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Friday, November 9, 2012

Literary Devices

The next stanza, however, seems utterly weird if we understand the narrator as the stimulate of this newborn infant bollix up:

Our voices echo, magnifying your arrival. New statue.

In a drafty museum, your nakedness

Shadows our prophylactic. We stand expand blankly as walls (Plath lns. 4-6).

This sounds more(prenominal) same(p) the arrival of an alien from outer space then a baby from the womb of a begin. Comparing the baby to a statue in a drafty museum, a naked statue somehow threatening the safety of the viewers, who are reduced to the role of walls. We have the sniff out that the grown-ups, curiously the father/poet, are helpless in the face of such a strange creature as a newborn baby. And the next stanza emphasizes the alienation the mother/poet experiences: "I'm no more your mother/ Than the cloud that distills a mirror to reflect its own tardily/ Effacement at the wind's hand" (Plath 7-9). Not only do we receive the image of a mother alienated from her newborn child, we also receive the clear impression at one time once again that the mother feels threatened by the baby, in danger of world "effaced" by its strange power.

The images of alienation and the voice of keepful fear, evening dread, continue. The baby has "moth-breath" and wakes the mother who hears a " remote sea" in her ear (Plath 10;12). "One cry" from the baby brings the mother stumbling from her bed, with the image of a slave or maid macrocosm summoned by her master. While the mother is compared to a


The voice in Plath's poetry is either depressed or frightened, or both. She sees death and alienation in newborn conduct, and cannot conjoin emotionally in any way with her baby. The images she uses---watch, statue, shadows, walls, mirror, moth, a far sea, a cat, dull stars, balloons---are all cold and hardly fascinate to the joy one would expect a new mother to be experiencing. The title is clearly meant to be ironic. We read that title, " break of the day Song," prepare ourselves for a light and happy poem, and are move to find a portrait of a mother who seems to feel she has given birth to something of a monster. Is the mother the monster, or the baby?
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Daylight comes, the stars fade, and the baby tries its "handful of notes;/ The clear vowels rise like balloons" (Plath 17-18). Are we to take this reference to balloons as a distinction that perhaps the mother is beginning to relax into the idea of beingness a mother, that she is beginning to see the joy and playfulness in the arrival and presence of her newborn baby? Or does it once again call to mind the fact that the baby's new life is shadowed by death, for a rising balloon moldiness fall soon, just as a ticking watch must soon run down.

cow, the baby is compared to a cat, accentuation the sense that the baby is by far the being more at ease with itself, more in control.

In Kinnell's poem, on the other hand, there is no sense of guardedness, no sense of carefulness, no sense of any danger or threat whatsoever. To the contrary, the form, style, word choice and voice all combine to germinate a sense of carefree abandon. Of course, in reality the poet has nearly likely taken great care and time to get hold of his words in creating the poem. However, the impression the reader has---especially reading the poem immediately after reading Plath's---is that the overriding impulse posterior the poem is one of complete freedom without thought or care as to how the poem might impress or not impress the reader.


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