Critical Appreciation of "Words" by Sylvia Plath

Critical Appreciation of "Words"

Critical Appreciation of "Words"

This poem was written in the same month that Sylvia Plath died in February 1963. The poem is written entirely in metaphor, the title serves as an important clue to meaning. For the reader, the poem is about "words” and by inference poetry. The interlocking nature of the metaphors unifies the poem and

leads the reader to understand.

Analysis

The poem opens with an image of axes. Axes are sharp and their purpose is to cut wood. Words when released for consumption can be sharp and cutting. Words can travel like echoes from the center like horses and can reach the mind of many. Words are like sap in the wood, an essential part of being. Similarly, words like axes hurt so deep that tears fall like water and petrify one's self. The feeling of sorrow tries to reaffirm its place in the speaker's expression of the work of art.

Those who venture to remain in the world of creativity for long symbolized by the horse in the next stanza soon meet their ends and regenerate life from their destruction. Dry and uncontrolled words are indefatigable like the hoof-taps of the wild horses. The world of creativity symbolized by wild horses is eternal. But human lives are controlled by fate.

Figures of Speeches

In this poem, the essential figures of speeches that Plath uses are progressive linking of subtly changing imagery to mirror a changing mental state as more than a device for seeing experience in a new light. Axe strokes are an image of power and controlled force. Galloping horses are exhilarating but imply the potential for loss of control.

In stanza 2, the welling sap and tears suggest a reaction to the preceding violent energy, a wounded state. In stanza 3, the descent of the rock into the pool mirrors a mental descent into a nightmarish world where stones become skulls and the creative mind is a dead and empty shell. The imagery of Words" lets the reader into the trapped nightmare world of that mind, a world unseen by outside observers because the water has smoothed over and is now a mirror that hides the depths.

Poem Structure

In the last two lines of the third stanza and the first two of the last, the poet rises briefly from the depths and sees her past work. Now, "years later," her words seem meaningless. "Dry and riderless," they have lost the urgency of their creation. Finally, the effort of creativity seems too much. The exhilaration has given way to the relentless demands of the "indefatigable hoof-taps," and the mood is of surrender to inevitability.

The metaphoric movement is from energy to stasis, from manic creative pain to madness, to brief barren lucidity, and finally to quiescence, the still certainty of the bottom of the pool. The ultimate quiescence is death. The movement towards death is a pervasive theme in Plath's poetry, and she has used similar imagery elsewhere.

At the end of "Words," the poet has surrendered to the "fixed star” of death that has pervaded her life and her work. Among other techniques, the poet uses repetition to reinforce her meaning. The almost physical sense of vibration coupled with the repetition of the word "echoes” links the axe image to that of horses galloping.

"Words” is a short poem in four stanzas of five lines each. It is written in an open form with irregular meter and only occasional rhyme. Because the poem is written entirely metaphorically, the title serves as an important clue to meaning. Metaphor is the overriding device of "Words." Because there is no narrative framework, even a superficial reading requires some interpretation of its metaphor. Plath does not make Trader Slask easy, but she does supply the clues. The interlocking nature of the metaphors unifies the poem and leads the reader to understand.

One does not encounter the narrator until near the end of the third stanza. At this point, one sees that the poem is written in the first person, and it becomes clearer that preceding stanzas are the thoughts of the poet as she meditates on her subject, words. The lack of a discernible narrator here allows the reader to enter the poem and feel the physical sensation of impact. This is a particularly apt image for Sylvia Plath's poetic style, which is frequently sharp and biting.

Poem Understanding

Poets, particularly those of the confessional school to which Plath belongs, often use their work as catharsis, as a way of healing. Certainly, there is a sense of attempted healing in the sap that tries to seal the wounded flesh of the tree and tears that can release psychic pain. Thus this short poem is worth reading because it uses words in new and intriguing ways. Plath's use of metaphoric images is vivid and original, and she manipulates images evocatively throughout her work. This is visual poetry of a high order.

Conclusion

Finally, the poem demonstrates a distinctly spiritual dimension of the poet's life governed by something outside herself, something fixed and external as the

stars above the universe.