Abstract
The poems written to her children reflect a passionate mother-love in the detailed beauty of imagery. The dead babies in glass jars have been transformed and the living babies are represented with love and tenderness:
Love set you going like a fat gold watch.
All night your moth-breath
Flickers among the flat pink roses.
‘Morning Song’
I rock you like a boat
Across the Indian carpet, the cold floor
‘By Candlelight’
Your clear eye is the one absolutely beautiful thing.
I want to fill it with color and ducks,
The zoo of the new
‘Child’
Your small
Brother is making
His balloon squeak like a cat.
…He bites,
Then sits
Back, fat jug
Contemplating a world clear as water
‘Balloons’
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Notes
Suzanne Juhasz, Naked and Fiery Forms (New York, Harper and Row, 1976), p. 88.
Margaret D. Uroff, Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes (Urbana, Chicago, London, University of Illinois Press, 1979), Chapter IV, ‘Plath’s Cambridge Manuscript’, pp. 63–84.
Judith Kroll, Chapters in a Mythology (New York, Harper and Row, 1979), pp. 248–51.
Ted Hughes, ‘Notes on the Chronological Order of Sylvia Plath’s Poems’, in The Art of Sylvia Plath, ed. Charles Newman (Bloomington and London, Indiana University Press, 1970), pp. 187–95.
Robert Graves, The White Goddess (London, Faber and Faber, 1961), pp. 367–68.
Copyright information
© 1987 Susan Bassnett
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Bassnett, S. (1987). Writing out Love. In: Sylvia Plath. Women Writers. Palgrave, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-18600-6_4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-18600-6_4
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