Poetry Notes

Gryffindor

I'm studying Plath for 5th year summer tests and figured the notes I typed up might be in some way helpful to a leaving cert who doesn't have the time to waste figuring out Elm's supposed 'meaning'.

The Times are Tidy

In ‘The Times are Tidy’ Plath laments contemporary American society and the system that drives it. What was once the globe’s great melting pot has become stagnant and sanitised. She passes comment on the modern world, by juxtaposing the excitement, adventure and mystery of the fairy-tale world with the monotony, dullness and smugness of the consumerist era in which she lives. Plath is reflecting on the American culture of the 1950s, an age of increasing materialism and political uniformity. The paranoia and propaganda engendered by Senator McCarthy meant that few were prepared to challenge the status quo. The title suggests the idea of an orderly, conformist society where nothing ‘untidy’ occurs.

The poem begins with her bemoaning the fact that the world today is no place for the traditional hero of old. Today's world is a world of 'the stuck record' and even “the most watchful cooks go jobless”. These cooks, perhaps, are those who would dare dissent from of criticise the values of the ruling regime and would have been censored and blacklisted. The image of the mayor’s roasting spit turning “round of its own accord” suggests the idea of a political regime that grinds in its own interest. The system has come full circle, mechanical and monotonous. In other words, it's a place where bravery, knowledge and skill are no longer needed. Yet, as the image of the 'stuck record' suggests, it is a world that doesn't quite work. The use of the word “mayor”, a small town politician, and “province” also reflect on the parochial and narrow-minded tendencies of society.

The heroes of old who used to ride out to fight against the dragon are all gone. So too are the dragons themselves. Plath glibly suggests that they have now shrunk to the size of lizards from 'lack of action'. History has 'beaten the hazard' - removed all the risks, suggesting a safer but unexciting, uninspiring and tedious world. Everything has been 'tidied up'. Although people have more money and consumer goods now than ever before, the world is poorer in terms of its imagination. Romance, in its broadest sense, has been killed. The poem, like many of her poems, displays a sense of discontent with the world and how it is developing.

This sense of the world having been made too safe, too bland, too unexciting is continued in the third stanza. “The last crone (witch) got burned up” decades ago, along with her mystery and magic, “the love-hot herb, the talking cat”. This image once again highlights the notion of censorship within McCarthy’s society. It seems innovation, free-speech and alternative viewpoints have been supressed and purged from the modern world.
The closing lines are heavy with irony and sarcasm, as she states that 'the children are better for it' - all the improvements of the modern age - because now 'the cow milks cream an inch thick'. Plath clearly doesn’t believe that the riches and comforts of contemporary America, compensate for the loss of mystery and disappearance of a spirit of adventure. Material wealth is no compensation for spiritual poverty.


Sorry if it's a bit incoherent but it's a nightmare to try and cover everything in a single note.

Elm

Plath’s intensely personal confessional style of poetry is epitomised by the poem ‘Elm’. Through a series of fragmented images, Plath recreates her chaotic stream of consciousness during a depressive episode.

The poem opens with the personified wych elm menacingly declaring “I know the bottom” “I know it with my great tap root”. This bottom appears to be an allusion to the depths of the human psyche and darker recesses of Plath’s mind. The selection of an elm tree, a faction of her psychological identity, also holds a significance. The tree, often found at graveyards, holds a strong association with spirituality and death. Furthermore, in 1962, as the poem was written, Dutch elm disease was devastating millions of elm trees around the globe, suggesting this tree is corroding, diseasing and destroying her very core.

The elm tree can also be interpreted as a reference to the tree of knowledge, with its root the essential nature of truth. As Plath journeys deep into her subconscious underworld, the knowledge she discovers boils inside her much like a “sea” brimming with “dissatisfactions”.

In the third and fourth stanzas Plath laments the failure of love, adding a deeply personal and intimate dimension to the poem. She reflects on Hughs’ infidelity, referring to the transient nature of love, which she compares to a “shadow”, intangible and irretrievable. It also connects with the notion that love has had a darkening impact on her life. Love has once again escaped her and “gone off, like a horse”. The relentless “echoing” serves as a bitter reminder of this, petrifying her mind and turning it to “stone”. Assonance of the long vowel sounds, and use of the onomatopoeic verb “echoing” heighten the reader’s sensory experience and aid in making the feelings of abandonment and loss she feels far more potent.

Stanzas 5-8 are populated with an array of impressionistic and layered images, all with violent connotations to intense suffering, both to the internal and external environments. Although her psychological landscape is fragmented, the images and language she chooses seems to be precisely selected, illustrating her innate poetic skill. One such image is that of a polluted environment, similar to a post nuclear landscape. A “hush” of poisonous acid “rain” and “fruit” like “arsenic” are portrayed and connect with the tree which has been annihilated and “scorched to the root”. This image also connects with Plath on a personal level, correlating the burning “red filaments” with the “wires” of electro convulsive therapy. Words such as “violence, shriek, scathes, merciless and burn” recreate the sounds and experiences of human suffering.

In the ninth stanza Plath refers to “let[ting] go” and radical surgery, perhaps referencing her separation from Hughes. However the image of surgery may also connect with the mastectomy undergone by her friend and fellow poet Ruth Fainlight, whom the poem is dedicated to. Through this image Plath references the distortion of the female shape and identity. (...also moon/barren)

In the tenth stanza the dual psychological identities become indistinguishable and merge into one. Here, the theme of possession suffused throughout the poem becomes more prominent. She is inhabited by “bad dreams”, suggesting her depression is an innate part of her identity. Interestingly, she gives an unusually concrete identity to this darkness. She describes it as a bat, with “soft feathery turnings”. She juxtaposes this very real palpable living force within her with the fleeting nature of love, exploring her confused ambiguous feelings regarding depression. The creature has sensitivities as it looks to her as “something to love”. It seems it seeks and almost appreciates her love, when others do not. The “pale” frail and fragile “faces of love” do not offer her the same stability and loyalty the dark creature does. Simultaneously, however she is “terrified” by its ”malignity”, creating a paradoxical, yet extremely accurate representation of the confusing nature of depression.

In the penultimate stanza Plath surrenders to this inexorable dark force within her, stating “I am incapable of more knowledge”. Despite the violent connotations associated with the “face so murderous in its strangle of branches” she seems to have accepted this particular dark face of love. Plath it seems is only content when she is unhappy and much of the discernible joy of her poetry is in fact derived from her eclectic and unique celebration of the darker recesses of her imagination and sub-consciousness. The slow killing of love will lead her to the tap-root, the source of all knowledge and imagination.

Alternative (very bull****ty) supernatural interpretation:

The concluding stanzas are heavily immersed in supernatural and mythological images. Plath juxtaposes the abstract and concrete, creating a surreal and nightmarish atmosphere. She plays upon the physical appearance of the tree, comparing its “strangle of branches “to “snaky acids”. This adds a further intertextual layer to the poem, as it connects with the Greek mythological character Medusa. As the snakes “hiss” and secrete their fatal corrosive “acids” Plath’s will is “petrified”, and turned to stone. The final repetition of “that kill” suggests the inevitability that as that as her will is immobilised and her emotions harden, her inherent ‘faults’ will crack and erode into dust and nothingness.


I'll add more as I revise them and hope my teacher's ramblings are helpful to someone.