amp Michelle Esch July 15 2009 English 413H Biography Born 1932 Died 1963 Victoria Lucas Assia Wevill Psychological Disorder Confessional Poetry The Colossus The Colossus of Rhodes Helios ID: 636375
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Slide1
Sylvia Plath
Jessica
Bither
& Michelle
Esch
July 15, 2009
English 413HSlide2
Biography
Born: 1932
Died: 1963
Victoria Lucas
Assia
Wevill
Psychological Disorder
Confessional PoetrySlide3
The Colossus
The
Colossus of Rhodes – Helios
“Perhaps you consider yourself an
oracle, Mouthpiece
of the dead, or of some god or
other. Thirty
years now I have
labored To
dredge the silt from your
throat. I
am none the wiser.”
Vanished authority
“I crawl like an ant in
mourning Over
the weedy acres of your
brow To
mend the immense skull-plates and
clear The
bald, white tumuli of your eyes.”
Tumuli – burial mounds
“A blue sky out of the
Oresteia
”
Trilogy of Greek tragedies
Roman forum, fluted, acanthine, pillar Slide4
Lady Lazarus
“
I have done it again. One year in every ten I manage it ---” line 1-3
“
A sort of walking miracle, my skin Bright as a Nazi lampshade” line 4-5
Supposedly, skins of some Jewish victims were used to make lampshades
“And like the cat I have nine times to die” line 21
Death becoming art in her eyes
“Dying Is an art, like everything else. I do it exceptionally well.” line 43-45
“I turn and burn […] Ash, Ash […] Out of the ash I rise with my red hair” line 71-83
Allusion to bird
PhoenixSlide5
Ariel
Title
refers to an air spirit in William Shakespeare’s “The Tempest”
“God’s
Lioness, How
one we grow,”
Ariel is Hebrew for “God’s Lion”
Name of archangel of healing and new beginnings
Plath’s horse
“
White Godiva
, I
unpeel-Dead
hands, dead stringencies.”
Lady Godiva rode on horseback nude