Sign ID/Analysis 8-31-10 Wk 3

Now for an old hat...Sylvia Plath...sorry for the awkward line spacing...

"The Colossus"

 I shall never get you put together entirely,


Pieced, glued, and properly jointed.

Mule-bray, pig-grunt and bawdy cackles

Proceed from your great lips.

It's worse than a barnyard.



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.



Scaling little ladders with glue pots and pails of Lysol

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.



A blue sky out of the Oresteia

Arches above us. O father, all by yourself

You are pithy and historical as the Roman Forum.

I open my lunch on a hill of black cypress.

Your fluted bones and acanthine hair are littered



In their old anarchy to the horizon-line.

It would take more than a lightning-stroke

To create such a ruin.

Nights, I squat in the cornucopia

Of your left ear, out of the wind,



Counting the red stars and those of plum-color.

The sun rises under the pillar of your tongue.

My hours are married to shadow.

No longer do I listen for the scrape of a keel
On the blank stones of the landing.



ID/Analysis:

• Line 3: the speaker likens the broken male, the Colossus to animals, not just animals, but barnyard animals.
• 4: "great lips..." not only implies irony towards the shattered momument itself, but also perhaps towards a social critique of the ideas concerning "male-centric" patriarchy.
• 6-7:  "oracle...mouthpiece..." more supposed self imposedly importance leading towards societal poking and questioning?
• 8-9: the attempt to rebuild not only the momument physically, but this also filters well with the idea of restructuring male dominant patriachy given that the time of publication overlaops with Women's Liberation Movement for instance.
• 11: "glue and Lysol...": possible attempt to comercialize the construction project? Seems a bit kitsch here. Does this cheapen the act of construction somehow? Or...through the use of objects found within the domesticated space...a woman's "traditional domain, does this serve as a potential means of empowerment for women?
• 12-15: In likening herself to an ant, this does not signify a decrease her worth per se, but step down into a seemingly insignificant role on the page allow her to once again highlight the problem of the Colossus and all of its inherant socio-economic-historical baggage?
• 18: The invocation of the Roman forum highlights the Colossus much like lines 12-15, but this specific reference perhaps stands as a possible warning given Rome's eventual fall?

**I know a lot of this dabbles in interpretation and not inventory, but these are questions that have stuck with me throughout the many times I've studied this poem. I plan to elaborate on these ideas in the near future**