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Sylvia Plath

Stillborn

More challenging questions!

Keith Tankard
Knowledge4Africa.com
Updated: 4 March 2014
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The poet had come to suffer from what is commonly known as "writer's block" or an inability to write imaginatively.

She compares herself to a woman who has been pregnant but who keeps giving birth to stillborn children, which look real enough but which have no life in them whatever.



A NOTE ON THE POET

Sylvia Plath was born in Boston, Massachusetts, in 1932.

She was an intelligent child who had her first poem published when she was only eight. She displayed a marked degree of sensitivity but sought perfection in all that she did.

Her father -- a college professor and a bee expert -- died of an illness when Sylvia was still young. He apparently thought it was cancer but in reality it was a curable form of diabetes.

His untimely death appears to have scarred the young child's sensitive mind.

She entered Smith College on a scholarship in 1950 and, while there, wrote some 400 poems. During her first year at the college, however, she attempted suicide through an overdose of sleeping pills.

She graduated from Smith College summa cum laude in 1955 and thereupon won a Fulbright scholarship to study at Cambridge University in England.

While there, she married the English poet, Ted Hughes. Their marriage, however, would last a mere ten years before Sylvia found herself divorced.

She was alone once more, but now in a small London flat. She was poor and with two children to look after.

This was a foreign existence to one who had always been accustomed to the comforts of middle-class life.

The winter of 1962 to 1963 was one of the coldest, during which time the poet was continually ill with flu. She learnt first hand much about the harshness of life.

She nevertheless worked furiously in the very early mornings while the children slept, producing a poem virtually every day.

Towards the end of that winter -- in February 1963 -- she committed suicide by gassing herself in her kitchen. She was then only 30 years of age.

She had not yet won the recognition she so richly deserved as a poet. Like so many great artists, fame would follow only after her death.

Have you looked at the questions
in the right column?
TEST YOURSELF!
Read the left column and then answer
the following questions:



Comment on the sustained image which the poet uses throughout this poem. (4)

[Need help?]




They grew their toes and fingers well enough,
Their little foreheads bulged with concentration.
If they missed out on walking about like people
It wasn't for any lack of mother-love.
  • Explain carefully what point the poet is making in these rather graphic lines. (4)

[Need help?]




O I cannot explain what happened to them!
They are proper in shape and number and every part.
They sit so nicely in the pickling fluid!
  • What point is the poet making here? (4)

[Need help?]

  • Comment on the sarcasm in her words, "They sit so nicely in the pickling fluid!" (4)

[Need help?]




And still the lungs won't fill and the heart won't start.
  • What on earth does Sylvia Plath mean by this? (4)

[Need help?]




It would be better if they were alive, and that's what they were.
  • What does the poet mean? (4)

[Need help?]




But they are dead, and their mother near dead with distraction,
And they stupidly stare and do not speak of her.
  • The poet makes a bitter comment about the reality of poetry with these words. What is this reality? (4)

[Need help?]




Sylvia Plath has been described as adolescent and immature in writing this poem. Would you agree? (4)

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