Sylvia Plath'S "The Elm Speaks"

Sylvia Plath's "The Elm Speaks"

Sylvia Plath's "The Elm Speaks"

Dutch elm disease is one of the most devastating shade tree

diseases the earth has ever seen. It is a wilt disease with an

extremely high fatality rate. The disease is characterized by

gradual yellowing of the leaves and defoliation. This is caused

be a fungus which is transmitted from diseased trees to healthy

trees by insects known as bark beetles. In the 1962 villanelle

"The Elm Speaks" confessionalist Sylvia Plath compares her

depressed emotional state with Dutch elm disease, which killed

millions of Elm trees around the world. In the fourteen stanza

poem written only one year before her suicide, a bitter Plath

cries out with pain. The theme of depression originates from the

loss of love in her marriage to Ted Hughes. The poem is

extremely rich in metaphorical language from beginning to end.

In many ways the poem is designed to fit the definition of a

villanelle. "The Elm Speaks" is a free verse poem with chaotic

meter.

While living in London, Sylvia Plath had a massive elm tree

in front of he house that became the subject of this poem. In

the first stanza, she mentions her "great tap root," which is the

very bottom of the elm's roots. This line symbolizes that she

has reached the very bottom of her depression. She describes her

depression further in stanza two as a "sea of dissatisfactions,"

"or the voice of nothing" meaning it is raging inside of her.

At the same time she has an empty feeling which is driving her

mad. Afterwards, in stanza three, she compares love to a shadow,

a dark reflection of someone which is not real and can not be

touched. "Till your head is a stone, you pillow a little turf"

creates the image of a grave stone in stanza four. "The sounds

of poisons" in stanza five refers to what Hughes, her husband,

has done to her and how it burns inside of her killing her like

"arsenic". In stanza six she expresses that she has been through

a lot, but she has always gotten through it. In stanza seven,

however, she admits that she has broken down and can not and will

not take her pain anymore. Next, in stanza eight she describes

the moon, which is normally calming, as merciless, meaning that

even the few things in life she used enjoy are now driving her

insane. Similarly, in stanza nine, she talks about dreams and

how they "possess and endow" her. In other words she feels as if

she is trapped inside an ongoing nightmare. In the tenth stanza

she confesses that she is holding everything in and that nightly

it "flaps out" which means she cries herself to sleep. She is

terrified of her depression and its effects on her, which she

admits in stanza eleven. Next, in stanza twelve she portrays the

"faces of love" as "pale irretrievable" saying that one can

never find love, it is out of reach. For the second time in the

poem, in stanza thirteen, she admits that she can not take the

pain she is suffering anymore. Finally in the last stanza, she

uses sexual imagery that for the most part states, the fact that

they got together has killed her.

The later years of Plath's life, when she wrote "The Elm

Speaks", were very tragic. She suffered from a vast number of

mental illnesses, including being bipolar or manic depressive.

Her moods were constantly up and down, one minute happy the next

sad. Just one year before she wrote this poem she suffered

through her second miscarriage, which was shortly followed by an

appendectomy. Through all of this her husband Ted Hughes abused

her both mentally and physically, driving her deeper into her

depression. During these difficult years she wrote Ariel, a

volume of poetry mainly concerning subjects such as injury,

victimization, parasitism, alienation, brutality, war,

cannibalism, death in all forms, torture, murder, suicide, mental

illness, and anger. Only one week after Ariel was completed she

viciously committed suicide by putting her head in the oven after

making her children breakfast on the morning of February

eleventh, 1963. In her poetry it is obvious that suicide was

something she had been considering for a long time, becoming an

obsession or even an addiction.

Throughout "The Elm Speaks"