We shall by morning/Inherit the earth/Our foot’s in the door.

Never Overlook The Colossus! January 26, 2007

Posted by amanda in : Uncategorized , trackback

Last week professor Emerson and I read The Colossus and Other Poems
, it was the first time that either of us had read the entire collection cover to cover and I was particularly interested in finding a common theme that bound the poems in the volume. Perhaps it is my lingering obsession with sequences from last semester’s directed study, but I can’t help but try to find some sort of reasoning and order in any poetic work I’ve read since then.
I decided after reading The Colossus several times through that the overarching theme is an insistence on being noticed. Throughout the volume she tackles subjects of varying size and importance: from the tiny splinter in “The Eye-Mote,” to a man’s suicide in “Suicide Off Egg Rock”. It is clearly evident in each poem that the subject (despite their sometimes fervent objection) is pushing through an obstacle and coming to an unavoidable forefront (many times literally and symbolically as in “Mushrooms”…see title of blog).
The final poem in the volume, “The Stones” is one of the only poems in the volume that uses first-person narration, and I think that it is Plath’s description of her own moment of being, which brings the volume to a very profound crescendo as she both links herself to her previous subjects while simultaneously separating herself out for the first time as poet and subject. This poem concludes with the lines “Ten fingers shape a bowl for shadows./My mendings itch. There is nothing to do./I shall be good as new.” To me this poem is a very direct foreshadowing to future poems in Ariel such as “Lady Lazarus”, but there is also a present sense that she is describing herself as whole and having arrived, just as the other subjects in the previous poems. The line “There is nothing to do.” is important because it both implies that she is being restored by someone else meaning the power is not in her hands, and there is a further implication that she isn’t necessarily content with her restoration. I’m not entirely sure what to make of this so far, but perhaps the fact that this particular poem has such an Ariel tone means that after reading Ariel, I’ll have a better grasp.
Overall, I think that while Ariel is absoluetly her best and most compelling work, I still truly loved The Colossus and I’m glad I spent the time considering it because the poetry (while maybe not her “best”) is still pretty damn great!
P.S. I apologize in advance for my terrible grammar
P.P.S. Can anyone see the photo of Sylvia Plath I posted in my first entry? I can see it on my computer but I noticed in professor Emerson’s computer it wasn’t visible.