Sylvia Plath - Words

 

Words
by Sylvia Plath


Axes
After whose stroke the wood rings,
And the echoes!
Echoes traveling
Off from the center like horses.

The sap
Wells like tears, like the
Water striving
To re-establish its mirror
Over the rock.

That drops and turns,
A white skull,
Eaten by weedy greens.
Years later I
Encounter them on the road ---

Words dry and riderless,
The indefatigable hoof-taps.
While
From the bottom of the pool, fixed stars
Govern a life.

Comments by Readers from Sylvia Plath's Forum

http://www.sylviaplathforum.com/words.html

 

It's a strong poem, without any grief, just images showing something extraordinary. The words are not just words... something is happening beyond them - how the poet could make all these [images] relevant. It makes you sympathise and takes you to the place. It's not a demonstration of pain, but pain as that which you can touch. All those sacred elements are meaningless now. It's a big challenge perhaps, the absurd which you cannot define very well, and the nature [that] supports the poet as something permanent and meaningful. All those elements which come from the nature are reliable and everlasting and blue can't be always holy....

 

Rosa Jamali Iran
Friday, June 24, 2005

 

 

To me this is a very direct poem. Words are like axes, powerful and sharp, loud, emitting echoes, that everyone can hear, that everyone can see in their effect. They hurt. They cut into the tree which may symbolize a person, the sap which wells being tears. The tears are heavy like a rock and disturb the calm waters which try to return to normality.

 

Sylvia's life tries to return to normality. The tears grow old and covered in weeds, forgotten, but still [they are] there forever. Later in life she encounters the words again, but now they are "dry and riderless." They have no effect. They are old and worn. This is while her life is fixed, her destiny controlling her, waiting in the pool which may be the same one once disturbed by the rock, the weight of her tears and hurt. But her destiny has always lain untouched like the stars, never to be disturbed or changed by emotions.

 

Oleander Normal , USA
Tuesday, March 8, 2004

 

 

The poem can be construed to be about the power of words, though in this case a destructive power. Images of echoes, resonations, reverberations, concatenations are numerous in Plath's poems--each word like a stone dropped in a pond, the meanings and symbolism of words travelling out from them like ripples.

 

In "Words" they drag her, like the horse in "Ariel" and wound her, bringing to the surface sap, like tears, or like the blood-jet of poetry, trying to re-establish her own image, the mirror, her own sense of self, over the rock, which here is the "white skull eaten by weedy greens", that represents her father's death; the white skull at the bottom of the pool is the "fixed star" that represents her fate. This has been the task of the poems, to heal the psychic wound caused by his death, and to reestablish her own image.

 

But, encountering them years later, in this case just days before her death, they appear "dry and riderless", sterile and powerless to do what she tries to make them do. So, in a larger sense the poem is about the impotence of words to resist one's fate, as embodied in the white skull at the bottom of the pool, where, in "Lorelei", "the daft father went down/ orange duck-feet winnowing his hair".

 

This sense of fatalism, the inevitability of her death is, in my opinion, a legacy she inherited from Ted Hughes, in whose work this sense of fatalism, particularly in "Birthday Letters" is a major motif. In BL, in fact, [Hughes] claims to be the source of the idea that it is the fixed stars that govern one's life.

 

I call this a major poem because it encapsulates in 20 lines the whole task that she set for herself and her work, and, in spite of the triumph of her poetic accomplishment, the ultimate failure of that task.

 

Jim LongHonolulu HI, USA
Monday, April 15, 2002