Sylvia Plath
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”