Analysis of Elm by Sylvia Plath

Elm

By Sylvia Plath

 

For Ruth Fainlight

I know the bottom, she says. I know it with my great tap root:   

It is what you fear.

I do not fear it: I have been there.

Is it the sea you hear in me,   

Its dissatisfactions?

Or the voice of nothing, that was your madness?

Love is a shadow.

How you lie and cry after it

Listen: these are its hooves: it has gone off, like a horse.

All night I shall gallop thus, impetuously,

Till your head is a stone, your pillow a little turf,   

Echoing, echoing.

Or shall I bring you the sound of poisons?   

This is rain now, this big hush.

And this is the fruit of it: tin-white, like arsenic.

I have suffered the atrocity of sunsets.   

Scorched to the root

My red filaments burn and stand, a hand of wires.

Now I break up in pieces that fly about like clubs.   

A wind of such violence

Will tolerate no bystanding: I must shriek.

The moon, also, is merciless: she would drag me   

Cruelly, being barren.

Her radiance scathes me. Or perhaps I have caught her.

I let her go. I let her go

Diminished and flat, as after radical surgery.   

How your bad dreams possess and endow me.

I am inhabited by a cry.   

Nightly it flaps out

Looking, with its hooks, for something to love.

I am terrified by this dark thing   

That sleeps in me;

All day I feel its soft, feathery turnings, its malignity.

Clouds pass and disperse.

Are those the faces of love, those pale irretrievables?   

Is it for such I agitate my heart?

I am incapable of more knowledge.   

What is this, this face

So murderous in its strangle of branches?——

Its snaky acids hiss.

It petrifies the will. These are the isolate, slow faults   

That kill, that kill, that kill.

In case your not a botanist or gifted with the greenthumbs knack for plants, the above is an Elm.   You may find a picture helpful as the poem is an extended conceit that touches on many of the physical aspects of the tree itself. 

There's a few things about the poetess that can help place the circumstance of the text.   Sylvia Plath was a member of the "confessional" feminist poets.   She suffered from severe depression through out her life, naturally some of her work is informed by this.  She begins at the bottom: 

Stanza I; line one:  I know the bottom, she says. I know it with my great tap root:

The poem begins in  appropriate form for a confessional poem.  The first line repeats I know, I know.  The narrator sexes the Elm as a female with the two words, she says.  These two words will alter the voice of the Elm for the rest of the poem. .

The next two lines hinge on the idea of the bottom.  The first stanza begins with a  reference to her tap root, which is modified in a figurative manner in lines two and three.  

Stanza I; line two: It is what you fear.

Stanza I; line three:  I do not fear it: I have been there.

The first stanza establishes an asymmetry of knowledge.  It speaks of knowledge and the fear of it.  Intimating that the Elm has known things and doesn't fear what they are any more, as opposed to the reader who does not.  The idea of a tree possessing dangerous knowledge is a trope that's been established at the root of the Western Canon since Genesis and the poem will revisit this idea at its end.

The second stanza establishes the misunderstandings attributed by the reader upon the Elm.  It asks two question, one associated with the sea and it's innate restlessness,  the other being the voice of nothing.  The final phrase was that your madness? in the last line establishes these as misunderstandings.  If it wasn't evident to begin with, this stanza cements the poem as a feminist work.  The narration posits that interpretations posited upon her from the outside are not satisfactory or even accurate.  As the poem continues and the "experiences"  of the Elm are voiced in full, we'll see that these superficial positings are not capable of providing weight or meaning to the experiences.

Stanza II; line :Is it the sea you hear in me,   

Stanza II; line :Its dissatisfactions?

Stanza II; line :Or the voice of nothing, that was your madness?

At risk of positing upon the poem some characterizations, stanzas III and IV draw a little bit from the poetess' life.  Ms. Plath was an avid rider of horses.  In fact one of her most famous poems is named after a horse she owned named Ariel. 

Stanza III; line one:   Love is a shadow.

Stanza III; line two:  How you lie and cry after it

Stanza III; line three:  Listen: these are its hooves: it has gone off, like a horse.

The third stanza is a direct metaphor. The subject of love will be a dark matter of rumination throughout the poem. It's first characterization paradoxically cements it's mercurial nature.   What is a shadow?  Figuratively shadows can be illusions or inner darkness.  The concrete nature of a shadow though is it's utter impalpability.  You can't feel a shadow, and what's more it's a mere trace of extant objects.  The second line expresses the futility of crying and lying after something like this.  The third line of the stanza begins abruptly with the imperative Listen: Here the mercurial love she characterized as a shadow materializes into a horse running off.

Stanza IV; line one:  All night I shall gallop thus, impetuously,

Stanza IV; line two:  Till your head is a stone, your pillow a little turf,   

Stanza IV; line three:  Echoing, echoing

The beginning of stanza IV continues the metaphor of love being a horse, but the voice of the poem becomes that of the horse itself.  The next line invokes the image of the grave.  The line illustrates Sylvia's powerful capacity for convergence, beginning with the word Till which is used as a contraction of until, while simultaneously adding nuance to the line by invoking till as in till the soil.  The rest of the first phrase is a rearrangement and splitting of the compound word "headstone".  Head is a stone conveys both the oblivion of the listener in death, and also the intractable, stupifying nature of the problem at hand.  The second phrase invokes the visual of the raised grave with the pillow shaped mound that is sometimes depicted in front of headstones.

The last line of stanza IV is echoing, echoing.  Here the the writers talent for convergence expresses itself again.  The word echoing echoes itself. 

 Stanza V continues...

Stanza V; line one:  Or shall I bring you the sound of poisons?   

Stanza V; line two:  This is rain now, this big hush.

Stanza V; line three:  And this is the fruit of it: tin-white, like arsenic.

Stanza five begins with an offering of the sound of poison.  There's a dissonance between the sense invoked; sound,  and the possibility of what is perceived by that sense; poison. How does one hear a poison?   Line two clarifies a little by continuing on with a sense of sound.  One can infer in these short lines that the rain is the poison, as lines are connected by their shared invocation of sound. The last line is striking and paints itself with visual references, fruit, tin-white, arsenic arsenic is popularly known for it's poisonous qualities. While seemingly jarring in a stanza centered around sounds and their perceptions, it makes a perfect transition line for the next stanza which focuses on sights rather than sounds.

Stanza VI; line one:  I have suffered the atrocity of sunsets.   

Stanza VI; line two:  Scorched to the root

Stanza VI; line three:  My red filaments burn and stand, a hand of wires. 

This stanza is one of the most color oriented of the poem.  The first line invokes colors with the word sunsets.  The atrocity involved is hinted at through the symbolic nexus associated with the idea of sunsets.  Sunsets are associated with endings, as in "ride off into the sunset", as in "sunset years" so sunset here invokes endings, even though the connection with the central conceit of the elm makes it a day to day occurrence, which gives weight and understanding to the gloom of depression.  The second line invokes the intensity of the suffering, scorched to the root.  The narrator was burned so badly that it's affected her deepest parts.  While roots that are scorched may appear normal, blackened roots lose the capacity to grow and sustain life.  The last line speaks of the Elm's filaments.  The filaments here likely allude to the small dendrites that branch from the main root.  They're depicted as stressed and hued red.

Stanza VII; line one:  Now I break up in pieces that fly about like clubs.   

Stanza VII; line two:  A wind of such violence

Stanza VII; line three:  Will tolerate no bystanding: I must shriek. 

  If you isolate the first half of the first line you get... Now I break up in pieces.  Perfectly symbolic of a break down.  The Elm speaks of the danger this poses, as the parts of her fly apart.  A danger not only to herself but for anyone or thing unfortunate enough to be around her at that moment.  The second line acknowledges the ferocity of the process.The last line speaks to the incapacity of the narrator to endure this silently.  An outburst must happen.  This is likely an allusion to the compounding nature of the depressed person's pain. When they can't keep a lid on their suffering they're compelled to voice vulnerability, weakness, and other pain that day to day society urges them to keep repressed.  This compounds the guilt of the sufferer as they draw bystanders into the vicinity of this "violence."  The very last part of the stanza also brings the focus back to the concrete symbol of the conceit.  The image of a leafless tree shrieking in a howling wind.  

Stanza VIII; line one:  The moon, also, is merciless: she would drag me   

Stanza VIII; line two:  Cruelly, being barren.

Stanza VIII; line three:  Her radiance scathes me. Or perhaps I have caught her. 

Stanza eight comments on the lack of succor in her surroundings.  The first line reiterates this,  hinting at the gravitational effect the moon has on the earth and how it would drag her cruelly. It's of note that the poem sexes the moon in a feminine manner.  The last line expresses how all light scathes her, and  perhaps invokes an image of the leafless elm holding the moon in it's branches.

Stanza IX; line one:  I let her go. I let her go

Stanza IX; line two:  Diminished and flat, as after radical surgery.   

Stanza IX; line three:  How your bad dreams possess and endow me.

The continuation of the moons trajectory necessitates that the Elm release her.  The second line reminds the reader of the deleterious effect she has on everything around her.  The last line admits this is mostly phantasmagoria and projection originating from sources outside herself, nevertheless it captures her and exacerbates these intolerable situations. I find the last line particularly intriguing as it introduces both a sense of menace, and pleasure at being an object of attention.  Stanzas ten and eleven will elaborate on this sort of malignant affection.  

Stanza X; line one:  I am inhabited by a cry.   

Stanza X; line two:  Nightly it flaps out

Stanza X; line three:  Looking, with its hooks, for something to love. 

Stanza ten and eleven center around the idea of a bird living within the Elm.  The cry flaps out, so it's reasonable to assume she's speaking of a bird.  Here again the Elm characterizes the nature of love in dark and predatory terms.   The first line serves as a trope to internalize the following lines.  The cry, is something that inhabits her.

Stanza XI; line one:  I am terrified by this dark thing   

Stanza XI; line two:  That sleeps in me;

Stanza XI; line three:  All day I feel its soft, feathery turnings, its malignity.

This stanza serves to reinforce the nature of the thing inside her as dark and scary.  It resides within herself, but she feels that it's behavior is unnacceptable.  Noteworthy is the last line, in which she relents in her grim depiction of the dark bird and speaks of it as soft and feathery, but she still finds these characteristics malign.

Stanza XII; line one:  Clouds pass and disperse.

Stanza XII; line two:  Are those the faces of love, those pale irretrievables?   

Stanza XII; line three:  Is it for such I agitate my heart? 

Stanza twelve begins with a more pensive attitude.  The dissipation of natural phenomena.  The second line reinforces the mood with reference to the transience and unsatisfactory nature of love. The tone of the stanza is passive and curious.  The detachment of the observation provides a sense of quiescence contrasting with the desperation of the preceding stanzas.  The last line ties the idea together with a feeling of surrender.  The love that has been a subject of the poem since the third stanza becomes just another thing.  An object not even worth getting agitated over.

Stanza XIII; line one:   I am incapable of more knowledge.   

Stanza XIII; line two:   What is this, this face

Stanza XIII; line three:   So murderous in its strangle of branches?——

Here the tree speaks of it's incapacity for more knowledge.  In the Judeo-Christian tradition one might find it noteworthy for a tree to talk about knowledge.  A reference to the Garden of Eden.  The Elm then begins to speak of a face that seems capable of murder hidden in branches separate from its own.  The first line is fitting, as the Elm isn't capable of identifying the face itself, being incapable of more knowledge.

Stanza XIV; line one:  Its snaky acids hiss.

Stanza XIV; line two:  It petrifies the will. These are the isolate, slow faults   

Stanza XIV; line three:  That kill, that kill, that kill.

The first line of the last stanza returns to the Garden of Eden motif, with a reference to snakes.  Here the hiss is acidic, it could be a reference to acid rain.  The second line speaks of the loss of will, and how the faults enumerated throughout the poem are isolate.  Although one recieves the poem as a general meditation on gloom, each problem is intractable and isolate.  The last line is a solemn chant, reiterating how these are the things that are killing her.