LITR 5535: American Romanticism
  
Student Poetry Presentation 2006

Monday 9 October:

poetry: Sylvia Plath, "Blackberrying," N 2783

poetry reader / discussion leader: Jo Lynn Sallee

 Sylvia Plath

1932-1963

Brief biographical information:

Plath was born in 1932 in Massachusetts.  She was intelligent and a perfectionist from a young age.  Her first poem was published when she was only 8 years old.  Later, during her years at Smith College she wrote over 400 poems.

Though she seemed perfect on the surface, she had serious personal problems that seemed to begin when her father died when she was eight years old.  The summer after her junior year Sylvia tried to kill herself with a sleeping pill overdose.  She described this experience later in her book, The Bell Jar.

In 1956 she married Ted Hughes.  By the winter of 1962 she was living in London, alone, with her two children.  The harder her life got, the more she seemed to write.

Sylvia killed herself on February 11, 1963 with cooking gas at the age of 30.

Plath wrote “Blackberrying” in the fall of 1961, while living in England.

According to Merriam-Webster:  

Cacophonous – harsh sounding

Choughs – birds related to crows with red legs and blue/black plumage

(N 2783--published posthumously in Ariel)

Blackberrying 

Nobody in the lane, and nothing, nothing but blackberries,
Blackberries on either side, though on the right mainly,
A blackberry alley, going down in hooks, and a sea
Somewhere at the end of it, heaving. Blackberries
Big as the ball of my thumb, and dumb as eyes
Ebon in the hedges, fat
With blue-red juices. These they squander on my fingers.
I had not asked for such a blood sisterhood; they must love me.
They accommodate themselves to my milk bottle, flattening their sides.

Overhead go the choughs in black, cacophonous flocks —
Bits of burnt paper wheeling in a blown sky.
Theirs is the only voice, protesting, protesting.
I do not think the sea will appear at all.
The high, green meadows are glowing, as if lit from within.
I come to one bush of berries so ripe it is a bush of flies,
Hanging their bluegreen bellies and their wing panes in a Chinese screen.
The honey-feast of the berries has stunned them; they believe in heaven.
One more hook, and the berries and bushes end.

The only thing to come now is the sea.
From between two hills a sudden wind funnels at me,
Slapping its phantom laundry in my face.
These hills are too green and sweet to have tasted salt.
I follow the sheep path between them. A last hook brings me
To the hills’ northern face, and the face is orange rock
That looks out on nothing, nothing but a great space
Of white and pewter lights, and a din like silversmiths
Beating and beating at an intractable metal.

COURSE OBJECTIVES relating to Romanticism:  Post-Romantic

Objective 1a.  . . . attitudes associated to Romanticism, such as desire and loss, rebellion, nostalgia, idealism, the gothic, the sublime, individual in nature or separate from the masses.

Objective 1c.  . . . literary genres of Romanticism

            The romance narrative (journey from repression to transcendence)

            The gothic novel or style (haunted physical and mental spaces; the shadow of death or decay).

 

Poem is a journey set in three stanzas.

1st stanza – Impression of tunneling from nothing to images of fat blackberries and nature that “love” and “accommodate” themselves to her.

2nd stanza – From a meadow are burnt bird images and flies/Chineese screen wings that are “protesting” and “stunned.”

3rd stanza – Images of the sea with the wind “slapping” and the sea “beating,” ending as beginning, with nothing.

The reader can almost feel being drawn down the path on a journey, through the hooks of life.

I see the poem as the journey through life, starting with birth (no one there).  Life has wonderful moments (fat berries) that can be bittersweet (flies) and bad ones (birds like burnt paper).  At the end of our journey we transcend to something larger than life (the sea).

Questions

1.  Why do you think the blackberries are referred to as “dumb as eyes” or a “bush of flies" (obj. 1a)?

 

2.  What evidence do you find of the gothic and sublime in the poem (obj.1a)?

 

3.  Critics disagree on whether Plath finds light and redemption at the end of the path or just nothingness (Obj. 1c).  What do you think?

 

4.  If Plath was alive today, she could take advantage of modern drugs for alleviating depression.  How do you think her poetry would have been different? 

 

 

Works Cited:

Young, Robert V.(editor).  Poetry Criticism.  Detroit:  MI. 1991

Litr 5535:  American Romanticism, presentation fall 2000.