Something I most enjoy while reading Sylvia Plath’s poetry is the clear visual depictions of very abstract and intangible things such as grief, disassociation, and the overwhelming nature of thoughts. That being said, Plath does not write so clearly as to rid the work of all mystique or intrigue. “Elm” is a good example of this clear yet complex style Confessional Poetry so wonderfully captures.
The “voice” of this poem is quick to distinguish itself in the first line; “I know the bottom, she says,” so, if a sheis doing the speaking who is she speaking to? Could it be to Ruth Fainlight? Our speaker knows this frightening “bottom,” knows it well, and yet says, “I do not fear it: I have been there.” When I read this first stanza and knowing what little I do of Sylvia Plath, I was immediately very concerned and fully ready for this poem to take a terrible turn. I am very interested in who is being addressed, who is Plath asking when she writes:
“Is it the sea you hear in me, / Its dissatisfactions? / Or the voice of nothing, that was your madness?”
Is Plath commenting on the distant or emotionally neglectful “madness” that her husband may have expressed towards the rumbling (sea) of dissatisfaction or the voiceless detachment of depression? Or, perhaps this madness is coming from a friend such as Fainlight desperately, maddeningly trying to pull Plath from the “bottom.” What do you think?
The third and fourth stanzas are interesting, I would say they lean much more to the abstract side of this poem’s imagery. Starting with “Love is a shadow. / How you lie and cry after it” I’m immediately thinking about how shadows are fleeting and changing all the time, and that they only appear in the presence of light; so if love is a shadow, then it only exists when light (attention?) is shining brightly, only to fade or disappear when life gets dark or even mildly gray. And then off it will fly like a startled horse at the first sign of trouble.
I’m not sure what to make of the fifth stanza. We were listening to the sound of hooves, horses running through the night, and now Plath asks, “Or shall I bring you the sound of poisons?” What is the sound of poison? Perhaps Plath is describing depression and grief here; the hush or rain being tears and depression being a literal poison to the body and soul. I think this is what I am leaning towards.
I also read some slightly differing information on Plath’s health that I wonder if it is connected to imagery in this poem. Specifically the lines “The moon, also, is merciless: she would drag me / Cruelly, being barren” and also “Diminished and flat, as after radical surgery” both seem to be referencing a hysterectomy and mastectomy. I think I hear something about Plath having a hysterectomy but I’m not sure, and when I looked it up I could not find a super reliable confirmation. Regardless of Plath’s own health, the idea of a woman without her sex organs ties into the title of the poem to an interesting degree. See, many trees are hermaphrodites and while it may not directly tie into the Elm specifically, that combined with the Classical and mythological prevalence of Elms make me wonder if Plath is using the symbolism of a tree to multiple effects.
Probably my favorite passages of this poem come in the last stanzas as our speaker seems to be directing her thoughts less towards a specific individual and more to empty space—yelling into a careless void.
I am incapable of more knowledge.
What is this, this face
So murderous in its strangle of branches?——
Its snaky acids hiss.
It petrifies the will. These are the isolate, slow faults
That kill, that kill, that kill.
What is going on here? I’m really not sure. If I’m working of the belief that the Elm is personifying Plath than I read the line “what is this, this face” as a rather catastrophic break from identity, a face that shows some murderous anger and/or depression strangling the life from Plath. Then this pent up emotion becomes the acid eating away at the insides of the speaker, to the point where even small or “slow faults” begin to kill. And of course, this draws me back to the stanza of poison and arsenic and how the toxicity of depression or disassociation can be just as poisonous to the body and soul.
I’m really curious what others think of this poem. In some ways I think my reading is oversimplified, and that I’m probably missing something. What do y’all think?
I am glad you zero in on the question of the rhetorical situation here. It seems so complex with that double-voicing up front (is that a second, responding “I” in the third line)? And then the way the entire poem is framed as the voice of the elm is striking. I read this poem as voiced by the elm, with the “you” being Plath herself–so this is Plath projecting an interrogating voice back at her. So in that sense it is also a sort of self-dialogue with self othered, and the other doing the voicing. I worry that made not sense. There is something stoic and resistant and strong about the elm even as its sounds and visual images haunt addressee. It is almost as though the sounds the tree generates and the images it projects drive the poem’s addressee to madness. You do a great job teasing out some of the images here–images that are so straightforward–moon against the sky appearing caught in branches of elm–yet their symbolism often remains mysterials. A fascinating poem–and a great reading of it, Alice!