Elm Speaks By Plath Essay Research Paper

Elm Speaks By Plath Essay, Research Paper

Sylvia Plath.s .The Elm Speaks. Dutch elm disease is one of the most

devastating shade tree diseases the earth has ever seen. It is a wilt disease

with an extremely high fatality rate. The disease is characterized by gradual

yellowing of the leaves and defoliation. This is caused be a fungus which is

transmitted from diseased trees to healthy trees by insects known as bark

beetles. In the 1962 villanelle .The Elm Speaks. confessionalist Sylvia

Plath compares her depressed emotional state with Dutch elm disease, which

killed millions of Elm trees around the world. In the fourteen stanza poem

written only one year before her suicide, a bitter Plath cries out with pain.

The theme of depression originates from the loss of love in her marriage to Ted

Hughes. The poem is extremely rich in metaphorical language from beginning to

end. In many ways the poem is designed to fit the definition of a villanelle.

.The Elm Speaks. is a free verse poem with chaotic meter. While living in

London, Sylvia Plath had a massive elm tree in front of he house that became the

subject of this poem. In the first stanza, she mentions her .great tap

root,. which is the very bottom of the elm.s roots. This line symbolizes

that she has reached the very bottom of her depression. She describes her

depression further in stanza two as a .sea of dissatisfactions,. .or the

voice of nothing. meaning it is raging inside of her. At the same time she has

an empty feeling which is driving her mad. Afterwards, in stanza three, she

compares love to a shadow, a dark reflection of someone which is not real and

can not be touched. .Till your head is a stone, you pillow a little turf.

creates the image of a grave stone in stanza four. .The sounds of poisons.

in stanza five refers to what Hughes, her husband, has done to her and how it

burns inside of her killing her like .arsenic.. In stanza six she expresses

that she has been through a lot, but she has always gotten through it. In stanza

seven, however, she admits that she has broken down and can not and will not

take her pain anymore. Next, in stanza eight she describes the moon, which is

normally calming, as merciless, meaning that even the few things in life she

used enjoy are now driving her insane. Similarly, in stanza nine, she talks

about dreams and how they .possess and endow. her. In other words she feels

as if she is trapped inside an ongoing nightmare. In the tenth stanza she

confesses that she is holding everything in and that nightly it .flaps out.

which means she cries herself to sleep. She is terrified of her depression and

its effects on her, which she admits in stanza eleven. Next, in stanza twelve

she portrays the .faces of love. as .pale irretrievable. saying that one

can never find love, it is out of reach. For the second time in the poem, in

stanza thirteen, she admits that she can not take the pain she is suffering

anymore. Finally in the last stanza, she uses sexual imagery that for the most

part states, the fact that they got together has killed her. The later years of

Plath.s life, when she wrote .The Elm Speaks., were very tragic. She

suffered from a vast number of mental illnesses, including being bipolar or

manic depressive. Her moods were constantly up and down, one minute happy the

next sad. Just one year before she wrote this poem she suffered through her

second miscarriage, which was shortly followed by an appendectomy. Through all

of this her husband Ted Hughes abused her both mentally and physically, driving

her deeper into her depression. During these difficult years she wrote Ariel, a

volume of poetry mainly concerning subjects such as injury, victimization,

parasitism, alienation, brutality, war, cannibalism, death in all forms,

torture, murder, suicide, mental illness, and anger. Only one week after Ariel

was completed she viciously committed suicide by putting her head in the oven

after making her children breakfast on the morning of February eleventh, 1963.

In her poetry it is obvious that suicide was something she had been considering

for a long time, becoming an obsession or even an addiction. Throughout .The

Elm Speaks. Plath generates a basic them of depression. She presents herself

as being the victim of a horrible love relationship that has ruined her. She

uses many different techniques to help create her theme. The first, and most

obvious, is her word choice. She uses words such as fear, madness, poisons,

arsenic, shriek, hiss, and kill. These keep the reader unsettled. The second is

her intensely powerful concluding line, .That kill, that kill, that kill..

This helps to establish theme because it is the very last thing the reader

reads, therefore it withholds in the mind. Lastly, throughout the poem she makes

undefined references to suicide or death. The first, in line eleven, .Till