"Death & Co." & "Examination at the Womb-Door" Jacks

Eye symbolism

• Allusion to William Blake’s death mask creates a grim pun in which a renowned optimistic visionary becomes an emblem of death — his closed eyes conclude his input

Bird metaphor

• Simple declarative clauses — “I am red meat” and “I am not his yet” create an ominous tone that personifies death as a predator — a condor "(kind of vulture) — which is exemplified using consonance in “His beak claps sideways”

Taunting tone

• Anaphora — “he tells me” reveals how death taunts the speaker, mocking her appearance & the innocence of her children in stark juxtaposition with their potential deaths — “how sweet the babies look in their hospital icebox” and “frill at the neck…of their Ionian death-gowns”

Juxtaposition — metaphor on perspectives? Absurdism

• Plath then introduces death in “his” 2nd form with “Hair long and plausive, masturbating a glitter” which frames extravagant, flamboyant, and absurdist imagery which may represent the temptations of a potential sweet death. However, the absurdist metaphor “masturbating a glitter” implicitly frames this as repulsive

Repetition

• The simple declarative sentence “the dead bell” is repeated which emphasises the ominous sound — followed by the satirical “somebody’s done for”

Ariel (1965)

• Simple declarative sentences

• Anaphora

• Eye symbolism

• Absurdism

• Gothic conventions — e.g. imagery such as a morgue

• Reaction to the Movement movement — crude depictions of death

• Plath’s marriage left her with 2 children

• Plath was known to suffer with suicidality — this is what eventually caused her death in 1963

Plath “let her writing express elemental forces and primeval fears.”

Anatomical imagery & Taunting tone

• The crow is repeatedly demeaned via noun phrases such as “scrawny little feet” and “unspeakable guts” and “minimum efficiency eyes” — this bounces between simple mockery and grotesque imagery such as “messy blood” — this evidently exemplifies the fallibility and vulnerability of life

Anaphora & repetition & eliptical sentences

• Crow is repeatedly pressed on “who owns” its features — this expands macrocosmically onto “all of space” and then abstract concepts such as “who is stronger than hope?” — again, overarching an unplaceable sense of pessimism that denotes the idea that death is all-consuming

• This is also highlighted as the questions become eliptical which quickens the pace and therefore the tension and consonance is used in the abstract nouns “love” and “life”.

Omniscient speaker & satire

• The crow however rather hubristically at this point says that it is “evidently” stronger than death, which grants the crow the command to “pass” — the title of the poem indicates that this is how the crow is allowed to be born — therefore it seems ultimately optimistic as Hughes suggests we are all born with an ignorance towards death, exempting us from intense fear of it despite it owning everything.

Crow (1970)

• Epistrophe and anaphora

• Repetition of questions

• Conversational structure

• Motif of violence

• Modernism — structure

• Reaction to the Movement movement

• Hughes on Shamanism

“Crow is the croak of nihilism itself.”

• They both take rather optimistic approaches to death in these poems — neither poet seems tempted to succumb to its powers

• Different characterisations of death

• Both seem to use comedic satire to comment on the strengths of death