Sylvia Plath

Sylvia Plath


«A blackberry alley, going down in hooks, and a sea Somewhere at the end of it, heaving.» A Blackberry alley is seen by Sylvia Plath at the beginning of her poem, she sees the hooks and the sea at the end. Plath needs three stanzas to walk along this alley and to describe what she sees on her way. Towards the end of the poem, she comes closer to the sea and seas nothing but it: “The only thing to come now is the sea.» Different people perceive and interpret this poem in various ways. The approach this essay is taking is the assumption of the analogy between blackberry alley and the life of Sylvia Plath. If to accept this assumption, this essay is arguing that in this poem Plath’s experience can be described through a series of voices.

In the first stanza Sylvia Plath, through the voices, describes her inability to express herself. “Blackberries Big as the ball of my thumb, and dumb as eyes Ebon in the hedges» - the repetition of the dumbness creates the feeling of dumbness. She refers to the dumb eyes, but in reality, Plath refers to herself. Even in her own poem, she is trying but unable to speak: the repetition of B, NM, MB, TH creates an impression of person who is not necessarily dumb, but rather who is forced physically to be silent. Thus, Plath describes herself as the one who is forced into a frame, which blocks her voice.

While the first stanza is telling the reader about how the author interacts with the environment, the second stanza is more about how the environment interacts with Plath, and this interaction can be observed through sounds. “Overhead go the choughs in black, cacophonous flocks-». A reader can again hear the repetition: [F], which is a deaf sound. While in the first stanza Plath is dumb and unable to speak, in the second stanza she is deaf ans unable to hear. The only sounds she hears is the cacophonous flocks, which is simply cacophony, mixed, loud, indistinguishable noises. The second stanza...

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