The Colossus by Sylvia Plath
"The Colossus" is a poem by Sylvia Plath that features six stanzas written in free verse, exploring themes of loss and the complexities of the speaker's relationship with her deceased father. The title invokes the grandeur of ancient monuments, hinting at the enormity of the speaker's emotional struggle. Set against a landscape that merges classical imagery with nightmarish metaphors, the poem employs an extended metaphor comparing the speaker's father to a colossal, fragmented statue. Throughout the poem, the speaker grapples with the task of reconstructing her father's identity, but despite her efforts, she finds herself surrounded by incomprehensible sounds and the remnants of his being.
The imagery becomes increasingly bizarre as the speaker interacts with her father's remains, illustrating her deep sense of mourning while also introducing elements of dark humor. Plath's use of exaggerated metaphors allows the poem to balance its serious subject matter with absurdity, preventing it from becoming overly sentimental. The poem culminates in a sense of resignation, as the speaker acknowledges that she is left without messages from the dead, ultimately expressing her enduring connection to a shadow of her father. Through its vivid imagery and unique conceit, "The Colossus" captures the struggle of reconciling grief with the complexities of memory and loss.
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Subject Terms
The Colossus by Sylvia Plath
First published: 1960, in The Colossus
Type of poem: Lyric
The Poem
“The Colossus” is a fairly short poem in free verse, with six stanzas of five lines each. The title of the poem, which also serves at the title of Sylvia Plath’s first collection of poetry, suggests both the classical world in which huge statues or monuments were constructed (for example, the Colossus of Rhodes, an ancient wonder of the world) and the enormity of the subject for the writer.
The poem is written in the first person, but the speaker of the poem does not place herself in a recognizably contemporary world; instead, she chooses a strange environment that seems to be partially a reconstruction of classical Greece and Rome and partially a bizarre world of exaggerated, nightmarish metaphors. As with many first-person lyrics, this poem is addressed to a specific “you”; however, the identity of the person addressed is withheld from the reader through the first three stanzas.
Plath begins with an image that suggests Humpty-Dumpty rather than the classical world. She can never get her colossus “pieced, glued, and properly jointed” together, no matter how hard she tries. Despite her attempts to “dredge the silt” from the throat of this thing (is it monster, statue, human, or animal?), all she hears are the untranslatable brays, grunts, and cackles proceeding from its lips. Because the oracles of Greece and Rome communicated by nearly incomprehensible messages, Plath thinks that perhaps these sounds are coming from a “mouthpiece of the dead, or of some god or other.” Although she has worked for thirty years on her dredging project, she is “none the wiser”; no god’s message has been heard.
The third and fourth stanzas remain focused on the image of the incomprehensible head, but they move from the lips to the brow, the eyes, and the hair. In addition, the fourth stanza finally removes some ambiguity by stating specifically that the “you” she is trying to recompose and listen to is, in fact, the speaker’s father. The images become increasingly bizarre and macabre as the speaker crawls all over the “skull plates” of her father, trying still to clean and mend him. She then proceeds to eat her lunch in this huge burial ground. The father’s enormity is clear not only because of the physical size of his ruined corpse/statue, but also because of the exaggerated comparisons he elicits from the speaker: Her father, all by himself, is “pithy and historical as the Roman Forum.” The reader is convinced that the father is immensely important to the speaker by the sheer size and outrageousness of the comparisons.
The final stanzas end one workday for the tireless speaker and begin another. During the night, she protects herself from the elements by squatting “in the cornucopia/ Of [his] left ear,” but she still hears nothing from him. The morning sun rises “from under the pillar of [his] tongue,” but it rises silently: No message comes from the land of the dead. The speaker is “married to shadow,” not substance, because she is still enamored of her deceased father. The poem ends with a striking image, taken once again from the classical world, of a boat’s keel scraping the shore as it lands; she no longer listens for this sound of rescue or deliverance—either because she does not expect a husband-type figure to win her or because she has resolved herself to the fact that her father will never return.
Forms and Devices
The chief literary technique employed by Plath is the conceit, or extended (and often exaggerated) metaphor. A reader can easily accept a quick metaphor which compares a person with a statue, but Plath allows this metaphor to surprise the reader when she insists on focusing her attention on the comparison for the entire poem.
Because of its subject matter, the poem could have easily become a macabre or sentimental piece, but because of the exaggerated and therefore humorous nature of the conceit, the poem is saved from the problems inherent in a poem about mourning a parent. The poem’s seriousness is undercut by the oddity of her comparisons.
The scattered remains of a dead parent are horrific, but Plath’s conceit allows her to challenge the horror by placing the absurd alongside it. The speaker imagines herself “crawl[ing] like an ant in mourning/ Over the weedy acres of [his] brow,” but she complicates the picture by having the metaphorical ant scale “little ladders with gluepots and pails of Lysol.” The poem becomes cartoonlike in its images: The ant carries glue to fix the “immense skull plates” and Lysol to clear his eyes. When the poem regains its seriousness with an allusion to Aeschylus’s Oresteia (458 b.c.e.), the Greek tragedy, Plath again disrupts the sober scene by explaining, “I open my lunch on a hill of black cypress.” She eats surrounded by her father’s bones and hair “littered…to the horizon line.” She has followed the metaphor for so long that the normal biological demands, the ingredients usually of comedy, interrupt the poem, and she picnics amid the littered scene. Finally, at night, when she protects herself from the elements near the poem’s close, she squats in “the cornucopia” of her father’s severed left ear. This hyperbolic, or exaggerated, comparison between a cornucopia and an ear, as with the other metaphors in the poem, becomes oddly humorous because the conceit, or the analogy between the father and the ruined statue, has become strained: He is her father, a Greek or Roman ruin, litter, and a cornucopia.
Plath’s successes come from her ability to risk the excesses of her metaphors, and her work is important at least partly because of the extremes—in both subject matter and style—she was able to reach in her writing.
Bibliography
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