Explore Plath's treatment of death, ageing, birth and rebirth.
It appears that Plath has a morbid fascination and an obsessed attraction to death in most of her poems. Statements such as “I only wanted to lie with my hands turned up and be utterly empty” in Tulips and “they will invite me to whiten my bones among them” in Wuthering Heights, show a longing to die and reveal a tendency toward suicide. Furthermore, Plath describes deathly images such as the “old beast”, “stars letting in the light, peephole after peephole - a bonewhite light, like death”, “the sky leans on me, me, the one upright among all horizontals” and “whitened by the faces of the drowned… leftover soldiers from old, messy wars”. The “carcass” of the “monster of wood and rusty teeth” depicted in The Burnt-Out Spa strongly conveys pain and suffering still endured by the “old beast”, even after death. Even positive images such as stars in the night sky are portrayed in a morbid fashion in Insomniac where Plath makes a clear link between the stars and death. Her feeling o!f being pressured by nature into dying (i.e. becoming a horizontal) is cleverly but also oppressively put in Wuthering Heights, evoking the thoughts in her mind that she is unwanted and would be better off dead. This insight into her mind is re-echoed in F
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Some common words found in the essay are:
Lift Plath, Wuthering Heights, Egg Rock, Burnt-Out Spa, Morning Song, Furthermore Plath, , Insomniac Plath, prevent ageing, wuthering heights, leftover soldiers, majority poems, burnt-out spa, insight mind,
Approximate Word count = 949
Approximate Pages = 4 (250 words per page double spaced)
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