Charlie's+analysis

The Colossus
“The Colossus”, by Sylvia Plath, is a depressing and dense poem, which uses the image of a statue being maintained to create a disturbing and enigmatic tale of a woman in a desolate and abandoned place, keeping an overgrown idol from falling more completely into ruin. There's no rhyme in this poem, and no standard number of syllables per line. The main devices that Plath uses are metaphor, simile, and imagery. For example, when speaking of the statue in the fourth verse, the speaker in the poem states O father, all by yourself You are as pithy and historical as the Roman Forum. (lines 19-21) This image of the Roman forum, a once grand and magnificent monument which is now mostly in ruins, ties in perfectly with Plath's colossus, a statue which, we now know, is ancient and useful only as a historical artifact. Nevertheless, the speaker in the poem does maintain it, as we can see from lines 9-17, in which the speaker claims Thirty years now I have labored To dredge the silt from your throat. I am none the wiser. Scaling little ladders with gluepots 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. These lines tell us that the speaker has been working on the statue for thirty years, and I would argue that the dredging of silt from the statue's throat is a metaphor for the speaker's efforts to make the statue speak to her, to understand it, and she has failed completely. The statue is as much a mystery to her now as it was thirty years ago, and still she crawls over its massive head every day, mending it and clearing it up. I assert that the speaker in the poem is Plath herself. She calls the colossus “father”, and this, perhaps, indicates that the gigantic statue is a metaphor for her father. A good deal of Plath's other poetry concerns her father, and in “Daddy” she calls her dead father a “Ghastly statue with one grey toe / big as a Frisco seal”. Thus, the image of a huge statue is not an entirely new one for Plath, and her father's being dead might explain lines 26-27, “It would take more than a lightning-stroke / To create such a ruin” Plath also tells the statue that “Nights, I squat in the cornucopia of your left ear / out of the wind” (lines 28-29). This means that the colossus provides her with shelter, but it also makes her despair. This despair permeates most of the poem, but is best seen in its final lines: My hours are married to shadow. No longer do I listen for the scrape of a keel On the blank stones of the landing. (lines 33-35) Plath's hours being married to shadow is a way of saying that her time is filled with darkness and despair, and the fact that she no longer listens for the scrape of a keel on the landing means that she's been waiting for a ship to come in, but she doesn’t think it will anymore; in other words, she's given up hope entirely. She also exclaims that “I shall never get you put together entirely / Pieced, glued, and properly jointed.” (lines 1-2). The colossus, which she's been working on for thirty years, will never be complete, and her life's work has been in vain. The only hopeful bit in the poem is when Plath observes that “A blue sky out of the Oresteia / Arches above us” (lines 18-19) The blue sky, where all the clouds have disappeared, is a symbol of hope, and a new beginning, and in the Oresteia, it's a symbol of the positive ending to the tragedy. But this hopeful theme is not picked up again, and Plath goes back to speaking, in the same somber and lonely voice, of bones and leafy hair littering the ground and then of ruins. “The Colossus” is open to multiple interpretations, and mine isn’t necessarily the most correct one, but whichever way you look at it, the palpable sadness of the poem remains the same. The broken idol and its lonely caretaker, no matter what they’re metaphors for, still carry the same weight.

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