20 Temmuz 2010 Salı

Words by Sylvia Plath

Axes 
After whose stroke the wood rings, 
And the echoes! 
Echoes traveling 
Off from the center like horses. 


The sap 
Wells like tears, like the 
Water striving 
To re-establish its mirror 
Over the rock 


That drops and turns, 
A white skull, 
Eaten by weedy greens. 
Years later I 
Encounter them on the road--- 


Words dry and riderless, 
The indefatigable hoof-taps. 
While 
From the bottom of the pool, fixed stars 
Govern a life.

1 yorum:

  1. It's not entirely accurate (or at least it leaves out a lot of teachable moments about the mechanics and devices of poetry) to say that Plath's poem Words is "written entirely in metaphor."

    The unadorned juxtaposition of the single word title "Words" to the single word first line "Axes" is a stunning example of metonymy. It's an almost violent use of metonymy in that the reader is nearly forced to at once accept the inevitable poetic equation from which the entire poem flows: Words = Axes.

    The trope of the echoes presented as (or compared to) horses in the first stanza and the sap similarly equated with tears and then with striving water in the second stanza are similes ("like" being the telltale giveaway there).

    That it all bundles into an overarching metaphoric meditation on the nature of creating art through words is certainly valid, but to skip some of the devices that are decidedly different from metaphor in the details of the poem is to miss a chance to increase peoples' understanding of how intricate and dense a poem this is.

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