I just loved my literature classes because it gave me insight into literature that I can't find on my own.

Why don't we have our own discussions and classes about stuff??

let's discuss this poem by Sylvia Plath:

Dialogue Between Ghost and Priest


In the rectory garden on his evening walk
Paced brisk Father Shawn. A cold day, a sodden one it was
In black Novemeber. After a sliding rain
Dew stood in chill sweat on each stalk,
Each thorn; spiring from wet earth, a blue haze
Hung caught in dark-webbed branches like a fabulous heron.

Hauled sudden from solitude,
Hair prickling on his head,
Father Shawn perceived a ghost
Shaping itself from that mist.

'How now,' Father Shawn crisply addressed the ghost
Wavering there, gauze-edged, smelling of woodsmoke,
'What manner of business are you on?
From your blue pallor, I'd say you inhabited the frozen waste
Of hell, and not the fiery part. Yet to judge by that dazzled look,
That noble mien, perhaps you've late quitted heaven?'

In voice furred with frost,
Ghost said to priest:
'Neither of those countries do I frequent:
Earth is my haunt.'

'Come, come,' Father Shawn gave an impatient shrug,
'I don't ask you to spin some rridiculous fable
Of gilded harps or gnawing fire: simply tell
After your life's end, what just epilogue
God ordained to follow up your days. Is it such trouble
To satisfy the questions of a curious old fool?'

'In life, love gnawed my skin
To this white bone;
What love did then, love does now:
Gnaws me through.'

'What love,' asked Father Shawn, 'but too great love
Of flawed earth-flesh could cause this sorry pass?
Some damned condition you are in:
Thinking never to have left the world, you grieve
As though alive, shriveling in torment thus
To atone as shade for sin that lured blind man.'

'The day of doom
Is not yest come.
Until that time
A crock of dust is my dear hom.'

'Fond phantom,' cried shocked Father Shawn,
'Can there be such stubbornness--
A soul grown feverish, clutching its dead body-tree
Like a last storm-crossed leaf? Best get you gone
To judgment in a higher court of grace.
Repent, depart, before God's trump-crack splits the sky.'

From that pale mist
Ghost swore to priest:
'There sits no higher court
Than man's red heart.'

bump- It's a good poem

you would not believe how many people here have never heard of sylvia plath.
i, for one, am appalled. i spent hours memorizing "Daddy" and then had no one to recite it to simply because no one had ever heard of sylvia plath..
WTF THIS IS CIVILIZED SOCIETY!! AND A COLLEGE TOWN!!!

__________________
first impressions are cheap auditions
situations are long goodbyes

well Sylvia is really cool, I've always loved how she talks about death

one of the lines on her poem about bees goes like "the box is only temporary" wich to me it's a metaphor for a body.

I ordered this, clean wood box
Square as a chair and almost too heavy to lift.
I would say it was the coffin of a midget
Or a square baby
Were there not such a din in it.

The box is locked, it is dangerous.
I have to live with it overnight
And I can't keep away from it.
There are no windows, so I can't see what is in there.
There is only a little grid, no exit.

I put my eye to the grid.
It is dark, dark,
With the swarmy feeling of African hands
Minute and shrunk for export,
Black on black, angrily clambering.

How can I let them out?
It is the noise that appalls me most of all,
The unintelligible syllables.
It is like a Roman mob,
Small, taken one by one, but my god, together!

I lay my ear to furious Latin.
I am not a Caesar.
I have simply ordered a box of maniacs.
They can be sent back.
They can die, I need feed them nothing, I am the owner.

I wonder how hungry they are.
I wonder if they would forget me
If I just undid the locks and stood back and turned into a tree.
There is the laburnum, its blond colonnades,
And the petticoats of the cherry.

They might ignore me immediately
In my moon suit and funeral veil.
I am no source of honey
So why should they turn on me?
Tomorrow I will be sweet God, I will set them free.

The box is only temporary.



^_^

i never studied sylvia plath in school, not much anyway. i was more about teh medieval poetry, knights and chivalry and all that

this bee poem is nice, what insight into a tortured mind. i can nearly imagine the author slitting her wrists or something after laying down the pen with that last line

we did sylvia in secondry school, but only a short story.

but tell me more!!!!! this is a lit class.

I don't see the poem as being that depressing. In a way she is comparing herself with God. Some people say that God decides when you die and how, and what goes on in your life, well she has absolute power over those bees. Like the Furies over greeks or whatever.

*bump* all of you suck.

i guess i see the bees as a symbol for plath's own inner thoughts and feelings that constantly torture her. loud, buzzing, frenzied - which need to be confined in a box in order to protect her from harm. she needs to confine and repress these dark, manic thoughts of her's to hold onto her sanity. if released, the bees will sting her. if she lets go of the repression of her inner turmoil, she will kill herself.

the "funeral veil" she wears is appropriate, i think - should these bees (her thoughts) escape their confines this is what will protect her. death will protect her from her madness and pain.

so, i think that releasing the bees = her death. opening the box is the only thing that will bring an end to the noise and anxiety of their confinement; likewise, her death is the only thing that will bring an end to the noise and anxiety of the voices inside her head that tortures her.

though she has doubts (I wonder how hungry they are/I wonder if they would forget me) in the end plath is sure she knows what will happen if she eases the confinement she has placed on herself & her inner thoughts in order to protect herself... from herself. to me, "the box is only temporary" means that inevitably, the bees will claim her. her only true "escape" is suicide.



hope that makes sense?

OH MY GOD, it makes perfect sense. I could've never figure it out on my own.