Poetry of Sylvia Plath: The Essay

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The poem "Daddy" thus chronicles a personal misery that is shared by all of Europe, bleeding its collective wounds of guilt at the end of World War II. This sense of the personal and the impersonal becoming melded into poetry is what gives "Daddy" its power. Everyone, not just everyone with a personal, historical family connection to the Holocaust can understand the speaker. She is everywoman, and perhaps everyone who has had a self-defeating, masochistic relationship with someone in the present, because she or he is still emotionally living in the past, replaying an old childhood drama.

Plath's complicated relationship with parenting, and her inability to fully trust or inhabit a healthy relationship is also seen in "Morning Song," which depicts a mother rising to comfort a crying baby. Unlike the relationship of "Daddy," the mother and child seem to have a normal bond -- the mother wakes to comfort the baby, but inside the mother's heart, a tempest is brewing. Plath's speaker articulates what many women feel, but do not say, namely that they resent the child who now burdens them and inhibits their freedom. The mother, still suffering from postpartum depression, thinks: "I'm no more your mother/Than the cloud that distills a mirror to reflect its own slow / Effacement at the wind's hand."

The mother's voice echoes the daughter in "The Moon and the Yew Tree:" the moon is my mother. She is not sweet like Mary. / Her blue garments unloose small bats and owls. / How I would like to believe in tenderness - / the face of the effigy, gentled by candles, / Bending, on me in particular, its mild eyes." But there is a disconnection between the image and the real, how parents should be and how they are. Even readers with less boldness than Plath understand such longing -- mothers wish to be more like the ideal, children wish to have ideal mothers.

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Plath's faith that the speaker will understand is won again and again. In "Morning Song," she takes a common situation, the frustration of a baby's cry, and instead of spackling over the pain with platitudes and false sentiments, she is honest. She is not sure -- perhaps accurately -- that the newborn child recognizes her as its mother, seeing herself as a cloud, a mirror. And the child is a being separate from herself, even though she is still "cow heavy" from childbirth. "Love set you going like a fat gold watch. / the midwife slapped your footsoles, / and your bald cry / Took its place among the elements." But in "Morning Song," unlike in "Daddy," even with the mother's irritation and sense of estrangement, there is also a sense of respect for the new life. The child is set going, like a watch, it thus has a time and a pace of growth all its own, over which its mother has no control, like the "bald and wild moon" in "The Moon and the Yew Tree." Plath respects the integrity and separateness of parents and children -- both are their own, free, unique entities. In this truth there is hope, in the form of the hard-won freedom earned by the speaker of "Daddy," although the lack of the assumed maternal bond in "Morning Song" and "The Moon and the Yew Tree" brings pain to the mother in the first poem and to the child in the second poem.

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