LITR 5535 American Romanticism UHCL 2000 student poetry presentation

LITR 5535: American Romanticism
Student Student Poetry Presentation, fall 2000

Reader: Shelly Childers

October 21, 2000

"Blackberrying"

Sylvia Plath

Norton Anthology of American Literature, 5^th shorter ed., 2753

The poem "Blackberrying" by Sylvia Plath corresponds nicely with a passage in Henry David Thoreau’s "Resistance to Civil Government." On page 864, he refers to a "huckleberry party" that led to the top of "our highest hills," where the "State was nowhere to be seen."

Sylvia Plath is very well known as a poet but her legacy is as much her life story as her work. Married to Ted Hughes, the mother of two children, she committed suicide at the age of 31. Her poetry tends to focus on dark subjects, and her depression and preoccupation with death are evident in her poetry.

"Blachberrying" reveals an intense response to nature. The appearance of nature in the poem seems to be tied to the consciousness of the poet who is also the central figure in the poem. In the opening line, "Nobody in the lane, and nothing, nothing but blackberries," we see the first glimpse of nature through the eyes of the poet. The image seems to be bleak and empty. Through the "blue-red juices," they develop a sisterhood that seems to strengthen the connection.

I was drawn to the opening of the second stanza because of a study that I just completed in my 8^th-grade classroom. In studying Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury, we found repeated images of books as birds. With their white pages fluttering like wings, the books floated through the air and some even escaped the firemen’s flames. In the poem, the "cacophonous flocks" were like "bits of burnt paper wheeling in a blown sky." The birds were "protesting, protesting" and after one more "hook," the path ends. One of the images of this stanza is of flies that are clustered around the ripe blackberries. Her description is beautiful with wings like "Chinese screens" and "honey-feast" that are like heaven and yet we are unsettled because of the image of flies, usually seen around decay and death.

The third stanza has a domestic image of laundry slapping her in the face and a mechanical image of silversmiths working with an "intractable metal." This ending is jarring after the beauty of the natural images. There is a strong image of the sublime as the path ends at the "hills’ northern face, and the face is orange rock" but again, the view is of "nothing, nothing but a great space." This is an obvious reference to the nothing at the beginning of the poem. The magnificence of the sea is an example of the sublime because of the feeling that there is something terrible there. The "beating and beating" produces a "din" that doesn’t quite seem natural.

The central image of the 1^st stanza is of nature and the blackberries that "love" and "accommodate" her. In the 2^nd stanza, the image is of birds and flies that are "protesting" and "stunned." The sea is the central image of the 3^rd stanza with the wind "slapping" and the sea "beating." Throughout the poem, the heroic ego of the author is confronting the sublime and we are left with the depressing feeling that the terrible outweighs the magnificent.

We talked about the hooks that are present in each stanza. They seem to represent the twisted path literally but we wondered if there might be a deeper meaning.

During class discussion, we agreed that it is difficult to separate the persona of the author with her poetry. Knowledge of her death by suicide seems to pervade her poetry and depression and despair seem to color her poems. We talked about her life, her suicide attempts, and her death and the dark feeling that her poetry leaves with her readers. There was a comparison made between the three stanzas of the poem and the three decades of her life. The domestic references of laundry and the industrial references of silversmiths beating an intractable metal seem to interfere with the romantic image of nature that we usually expect to see in Romantic poetry.