"Widow" by Sylvia Plath (p.164 in book)
Widow. The word consumes itself ---
Body, a sheet of newsprint on the fire
Levitating a numb minute in the updraft
Over the scalding, red topography
That will put her heart out like an only eye.
Widow. The dead syllable, with its shadow
Of an echo, exposes the panel in the wall
Behind which the secret passages lies--stale air,
Fusty remembrances, the coiled-spring stair
That opens at the top onto nothing at all....
Widow. The bitter spider sits
And sits in the center of her loveless spokes.
Death is the dress she wears, her hat and collar.
The moth-face of her husband, moonwhite and ill,
Circles her like a prey she'd love to kill
A second time, to have him near again ---
A paper image to lay against her heart
The way she laid his letters, till they grew warm
And seemed to give her warmth, like a live skin.
But it is she who is paper now, warmed by no one.
Widow: that great, vacant estate!
The voice of God is full of draftiness,
Promising simply the hard stars, the space
Of immortal blankness between stars
And no bodies, singing like arrows up to heaven.
Widow, the compassionate trees bend in,
The trees of loneliness, the trees of mourning.
They stand like shadows about the green landscape ---
Or even like black holes cut out of it.
A widow resembles them, a shadow-thing,
Hand folding hand, and nothing in between.
A bodiless soul could pass another soul
In this clear air and never notice it ---
One soul pass through the other, frail as smoke
And utterly ignorant of the way it took.
That is the fear she has--the fear
His soul may beat and be beating at her dull sense
Like Blue Mary's angel, dovelike against a pane
Blinded to all but the grey, spiritless room
It looks in on, and must go on looking in on. ("Widow" 1-40)
When going through Sylvia Plath's poems, I was searching for a poem that grabbed my attention. First, I was just looking at titles that caught my eye. However, I realized that there were a lot of titles that caught my eye. One of the poems that not only caught my eye with the title but allowed me to immerse myself in the content as well was "Widow." It isn't a happy poem. In fact, it is a pretty depressing poem. However, it is a depressing poem that is written beautifully. In this poem, Plath does a wonderful job of portraying all the emotions that widows go through when losing their spouses. The tone of the poem seems to be bitter especially in the stanza where it describes the widow as a "bitter spider." Also, there is a bitter tone when she states, "A widow resembles them, a shadow-thing." By comparing the widow to a shadow, she is bitter in saying that they do not have much value. However, the tone is not all bitter in the poem. It also seems as if the tone is desirous in that there is a longing to have him near her again. This is shown in the fourth stanza when she says, "A second time, to have him near again..." Another aspect of the poem that I found interesting was the parallelism she used. She repeats the word "widow" and has different interpretations of the word "widow." For instance, in the first and second stanza, she states widow as a "word" and a "syllable." In the third, fifth, and sixth stanzas, she uses metaphors to compare a widow to a bitter spider, a great vacant estate, and the bending of trees. Finally, there is a wide variety of imagery that Plath uses in this poem. One example of imagery that I love is in the first stanza when she says, "a sheet of newsprint on the fire." I thought this was great for showing how something alive (person, love between two people) is now gone. Overall, the theme of this poem seems to be that even though the husband is not there physically, he is always with her and a part of her. In general, Sylvia Plath is incredible at transforming something depressing into a beautiful work of art.
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