Analysis of I Am Vertical by Sylvia Plath

I Am Vertical

by Sylvia Plath

But I would rather be horizontal.
I am not a tree with my root in the soil
Sucking up minerals and motherly love
So that each March I may gleam into leaf,
Nor am I the beauty of a garden bed
Attracting my share of Ahs and spectacularly painted,
Unknowing I must soon unpetal.
Compared with me, a tree is immortal
And a flower-head not tall, but more startling,
And I want the one's longevity and the other's daring.

Tonight, in the infinitesimal light of the stars,
The trees and the flowers have been strewing their cool odors.
I walk among them, but none of them are noticing.
Sometimes I think that when I am sleeping
I must most perfectly resemble them --
Thoughts gone dim.
It is more natural to me, lying down.
Then the sky and I are in open conversation,
And I shall be useful when I lie down finally:
Then the trees may touch me for once, and the flowers have time for me.

Today's poem is by Sylvia Plath, again a writer of feminist poetry.  The first line of the poem is stylistic in that it continues directly from the title.   If one isn't paying attention to the title of poem it can be a little disorienting.

The first line is in direct opposition to the title.  Here we can take vertical to mean standing up, and horizontal to mean lying down.   Here the narrator makes her yearning to lie down evident.  She begins by making her comparison to other upright and vertical life in the forms of flora.  

The second line begins a long description of the things she isn't.  She isn't a tree rooted in the ground.  The third line mentions that the tree sucks up minerals and motherly love.  Here we can guess that motherly love in this line alludes to mother earth.  The fourth line is particular in it's admiration of the tree.  The tree doesn't just sprout leaves, it gleams them, they shine.  The fifth line continues in the vein of what she isn't.  Here she mentions that she isn't a garden bed.  The sixth line directly sexes the garden bed as female by means of it's depiction of attracting ahs and depicting it as painted.

Paradoxically the seventh line uses metaphor as the narrator imagines herself as a flower bed for this line.  She's using empathetic imagination to put herself in the place of a garden bed that's ignorant to it's own transience.

The next few lines return to the trees and flowers.  The tree is immortal and the flower-head startling.  The last line of the stanza is an admission of her longing to be as long lived as the tree and as daring as the flower-head.

The next stanza paints for us a depiction of a setting beneath the stars.  Here again the trees and stars are sexed in their effusion of cool odors.   She talks about how she walks among them but they pay no attention to her.  She sees them as asleep.  If one takes the sexing of the flora a little further and sees them as people one begins to see a little bit more sorrow in the poem.  The narrator confesses that when she's sleeping she's most like these people she admires.  Ms.  Plath was well known to have suffered from depression and this sort of wistful musing is something perfectly in keeping with that little expression of sorrow.  She sees her nature more authentic when she's lying down.  The juxtaposition here is that the trees and flowers are more natural standing upright with their thoughts gone dim.  The subdued nature of the narrative seems to be hiding a sharper and more cutting pain than is outright evident in the text.  It redounds to Ms. Plath's talent that she could allude to this sort of pain without becoming lost in it, while expressing the softer side of it.

Here the next line brings us back to the setting, a starry night, where the narrator lies down and let's herself be in conversation with the sky.  The penultimate lines reveal her sorrow in a soft light, but still hint at the depression that plagues her.  She thinks of her usefulness as being complete when she dies and decomposes.  Then she may feed these plants and trees with her body.  Then the trees may touch me for once.  This brings us back to the first stanza where the trees suck up minerals and motherly love.  Here the narrator would be letting the trees gain nourishment from her, her motherly love.  Then also the flowers would be spending time with her as well.