Like so many of Sylvia Plath’s poems, “Electra on Azalea Path” highlights the intense trauma, mourning and grief that she experienced due to the death of her beloved father when she was just a little girl. Hopefully by the end of this synopsis, you will come to understand the pain that she endured for much of her life due to the death of her father. This poem perfectly illustrates Plath’s innermost thoughts through its eerie imagery and seamless attention to detail.
In analyzing this poem, one must first consider the title. “Electra” refers to Freud’s theory that every young girl possesses an “Electra Complex”, meaning that they are in love with their father, and jealous of their mother for getting the attention and affection that any wife would hope to receive from their husband. Since “Azalea Path” is the name of the graveyard where her father is buried, Plath is referring to herself as Electra and thus expressing how much she loved her father. She begins her poem by describing what happened to her when her father died. “The day you died I went into the dirt,/ Into the lightless hibernaculum/ Where bees, striped black and gold, sleep out the/ blizzard”. She is speaking directly to her father and telling him that when he died, so did she; when he was buried beneath the dirt, so was she. Plath then goes on to describe the dull and emotionless life that she led for twenty years after her father’s death. “It was good for twenty years…/As if you had neer existed, as if I came/ God-fathered into the world from my mother’s belly/…I had nothing to do with guilt or anything”. Her youth and innocence at the time of her father’s death made it impossible for Plath to comprehend death and cope with the loss of her father. “Nobody died or withered on that stage./ Everything took place in a durable whiteness”. Her inability to accept death that lasted for twenty years, effected Plath for the rest of her life. Sadly, she was never strong enough to overcome the traumatizing loss.
In the next few lines of the poem, Plath seems to take on a different tone. She describes an awakening in her life-a moment in which she comes out of her emotionless state of living, and back into reality. “The day I woke, I woke on Churchyard Hill./ I found your name, I found your bones and all/ Enlisted in a cramped necropolis,/ Your speckled stone skew by and iron fence”. These few lines in particular invoke a powerful image that we, as readers, can conjure up in our own minds. To me, it’s like I’m honing in on a smaller and smaller image. First I picture a gloomy graveyard on a cloudy day in the fall, then my mind zooms in on a particular tomb stone in the graveyard. By this tombstone kneels a young woman, possibly in her late twenties, weeping over the loss of a loved one. This woman of course is Sylvia Plath, and my mind then zooms in on her thoughts. She is finally accepting and consequently mourning over the loss of her father. I can almost feel the grief washing over her in heavy waves as she cries. My imagination would not be able to create these images, however, if Plath had not described them (in fewer words of course) in her poem. “This is Azalea Path”, she states so curtly. With this curtness, though, comes a profound moment in her life that we as readers now have a better understanding of. It was here, on Azalea Path, “where the dead/ Crowd foot to foot, head to head” and “no flower/ Breaks the soil”, that Sylvia Plath first began to battle the grief of losing someone whom she loved so dearly.
In the next stanza, Plath describes the tombstone next to her father’s, and the artificial flowers that surround it. “The artificial red sage does not stir/ In the basket of plastic evergreens they put/ At the headstone next to yours, nor does it rot,/ Although the rains dissolve a bloody dye:/ The ersatz petals drip, and they drip red”. These few lines emphasize the artificiality of the flowers by noting that no matter what, they last forever. I took this as Plath’s ambiguous way of comparing grief to the plastic flowers decorating the gravestone. They both last forever, and although the rain may help to fade the intensity of the grief or the colors of the fake flowers, the pain endures.
The last stanza gets a little more confusing, so let’s sort through it. The first thing that probably sticks out to most readers is that there are a few lines that are italicized, “the day your slack sail drank my sister’s breath/ the flat sea purpled like that evil cloth/ My mother unrolled at your last homecoming./ I borrow the stilts of an old tradgedy”. These few lines are a reference to a greek tragedy about a king named Agamemnon, who was the leader of the Greek forces in the Trojan War . In exchange for a smooth voyage to Troy, he promised the Gods he would sacrifice one of his daughters. His daughter was eventually saved at the altar just before execution, but when the king returned home, his wife killed him out of hate and anger (Hunter). Plath may have chosen to include such a reference because she may have partially blamed her mother for her father’s death. Later in this stanza, Plath also says, “My mother dreamed you face down in the sea”, which may be another jab at her mother for causing the death of her beloved father. There is also a very interesting line where Plath acknowledges the day of her own birth, and argues that she has been plagued with bad luck since birth, “The truth is, one late October, at my birth-cry/ A scorpion stung its head, an ill-starred thing”. The reference to stars reminds me of the prologue in Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet when he refers to them as “star-cross’d lovers”, meaning that they are destined to be together. However in this case, Plath is using the stars to describe how she was destined from birth to live with the sorrow and grief that comes with the death of a loved one.
It is also interesting to note that Sylvia’s father died of diabetes because he claimed he did not have that disease, and instead was convinced that he suffered from lung cancer. So although treatment was very much available to him, he refused to take it and allowed the diabetes to grow worse until it threatened his life. Eventually, he developed gangrene in the leg before having to have it amputated (Mondragon). Knowing this background is helpful in attempting to understand the end of “Electra on Azalea Path”. Firstly, she acknowledges the gangrene in her father’s leg by saying, “It was the gangrene ate you to the bone/ My mother said”. She then goes on to say what, in my opinion, is the eeriest line of the poem, “I am the ghost of an infamous suicide,/ My own blue razor rusting in my throat”. The suicide could be a reference to her father killing himself, in a sense, because he refused to get treatment for a disease that could easily be regulated with medication. The “blue razor rusting in my throat” could be Plath’s way of saying that she is committing suicide too because of this grief that she can’t get overcome, and instead, she lets it eat away at her. The last line of the poem is a powerful one. Plath speaks directly to her father for a final time when she says quite simply, “It was my love that did us both to death”. It’s heartbreaking to think of Plath as a little girl who’s father has just passed away and, as so many young children do, she thinks it is her fault- that somehow she caused something so terrible to happen. Imagine living with those dark feelings for the rest of your life, and never having the strength to overcome such overwhelming pain and sadness. With a child hood like that, who’s poetry wouldn’t be dark and somber?
The second poem by Sylvia Plath that I dove into analyzing is called, ”Stillborn”. Although the heavy title may fool you, this particular poem has a little more of a frustrated tone. Much of the text revolves around Plath wondering why so many of the poems she has mothered-or written-remain lifeless. She compares them to stillborn babies with an extended metaphor that begins with the first line,”These poems do not live: it’s a sad diagnosis.” She then goes on to personify her poems.”They grew their toes and fingers well enough,/ Their little foreheads bulged with concentration”. Although a dead infant may be a heavy and grim thing to compare poetry to, by doing so, Plath allows us to understand her pain and grief over the loss of perfectly constructed poetry. We feel for her just as we would for a mother who loses a child because to her, her poems matter as much as her children. In the second stanza, the poem is written in first person perhaps to emphasize how attached Plath is to her poetry. She says, “I cannot understand what happened to them! They are proper in shape and number and every part”, and with that, we too can experience her frustration as she puts so much effort into making her poems technically immaculate, and yet “still the lungs won’t fill and the heart won’t start”.
In the final stanza of “Stillborn”, Plath further describes her frustration by saying that not only are her poems not living breathing humans, but “They are not pigs, they are not even fish” either! In her own child-like words, she then goes on to say that her poems are deceiving because “Though they have a piggy and a fishy air”, they are still far from having a life of their own. It is here that I began to wonder if Plath, while describing her poems as lifeless, was also talking about herself. My curiosity was further enhanced in the next line when she says, “It would be better if they were alive, and that’s/ what they were./ But they are dead, and their mother near dead/ with distraction”. Since Plath is the author, and therefore the mother, of her own poems, then she is describing herself as dull and lifeless. Perhaps the reference to the poems once being alive, means that she too was once alive. Knowing what we now do about her father and the effect his death had on the young Plath, she may be expressing the same deep sorrow in this poem, as she did in the previous one.
I have been fortunate enough to never have attended a funeral. No one close to me or my family (aside from my great aunt when I was about 5) has ever died. We are very fortunate, but because of my lack of any first hand experiences, I can only sympathize with Sylvia Plath’s immense grief over the loss she has suffered. Sure I’ve cried over lost loved ones, but those whom I lost had not died, but simply moved away or broken up with me. Death is a foreign concept in my mind. The only funerals I’ve ever seen have been in movies or on TV, and my only childhood memory of a graveyard is when I would go with my neighborhood friends to the one behind our houses to pick some of the pretty flowers that bloomed just outside the gates. Never had I been inside one, that is, not until this past summer. In late July, I was lucky enough to travel to Florence, Italy and take some classes with a program there. Since one of my classes was a study of WWII, my teacher planned a day for us to go visit the American Soldier Cemetery that is nessled just outside of Florence, in the hills of Tuscany. There I was, a seventeen year old girl who had had close to no experience with death what so ever, and all of a sudden I was surrounded by it. Thousands of tombs sat silently around me and even though I knew not one of the soldiers buried there, it was impossible not to feel instantly saddened by the sight. There was no escape from thinking about death at that moment, and now looking back, I’m not sure I really took into account how much of an impact it must have had on the families of each and every soldier who died while fighting abroad. These men had parents, wives, and children who probably prayed every day that their loved one would come home from the war alive, and yet that prayer had not come to fruition. So what did they do? Did they accept the horrible and fight through the grief until acceptance finally reached them? Or did they sink into a life of sadness and sorrow with no hope of overcoming the loss? I think we know which route Sylvia Plath took when her father died, however, this saddens me because she was so young and innocent when such a terrible thing happened to her. Losing the man you look up to the most at eight years old? I think I would have an impossibly difficult time prevailing through that grief as well.
American Soldier Cemetery in Florence, Italy (taken from my camera)
Headstones fill the fields
Another view of the cemetery (yet again from my camera)
Works Cited
Hunter, James. “Agamemnon.” Encyclopedia Mythica. 30 November 2005. 9 December 2010. <http://www.pantheon.org/articles/a/agamemnon.html>
Mondragon, Brenda C. “Sylvia Plath.” Neurotic Poets. 9 December 2010. <http://www.neuroticpoets.com/copyright/>
