hey peeps. i just wanted to know if using plaths poetry would be enough as supplementary texts...
all my english teacher did was give us a diary entry extract from plaths diaries and left the rest to us. i know the techniques part and all that but just need some tips on supplementary texts...
im thinking of using "daddy" .. "i want, i want" and "female author"... let me know what you guys think...
to shortii tania, fullbright scholars is very easy as well as the shot. ive got heaps of notes on them... have a read from below
Fullbright Scholars
The first poem introduces the concept of how the poet’s memory is uncertain and how time has played tricks with his perspective. This poem is written in a controversial, chatty style, almost like a diary entry. There is no regular rhyme or rhythm or stanzas as in traditional poetry. The poem is in shorty, punchy, sentences. It opens with a question indicating his uncertainty “where was it, in the strand?” This introduces the idea that the poet will admit that his perspective, his memories of their relationship are open to debate and are not the only version of truth. This is his subjective view his truth, his perspective. He describes her grin, her stereotypical America film star hairstyle. He describes his fleeting memories in short 3 or 4 word sentences, “Not what it hid”. This suggests hidden depths of psychological hang ups.
The problems of hidden psychological depth are foreshadowed here. The poet’s ignorance of love, of relationships, of fragile mental states is foreshadowed in the final line, “I was dumbfounded afresh by my ignorance of the simplest things.”
The poet uses the ‘first fresh peach’ to symbolise his first taste of love, luscious and voluptuous gustatory imagery and alliteration and used this image to make it effective and powerful. Repetition of the word ‘maybe’ indicates the unreliable mature of his memory, his perspective.
The peach also symbolises the fruit offered by Eve to Adam in the Garden of Eden. He feels tempted by the sensuality of the photo.
The exaggerated American of Plath suggests her forced happiness that hides her inner sadness. The idea is suggested that superficial exterior appearances are often deceptive and hide inner truths. This foreshadows the depression that Hughes refers to in later poems.
These poems are addressed to his long dead wife Sylvia Plath. He often says ‘you’ and ‘your’ in these poems. This technique of speaking to a dead person is called appropriate. This apostrophe has the effect of making the poetry highly personal, highly emotive, subjective its perspective. In this volume, ‘Birthday Letters’ the poets defend himself by suggesting that Plath’s personality was partly to blame for their destructed conflicted relationship. These poems discuss the complexity of their relationship and there powerfully changed characters traits ‘Fullbright Scholars’ is the first poem in this collection that introduces the idea that has perspective is not perfect and that the truth is often so difficult to establish because it depends on unreliable memories and a personal, subjective opinion.
Supplementary text for this module
Plath’s published journal demonstrates a conflicting perspective and lays the blame squarely on Hughes’s violent and idiosyncratic behaviour , ‘and then he kissed me bang smash on the mouth and ripped my hair band off and my favourite silver earrings’. ‘hah I shall keep these’, he barked, and when he kissed my neck I him hard ad long on the cheek, and when he came out of the room, blood was flowing, running down my face’.
The Shot
This is a poem telling Plath the truth as he saw it about her destructive personality. Hushes uses the sustained metaphor of a gun shooting high velocity bullets as an image to symbolise Plath’s deathly force in her relationships with all who fall in her range. ‘The Shot’ gives psychoanalysis of Plath, accusing her of being motivated by an obsession with her dead father, Otto. His early death acted as a destructive catalyst ‘Your daddy had been aiming you at God, when his death touched the trigger’.
In Hughes’ conflicting perspective he blames her too high expectations of him for the cause of their broken marriage. ‘I did not know’, ‘I had been hit’. He suggests that she was getting revenge on her father’s betrayal by aiming her bullets at him. ‘You had gone clean through me to bury yourself at last in the heart of God.’
She could not cope with the fast that Hughes could not be a worthy God like substitute for her father. So she killed herself to punish everyone. All he had left was ‘A wise of your hair, your ring, your watch, your nightgown.’
To a certain extent, this poem is a brief biography of Plath’s psychological motivation. But is also displays his own personal viewpoint about her suicide that conflicts with the feminist perspective that lay all the blame on Hughes adulterous philandering and his violent behaviour. In fact, Plath had suicidal tendencies and she had attempted suicide before meeting Hughes at the age of 18. She had been placed in a psychiatric hospital Hughes knew this and in his poems he suggests her father’s obsession and grief at his early death are the triggers for her mental breakdown and suicide.
