Sylvia Plath

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Sylvia Plath (1932-1963) was a poet, novelist, and short-story writer born in Boston, Massachusetts. She received her BA from Smith College and studied at Newnham College, Cambridge on a Fulbright Scholarship. Plath famously suffered from depression throughout her life, the subject of her semi-autobiographical novel The Bell Jar. Source

Heavy Women

Irrefutable, beautifully smug

As Venus, pedestalled on a half-shell

Shawled in blond hair and the salt

Scrim of a sea breeze, the women

Settle in their belling dresses.

Over each weighty stomach a face

Floats calm as a moon or a cloud.

 

Smiling to themselves, they meditate

Devoutly as the Dutch bulb

Forming its twenty petals.

The dark still nurses its secret.

On the green hill, under the thorn trees,

They listen for the millennium,

The knock of the small, new heart.

 

Pink-buttocked infants attend them.

Looping wool, doing nothing in particular,

They step among the archetypes.

Dusk hoods them in Mary-blue

While far off, the axle of winter

Grinds round, bearing down the straw,

The star, the wise grey men

Published:

1962

Length:

Regular

Literary Movements:

Confessionalism

Modernism

Anthology Years:

2020

Themes:

Body & Body Image

Womanhood

Literary Devices:

Alliteration

the repetition of the same letter or sound at the beginning of words appearing in succession

Assonance

The repetition of similar vowel sounds that takes place in two or more words in proximity to each other within a line; usually refers to the repetition of internal vowel sounds in words that do not end the same.

Sensory Detail

words used to invoke the five senses (vision, hearing, taste, touch, smell)

Simile

a comparison between two unlike things using the words “like” or “as”