiness as well as sex. “like pollen of bright air. Lulled/Near a bed of poppies,” (Two Sisters of Persephone 15-16). In these two lines she shows an image of sex. She later says “Of patelled blood/Burns open to the sun's blade,” (18-19). She describes the emotion of what is occurring from sex. It shows a virgin having sex for the first itme. It is shown that this poem is using spring to display these emtions from the use of pollen and poppies, as well as petals. Another recurring season in these two poems is winter. She shows this image in the second half of the poem Spinster, when the girl is happy one moment to incredibly sad the next. “And heart's frosty discipline/ Exact as a snowflake” (Spinster 17-18). In this line she shows that the girl is sad and that it is inlike any other that she has experiences since it exactly as a “snowflake.” “Heart's frosty discipline” shows that she must be sad but not upset due to the “frosty discipline.” She also says in stanza 4 “let idiots/Rell giddy in bedlam spring,” (Spinster 22-23). This is an ironic statement since in the beginning of this poem she states that this girl is happy and that it is springtime, but now she believes that anyone who feels giddy in spring is an idiot. In Two Sister of Persephone, she uses winter to describe the first sister, who is very dark and angry. “In her dark wainscoted room” (Two Sister of Persephone 5). Int his she is describing the dark emotions in which the first sister feels as well as giving off the image that it is winter. Throughout these two peoms Plath uses images of winter and spring to convey certain emotions that the characters are feeling.
In contrast, these two poems use seasons and weather changes to show two different aspects of the theme and characters. In Two Sister of Persephone, she uses this imagery to convey the certain sisters personalities, but in Spinster Plath uses the image to show the atmosphere around the character. These two poems have a different narrative which can resemble the different uses of these images. Although the two poems are both in a third person limited narrative, in Two Sisters of Persephone, the narrative is used in such a manner that the understanding of the characters is larger. However in Spinster, the narrative leaves the reader into a more confused state in which seasons only show the atmosphere in which the character is in. “During a ceremonious april walk” (Spinster 2). This line shows how the surroundings of the character and what she is doing. One example from Two Sisters of Persephone, “In her dark wainscoted room” (5). At first this line only seems to show where this sister is, but the deeper meaning is to portray this sister as more of a dark and shy person. She does that by using wainscoted which represents the season of winter.
Both of these poems have use the image of seasons to help portray the theme of those poems. But the wording of the imagery shows a different in the usage. Seasons resembles the personalities of the two sister in Two Sister of Persephone while showing the atmosphere and surroundings of the character in Spinster. The main focus of this image was to help Plath portray how she as a person felt about those season and inferring those feelings into her poems. Plath shows that she felt happy during the springtime but miserable during winter. She uses these two poems to make it more evident to her audience and show her contemporary poetry style.