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Sylvia Plath - Coggle Diagram
Sylvia Plath
Morning Song
Theme
- motherhood, the vulnerability of becoming a mother and the loss of self.
Key images
- the watch, the new statue, the cloud and the puddle, cow heavy and Victorian nightgown, the baby’s cries.
Stylistic features
- sounds permeate the poem, assonance, alliteration.
Tone
- reflective, disorientation, uplifting.
Mirror
Theme
- a woman’s self-worth and value in society is often in her appearance, internalised misogyny towards the ageing process.
Stylistic features
- the voice of the mirror, not the woman.
Key images
- the personification of the mirror, eye of a little god, lake, the candles and the moon, the agitation of hands, the young girls drowning the old woman and the simile of the terrible fish.
Tone
- neutral to begin but increasingly menacing.
Elm
Theme
- exploring anxiety and fear and mental illness
Stylistic features
- rhetorical questions, repetition, the language of physical pain, synecdoche.
Key images
- the bottom, the scorched filaments, the atrocity of sunsets, the elm itself.
Tone
- malevolent, chilling, disturbing.
Poppies in July
Stylistic features
- awkward syntax; desperate rhetorical questions; punctuation such as exclamation marks and dashes; and repetition.
Theme
- mental breakdown or turmoil, desire to self-harm and self-medicate.
Key images
- the poppies are central – poppies as fire, as bloody skirts, as the bloody lips of a mouth, the opiates, the glass capsule, colourless.
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Child
Theme
- the ideals juxtaposed with the realities of motherhood
Stylistic features
- simple almost like a nursery rhyme, enjambment signifies being carried away by emotion.
Key images
- the child’s eye is central, all other images stem from it, zoo of the new, the two flowers, the anxious hands, and the dark ceiling.
Tone
- hopeful, turns anxious and eventually into despair