Paralytic Sylvia Plath
Paralytic - Sylvia PlathParalytic: Poetry From The Brink
Silvia Plath has always been famous. She was a very open poet who wrote with so much confession, she became almost like a soap opera. Her life was a constant bout with suicide and the readers loved to watch. After one of her first suicide attempts, which is included in The Bell Jar, a novel later written by Plath, she was admitted into McLean Hospital. The poem "Paralytic" more than likely came from her time there. It is a poem about a girl who is placed into a mental institution after attempting to commit suicide.
The poem "Paralytic" goes as follows:
It happens. Will it go on?-
My mind a rock,
No fingers to grip, no tongue,
My god the iron lung
That loves me, pumps
My two
Dust bags in and out,
Will not
Let me relapse
While the day outside glides by like ticker tape.
The night brings violets,
Tapestries of eyes,
Lights,
The soft anonymous
Talkers: "You all right?"
The starched, inaccessible breast.
Dead egg, I lie
Whole
On a whole world I cannot touch.
At the white, tight
Drum of my sleeping couch
Photographs visit me-
My wife, dead and flat, in 1920 furs,
Mouth full of pearls,
Two girls
As flat as she, who whisper "We're your daughters."
The still waters
Wrap my lips,
Eyes, nose and ears,
A clear
Cellophane I cannot crack.
On my bare back
I smile, a Buddha, all
Wants, desire
Falling from me like rings
Hugging their lights.
The claw
Of the magnolia,
Drunk on its own scents,
Asks nothing of life.
This work is easiest to understand when it is broken down, stanza by stanza. The first question to be asked is: what is Plath talking about when she says "it happens"? I believe that she is talking about life. She has tried to take her own but has not accomplished that task and so it goes on. Plath says that her mind is a rock....
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