The Colossus, and Other Poems by Sylvia Plath

First published: 1960

Type of work: Poetry

The Work:

Sylvia Plath’s first book of poetry, The Colossus, and Other Poems, was generally well received as the clever first book of a promising young poet. The poems contain images and themes that Plath revisited in her writing, themes such as death, nature, the sea, water, and the parent-child relationship.

The Colossus, the only book of poetry Plath published during her lifetime, was published first in England in 1960, then in the United States in 1962. Some poems were omitted in the American edition for fear that their resemblance to the poetry of Theodore Roethke could cause legal problems. While Plath was influenced by Roethke, the poems in this collection are distinctly hers. Furthermore, some reviewers had undercut Plath’s individual poetic achievements by drawing attention to her marriage to fellow poet Ted Hughes.

Plath’s poetry, to take one particular example, examines the theme of death from many angles. In two poems in the first half of the collection, Plath contemplates dead bodies. In “Two Views of a Cadaver,” the almost unrecognizably human corpses are contrasted with the two living lovers observing them, and the poem ends on a slightly hopeful note: There is life before inevitable death. Considering a mummified body in a museum in “All the Dead Dears,” however, the poet’s tone is bleaker, acknowledging that being alive implies eventual death. The poem’s speaker feels a bond with the dead, another theme that reappears. In several poems, death is presented as a quiet, neutral place in contrast to the noise and disorder of life.

In three poems in the second half of the book, this idea of death is represented by images of dead animals. The two dead moles in “Blue Moles” have left behind the “fury,” “war,” and “battle-shouts” they struggled with in life, and are now “neutral as the stones.” Their positioning is benignly described as a “family pose.” In “Medallion,” the poet describes a dead snake admiringly, as grinning and laughing, and notes that the snake’s firelike colors are beautiful. She also depicts the snake as “pure” and “chaste.” A crab’s corpse is presented similarly in “Mussel Hunter at Rock Harbor,” a long poem near the end of the book. Even though the crab’s inner body has been washed away, its hard outer skeleton remains as a “relic.” Its shell is “bleached” and “pallid,” with the white colors suggesting a desirable purity and neutrality.

Water and the sea appear repeatedly in Plath’s work. A more explicit wish for death appears in three poems about drowning. The first poem, “Lorelei,” uses German mythological figures (similar to the Greek sirens) to symbolize the attractiveness that death can have: “They sing/ Of a world more full and clear/ Than can be.” Another poem, “Suicide off Egg Rock,” also depicts death’s attractiveness, but couples it with the desperation of a suicidal man. He cannot stand the noises and smells of the public beach around him, or even the sound of his own pulse. As the poem progresses, his senses slowly recede, and the sea in which he drowns himself offers a “blank” and “forgetful” respite. In Plath’s heavily autobiographical novel The Bell Jar (1963; written as Victoria Lucas), the main character contemplates committing suicide this way, but she cannot go through with it. Plath herself attempted suicide in 1953, and eventually did kill herself in 1963. Finally, in “Full Fathom Five,” a daughter feels compelled to join her drowned father: “Father, this thick air is murderous./ I would breathe water.” This poem foreshadows Plath’s later themes, and its title comes from a line spoken by a character named Ariel in William Shakespeare’s play The Tempest (pr. 1611, pb. 1623). Plath later wrote a poem titled “Ariel,” which also was used as the title of her next book.

Other poems in The Colossus deal with the parent-child relationship. The title poem “The Colossus” is widely thought to refer to Plath’s father, Otto Plath, who died when his daughter was eight years old. In a technique she commonly uses, Plath projects her thoughts about people close to her onto a larger-than-life image, in this case the Colossus of Rhodes, one of the Seven Wonders of the World. The speaker of this poem tends, mends, and listens to the giant statue to try to understand something of the unintelligible “barnyard” noises issuing from it. No connection is made, however; the poem’s first line is “I shall never get you put together entirely.” “The Beekeeper’s Daughter” is a more literal attempt by the poet to get close to her father through his work. (Otto Plath had studied and written a book about bumblebees.) The mother-child relationship is addressed from the point of view of a child in “The Disquieting Muses” and from that of a pregnant mother in the book’s first poem, “The Manor Garden.” Both “The Disquieting Muses” and “The Beekeeper’s Daughter” depict neglectful mothers, the first using an image of sinister godmother figures. These figures were partly inspired by the Giorgio de Chirico painting The Disquieting Muses (1916); other poems by Plath that refer to works of art include “Snakecharmer” (Henri Rousseau’s Snake Charmer, 1907), “Two Views of a Cadaver” (Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s The Triumph of Death, c. 1562), and “The Ghost’s Leavetaking” (Paul Klee’s Fleeing Ghost, 1929).

Nature is another major theme in The Colossus, but Plath does not portray nature as ideally or as gently as do many other poets. Plath’s poems are filled with animals, plants, and landscapes that are dead or menacing, harsh, and indifferent. Even when a landscape appears calm and inviting, as in “Watercolor of Grantchester Meadows,” danger lurks beneath the surface: The poem ends with an owl disrupting a tranquil domestic scene to kill a rat. Similarly, in “The Eye-Mote,” a beautiful landscape is spoiled by the speaker’s distorted vision. “Mushrooms” uses short lines, repetition, and words like “nudgers and shovers” to show how a quiet, insistent force can slowly overwhelm its surroundings. “Frog Autumn” highlights the decay that characterizes that season, while “Hardcastle Crags” emphasizes a particular landscape’s harshness, reminding the reader that nature does not care if humans live or die. “Departure” and “Point Shirley” both depict houses, symbols of civilization, being eroded relentlessly by the sea. Though the title character in “The Hermit at Outermost House” has endured the corroding force of the sea, it has taken all his strength, and he is alone.

The poems in The Colossus were carefully selected to represent years of Plath’s work, much of which had been published previously in magazines and journals. Together, they represent a more controlled poetry than Plath’s next book, Ariel (1965), which is looser and more intense and which was somewhat overshadowed by her dramatic death. Almost every poem in The Colossus is written in some kind of form, whether traditional or improvised, or includes rhyme (often slant or off-rhymes). The most commonly used form is terza rima, three-line stanzas in which the first and third lines rhyme. An example of this form (using off-rhyme) is “Sow.”

Plath’s controlled approach to emotion in The Colossus is an example of learning the rules to break them successfully, which she does in later poems. She could not have written these later poems without preparing the groundwork in The Colossus.

Bibliography

Axelrod, Steven Gould. Sylvia Plath: The Wound and the Cure of Words. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990. A literary biography blending biographical information with themes in Plath’s work, including language, the mother-daughter bond, and death.

Bassnett, Susan. Sylvia Plath: An Introduction to the Poetry. 2d ed. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005. Concentrates on close readings of Plath’s texts, rather than on the cult of her personality and suicide. Chapters include “God, Nature, and Writing” and “Writing the Family.”

Gil, Jo. The Cambridge Introduction to Sylvia Plath. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008. A brief but comprehensive introduction to Plath’s life and work. Includes chapters on The Colossus, the critical reception to her work, and analyses of the cultural contexts—including the domestic sphere and suburbia—in which she lived and wrote.

Kroll, Judith. Chapters in a Mythology: The Poetry of Sylvia Plath. 2d ed. Stroud, England: Sutton, 2007. First published in 1976, this book is one of the first to concentrate on the complexity of Plath’s work, rather than on the circumstances of her life and death. Discusses books and artwork that influenced Plath, including mythological and psychological sources.

Newman, Charles, ed. The Art of Sylvia Plath: A Symposium. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1970. A compilation of essays including an early assessment of The Colossus, an analysis of sea imagery in Plath’s poetry, and a discussion of her use of form, rhythm, and metaphor. Includes a checklist of criticism and a bibliography.

Wagner-Martin, Linda. Sylvia Plath: The Critical Heritage. 2d ed. New York: Routledge, 1997. A collection of criticism on Plath and her work. Includes reviews of all editions of The Colossus.