Week 8
Poems about growing up:
In the poems “Packing for the Future: Instructions”, “Miracles” and “The Writer” Lorna Crozier, Harry Thurston and Richard Wilbur all use extended metaphors to discuss the passage from childhood to adulthood. Lorna Crozier likens it to a journey which will bring sadness and possibly loneliness, on which one will encounter many obstacles and difficulties. Harry Thurston sees it as a miraculous event that unfolds right before our eyes, while Richard Wilbur views it as a journey with heavy baggage that requires perseverance and determination. The theme of Lorna Crozier’s “Packing for the Future: Instructions” is a list of items necessary for the journey into adult life, as well as a list of admonishments, the sort your mother gives you before you leave the house on your own for the first time. Each of the items can be viewed as both tangible and intangible, for example: “A ball of string to lead you out… into that light” suggests to me that you should never forget where you came from, or the love of your family even if they aren’t with you. In the last stanza of the poem the admonishments are meant to remind the reader of this packing list to trust those willing to help, and to keep their heart full and their metaphorical baggage light. Harry Thurston takes a somewhat different approach in his poem “Miracle”. He uses the flowering (and perennial) strawberry plant as a metaphor for life. When you are a child it is spread out before you, to be enjoyed at each phase, and if you can wait for each successive stage it will be all the more sweet, bearing ripe fruit to be picked and eaten. In the first five stanzas of “The Writer” Richard Wilbur discusses the house in naval terms. In the last six stanzas Wilbur changes tack, and the metaphors are based on an experience he has shared with his daughter of helplessly watching a “sleek, wild, dark and iridescent” starling trapped in her room This beautiful determined starling is a metaphor for his daughter, headstrong, willful, at an age now that she is ready to continue her journey through life outside of the nest. A parent can only arm their child with all of the knowledge and love they are able to, they can’t protect them forever or keep them from learning painful lessons that are necessary to find a smooth course through life. Lorna Crozier’s poem struck me as being the most pessimistic of the three, written from a mother’s perspective ( I don’t know any mom who doesn’t say “I told you so” when you come home soaking wet because you refused to wear you raincoat), and with many warnings about the miseries and disappointments ahead. It was obvious from Harry Thurston’s poem that he has an affinity with nature and a far less cynical approach to life than either Crozier or Wilbur. Richard Wilbur’s poem expressed a fear that I expect is quite common among parents whose fledglings are about to leave the nest. While each poem expressed the emotions differently, all three are about the hopes and dreams that parents have for their children, and their wishes for happiness in their lives.
Sylvia Plath and her "Daddy":
On the surface Sylvia Plath appeared to be blessed in every way- beautiful, highly intelligent and well liked by those around her, but the death of her father when she was eight seems to have caused many psychological difficulties for the acclaimed poet. It is possible that the grief, anger, insecurity and fear she expressed in her poetry over his death was based on the fact that he died of untreated diabetes, an easily curable ailment for which he did not seek medical attention. Any child who loses a parent is likely to have difficulties with issues of abandonment, and to lose a parent because they couldn’t be bothered to go to the doctor with their symptoms could well find themselves experiencing intense anger. I am a strong proponent for the nurture aspect of the nature vs. nurture debate as regards human development, so I must admit that to me any and all of Sylvia Plath’s difficulties in dealing with the disappointments in her life, which lead to her ability to create such beautiful but tormented works can only be based on that loss, at the age of eight of a father who by all accounts she admired for his brilliance and ability. In a way, the Hitler regime can be construed as a betrayal to Germany, an ideology that brought not only the horrifying death of millions of its subjects, but brought a country to its knees. Perhaps Plath was telling her father that his folly, his betrayal in not dealing with his health issues altered the structure of their family in such a way that it was also brought to its knees, and any of her attempts to rise from the ashes were met with the negative emotions she was left with after his death. The allusion to Ted Hughes, “a man in black with a meinkampf look… the vampire who said he was you” suggests to me that she saw her husband, a philanderer in much the same light, someone who couldn’t be bothered to stick around. I wasn’t able to find any information about public sentiment regarding their separation, but I suspect that the last stanza of the poem, in which “the villagers never liked you…(and) are dancing and stamping on you… daddy you bastard, I’m through” was directed at Hughes rather than her father, as she already had quite a cultish following for her painfully insightful work and I can see that women involved in the burgeoning women’s revolution would have seen her poetry as a rallying cry for their movement. As to Jeanette Winterson's theories about autobiographies, having read a couple of her books, I find her characters to be rather desperate in the same way that Plath herself seems to have been, so I believe it likely that Plath, with her ability to twist the effect the death of her father had on her into a likeness of the Nazi movement would have embraced the idea that "there is only art and lies."