Sylvia Plaths The Elm Speaks Essays

Sylvia Plaths The Elm Speaks Dutch elm disease is one of the most devastating shade tree diseases the earth has ever seen. It is a wilt disease with an extremely high fatality rate. The disease is characterized by gradual yellowing of the leaves and defoliation. This is caused be a fungus which is transmitted from diseased trees to healthy trees by insects known as bark beetles. In the 1962 villanelle The Elm Speaks confessionalist Sylvia Plath compares her depressed emotional state with Dutch elm disease, which killed millions of Elm trees around the world. In the fourteen stanza poem written only one year before her suicide, a bitter Plath cries out with pain. The theme of depression originates from the loss of love in her marriage to Ted Hughes. The poem is extremely rich in metaphorical language from beginning to end. In many ways the poem is designed to fit the definition of a villanelle. The Elm Speaks is a free verse poem with chaotic meter. While living in London, Sylvia Plath had a massive elm tree in front of he house that became the subject of this poem. In the first stanza, she mentions her great tap root, which is the very bottom of the elms roots. This line symbolizes that she has reached the very bottom of her depression. She describes her depression further in stanza two as a sea of dissatisfactions, or the voice of nothing meaning it is raging inside of her. At the same time she has an empty feeling which is driving her mad. Afterwards, in stanza three, she compares love to a shadow, a dark reflection of someone which is not real and can not be touched. Till your head is a stone, you pillow a little turf creates the image of a grave stone in stanza four. The sounds of poisons in stanza five refers to what Hughes, her husband, has done to her and how it burns inside of her killing her like arsenic. In stanza six she expresses that she has been through a lot, but she has always gotten through it. In stanza seven, however, she admits that she has broken down and can not and will not take her pain anymore. Next, in stanza eight she describes the moon, which is normally calming, as merciless, meaning that even the few things in life she used enjoy are now driving her insane. Similarly, in stanza nine, she talks about dreams and how they possess and endow her. In other words she feels as if she is trapped inside an ongoing nightmare. In the tenth stanza she confesses that she is holding everything in and that nightly it flaps out which means she cries herself to sleep. She is terrified of her depression and its effects on her, which she admits in stanza eleven. Next, in stanza twelve she portrays the faces of love as pale irretrievable saying that one can never find love, it is out of reach. For the second time in the poem, in stanza thirteen, she admits that she can not take the pain she is suffering anymore. Finally in the last stanza, she uses sexual imagery that for the most part states, the fact that they got together has killed her. The later years of Plaths life, when she wrote The Elm Speaks, were very tragic. She suffered from a vast number of mental illnesses, including being bipolar or manic depressive. Her moods were constantly up and down, one minute happy the next sad. Just one year before she wrote this poem she suffered through her second miscarriage, which was shortly followed by an appendectomy. Through all of this her husband Ted Hughes abused her both mentally and physically, driving her deeper into her depression. During these difficult years she wrote Ariel, a volume of poetry mainly concerning subjects such as injury, victimization, parasitism, alienation, brutality, war, cannibalism, death in all forms, torture, murder, suicide, mental illness, and anger. Only one week after Ariel was completed she viciously committed suicide by putting her head in the oven after making her children breakfast on the morning of February eleventh, 1963. In her poetry it is obvious that suicide was something she had been considering for a long time, becoming an obsession or even an addiction. Throughout The Elm Speaks Plath generates a basic them of depression. She presents herself as being the victim of a horrible love relationship that has ruined her. She uses many different techniques to help create her theme. The first, and most obvious, is her word choice. She uses words such as fear, madness, poisons, arsenic,