It is often easy to suggest that ‘poetry makes a familiar world unfamiliar’ however, the world that the poet writes about is familiar to them. For example, Sylvia Plath’s poetry was highly influenced by her deteriorating mental health and her difficulty with relationships. The world that Plath’s poetry portrayed is a world that was familiar to her. Plath’s short book of poems ‘Ariel’ was a huge insight into how she viewed the world before her death, specifically her poem ‘Stings’.
The name (‘Stings’) that Plath gives to this poem already creates painful imagery suggesting that pain is familiar to her, furthermore, it implies that within Plath’s world the pain of her mental illness and the pain she felt from the relationships with loved ones felt like a sting. Often a sting lasts a while, implying that Plath felt pain for long periods of time causing this part of her world to become familiar. It is possible that Plath wanted to highlight her daily struggle and encourage others to do the same, in turn making these problems seem much more familiar and encouraging acceptance of differences. Her fascination with bees throughout her poetry suggests that she used a familiar aspect of life to encourage others to understand the mental pain that she was so used to.
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Within the poem, Plath uses a simile to signify the betrayal she felt from her husband when she writes ‘’the bees found him out, molding to his lips like lies’. The personification of the bees makes them almost appear friendly and suggests that they are helping her out, the simile suggests that the lies from her husband are so common that even the bees are aware of how these lies present themselves. Plath’s use of personification familiarises the bees and suggests they are compassionate to her; however, they are not as forgiving towards those who have inflicted pain, in this case, her husband, and therefore in their natural way they retaliate and attach themselves to him. Plath has the bees behave in a well-recognized manner in order to attach her troubles to something others are likely to understand and recognize. Further suggesting that through her poetry she was not afraid to try to make what she was accustomed, to much more familiar to those around her. The sense of catharsis appears to be shared amongst the reader and the writer, as though the poet is attempting to create catharsis within the world.
Later in the poem, Plath refers to the queen bee using violent and harsh imagery when she states ‘Scar in the sky, red comet’. The noun ‘scar’ has connotations of violence and pain, further enhancing the catharsis within Plath’s poetry and how the common connotations with this word would encourage understanding and acceptance of her pain. The alliteration of ‘scar’ and ‘sky’ also reinforces the violence of the death of the queen bee, this could be a metaphor for Plath’s imminent violent death, as often suicide is brought on by relentless and painful thoughts, much like the relentlessness of the unlucky ‘red comet’ which could be a reference to blood in the sky, linking to the implication of dying and going to heaven or even hell. This final stanza includes much darker and more violent imagery, suggesting that throughout time Plath’s thoughts became darker and harder to deal with. The earlier repetition of the word ‘sweet’ suggests that there were some simpler and much more manageable times in Plath’s life however it seems that this sense of security has been quickly destroyed leading the reader to reassess how the world around them works and how sometimes the familiar ‘sweetness’ of the world is a warning for darker and harsher times.
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Critical Essay: Analysis of ‘Stings’ by Sylvia Plath.
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