Mad Girl’s Love Song by Sylvia Plath
A mad girl’s love poem is a villanelle type of poetry, done by Sylvia during her college years. A Villanelle is a poem that comprises of nineteen lines, with tercets and quatrain. Tercets are a stanza in a poem that contains three lines, while a quatrain is a stanza consisting of four lines. The speaker in the poem addresses her long lost lover directly about matters concerning what was supposedly their relationship. The speaker says that every time she closes her eyes, she feels death and destruction looming around, and on opening them, it’s a new light. She says to this love that she was hopeful he would come back to her as he had said, but seeing as he has been long enough, she is convinced he is no longer happening. In the end, she says to her lost lover /that she wishes she had a thunderbird instead, seeing as, after every winter, it comes right back, unlike he that left and never returned. Mad girl’s love explores vital themes such as sanity, disillusionment and love, madness, isolation and denial. It also uses literary devices such as repetition, personification, tone and diction.
Sylvia Plath’s poem addresses themes of isolation and denial. The speaker, as it is has been heartbroken. As many persons would, the speaker alternates between deprivation and self-isolation, as a way of coping with the immense pain she feels. The speaker, as a way of isolating disengages herself from the realities and extremities of life around her every time she shuts her eyes. She also tends to close her eyes and assume that she never did have a lover even though all these efforts are not successful in helping her get over the pain she feels. According to Sylvia, the more she tries escaping through denial and isolation, the more she feels the pain eating her up. She says, for instance, in the first line of the first stanza, “I shut my eyes, and all the world drops dead.” This line that has been used repeatedly mentions that the speaker regularly dives into the safety of her mind, shutting the world out. However, every time she opens them again, the real world she is trying to escape confronts her again. At that point, she repeatedly denies her lover’s existence saying, “I think I made you up inside my head” in the last lines of stanzas one, three, five and six. Also, in an effort to deny her lover, the speaker starts by saying, “I dreamed,” assuming her lover was never real. She further states that the lover bewitched her into bed and kissed her insane, insinuating that she was tricked into the relationship, and thereby denying their love. When denial does not succeed, she says in the second line of stanza five that “I grow old and forget your name” to make herself forget him.
The poem also brings out the themes of love, madness and disillusionment intertwined. For starters, based on the speaker’s claims, it is not clear whether or not the lover did exist. Also, when the speaker says, “I think I made you up inside in my head,” it could mean that the lover did exist, but he did not live up to what she expected. The poem and speaker associates love with insanity. The speaker feels like the disillusionment after she was abandoned driving her insane, and it appears that after he left, the world was turned upside down. This so to say, depicts a situation where heartbreak pushes the speaker into a state of madness. Some of the things the speaker says portray her she’s delusional, such as bewitched and dreamed. At some point, even she believes that the lover was made up in her mind.
One of the literary devices that are mostly used in this particular poem is repetition. One of the phrases she repeats is, “I think I made you up inside my head.” This repeated phrase in almost every stanza in the poem depicts how much the speaker dreads the reality of having lost her lover, and how she wishes he had only made him up or dreamed about him. She is thus trying to convince herself that she indeed only made him up, that he was never there, and so he never abandoned her. Another line or phrase the speaker repeats is, “I shut my eyes and the entire world drops dead” in stanzas one, two four and six. This could mean that every time the narrator shuts her eyes, the world is gone. It could also mean that by dropping dead, she closes her eyes and experiences nightmares of terrible visions that resemble death and darkness, probably because she got into bed with a mad she had not married. This aspect is also supported by the mention of God, Satan and also Seraphim. The use of repetition in this poem is purposed to emphasize specific phrases and their meaning.
The author of the poem has also used the literary element of personification. This appears in the poem’s second stanza, when the speaker says on the first and second lines of verse two, “The stars go waltzing out in blue and red, And arbitrary blackness gallops in.” it is clear just as blackness cannot gallop, starts cannot waltz either. Her use of the phrases waltzing out and running in is an illustration of how her lover left her without second thoughts and fasted at that and how darkness loomed over her life in the form of pain after she was abandoned. The narrator further says in the first two lines of stanza six, “I should have loved a thunderbird instead, at least when the spring comes, they roar back again.” The thunderbird that the speaker uses is a type of a car, and it is personified when the speaker associates it with the ability to love and return to its lover after it leaves. The speaker is doing so also compares the car to a man, and decides it is way better.
The poem also uses allusions within it. For instance, the fourth stanza is almost an entire allusion. It is in this stanza that the speaker mentions God, Hellfire and Seraphim and also Satan. She says in the first line that “God topples from the sky, hell’s fire fade.” God, in this case, is used to depicting that a pillar of stability, strength and hope in her painful life in the form of religion. When God topples from the sky, and her pain and suffering do not fade away, she loses faith in religion, neither believing in heaven nor hell. Besides the thunderbird is a type of a car, it is also an ancient creature that is believed to be robust and wrathful. When it flaps its wings, it is claimed to be capable of causing thunderstorms and loud noises. The creature is also loyal and intelligent, and the author depicts the speaker as needing security and loyalty by choosing the thunderbird in the end.
Mad girl’s love song is a poem that harbours a lot of hidden and underlying meanings in all stanzas and lines. Two purposes stand out, and these are that one, the speaker is very frustrated, angry or mad about how badly her love life turned out. She surrendered her love to a man who later abandoned her. Second, the speaker may be insane from trying to convince herself that the man was made up. Mad girl’s love author used vital themes and literary devices to bring out the meaning of the poem successfully.
References
Plath, S. (1953). Mad Girl’s Love Song.”. Mademoiselle, 37, 358.