LITR 5535: American
Romanticism
Student Poetry Presentation, fall 2003
Thomas Parker
10/07/2003
Sylvia Plath's "Blackberrying" pg 2783-84 Norton
Bedford pg. 72 confessional poetry: a contemporary poetic mode in which poets discuss matters relating to their private lives. Confessional poets go beyond romanticism's emphasis on the individual experience in intimate detail and often psychoanalytical terms with which they describe even their most painful experiences. The reader is often addressed directly by the confessional poet, who typically expresses some very private confusion or sorrow.
In stanza one, Plath seems to conform to her title of "Blackberrying" The setting that is produced is one of solitary communion with nature. We are brought into the scene with the experience really belonging to no one at first. The individual alone in nature is then quickly represented in the narrative voice with the use of "my" and "I" toward the end of the stanza. But is this a typical Romantic scene? There are specific things being done with the language that suggest that the individual in nature are more of a backdrop for this poem. The combination of "heaving" (used to describe the sea) as well as the symbolism that is used to equate the "blue-red juices" with a "blood sisterhood" and the use of "squandered" to describe the berries free flowing juice suggests a waist beyond the product of the plant, juxtaposed with the line "they must love me" seems to suggest a sexual relationship of a difficult nature. One description that really stands out in this stanza is that in which the blackberries are equated with "dumb" eyes. I think that's a wonderful word if a somewhat confusing description. Are the eyes dumb as in expressionless? Or are they simply voiceless, as all eyes must be?
Here in the second stanza Plath maintains and even succeeds in sharpening the clarity of the images she evokes, her comparison of the birds to "burnt bits of paper" is highly descriptive and somewhat ominous. What are they birds protesting; the invasion of the blackberries? There is a suggestion of sunset in the way the meadows are "lit from within" and a the sublime image of the overabundance, over-fertility, which gives in it final stages to decline and destruction in the bush of flies.
The poem changes a good deal in the last stanza. The third line brings in a "domestic image" as Shelly Childers refers to it in her 2000 presentation of the poem, and in the last two lines the imagery becomes more obscure than it has been in the rest of the poem toward the end of the third stanza.
Class Discussion Questions
1.) Does the narrator find the sea at the end of the poem?
Sheila: waves in the evening have those colors
Yvonne: the
waves can look like metal
Mary: Isn’t the sea symbolized as male in Greek
mythology?
April P: Well, Poseidon.
White: There are male gods of the sea, but the sea is
generally maternal.
Mary: Somewhere in the Iliad,
maybe, where the sea is male
White: There is something Homeric about the last lines.
Something like Vulcan, industrial.
Thomas: All this fits with a progression toward sunset.
April P: But why are the hills too sweet to have tasted
salt? Wouldn’t they have tasted
salt if they’re near a sea?
Thomas: It’s
a journey. I think she finds what
she was looking for.
Thomas: She’s
playing on salt and bitterness. She
says nothingness, barrenness. The
sea is death. The poem progresses
from the fertility of the fruit to the flies and decay and on to death.
April P: The birds seem an ominous omen.
White: As
confessional poetry, everything seems latently threatening.
Holly: “Hooks” in the first and third stanzas seem to
connect somehow. The hook is taking
her somewhere.
White: A turn.
Yvonne: coming up on the north face of the sea
Holly: If this is her life, she goes down this blackberry
alley, then turns to the hills . . . Her life in three parts.
Life doesn’t turn out the way you think and you make a turn to the
hills where there is nothing.
Yvonne: The light and dark side of Nature.
April D: male and female; sisterhood - then the male sea
Yvonne: Silversmiths - a male image?
White: like
gnomes under a hill or something. Gothic
imagery personalized
Thomas: Confessional poetry is the romantic narrative very
personalized. She seems to be
working through a quest for the sea. Working
through stages of life. Salt and
nothing but a great space fit this.
Sheila: The
last two lines are modern life. Similar
to Whitman maybe.
White: If the quest is Romantic, and then we have the
Gothic, then is this a quest toward death.
Thomas: I
tried not to look at that about Plath - death at 30, 3 stanzas and so on.
White: Like Poe, it’s hard to ignore her life.
April P: I saw it more as a quest for assurance, looking
for redemption. There are some
parallels with Young Goodman Brown.
Kristy: The whole poem is what she’s seeing, and then a
perspective change with the hills and it’s like what the rock is looking out
on. She leaves the poem so maybe
she’s succeeded in a quest toward death.
Thomas: She’s also out of the beginning.
White: It gets to the sublime - being there and not being
there, pain and pleasure.
Kristy: and the rock is always going to be there
Marian: It has a very Sapphic quality - sensual, feminine,
especially near the end about the sea, wind, laundry. It reminds me of Whitman about young men and the sea.
White: It’s the domestic.
Dickinson comes to mind - domestic imagery sprinkled through mythic
landscapes.