Ashlynn Steele

Professor Phillips

English 101

February 3, 2016

"Edge" By Sylvia Plath

Sylvia Plath's final poem before she took her own life, "Edge" was a dismal interpretation of death. The plot of the poem is a woman, possibly the author herself, focusing on her dark internal thoughts and trying to escape them externally through committing suicide. The title itself, "Edge" leads the reader to believe this represents someone being pushed to the border between crossing the line of their own life and death. Plath expresses her feelings through diction, symbolism and structure to provoke a gloomy tone among the audience. 

The vivid diction Plath choses is used to portray her unique interpretation of death and the remainder of life with words such as "dead", "bare", "empty", "crackle and drags" and "stiffens". This impacts the readers through enforcing this poem is not something to be taken lightly and to perhaps put yourself in that dark mindset of the author. Plath feels the only way to "perfect" the women is through death and strongly portrays that within the first few lines of the poem: "The woman is perfected. / Her dead/ Body wears the smile of accomplishment". By choosing the word "accomplishment" shows the narrators opinion with this form of death as an achievement and an act of bravery opposed to an act of selfishness or cowardliness which is the typical connotations for suicide. Also, with the choice of using "accomplishment" means the narrator feels like she has done everything to the best of her ability up to that point and that she a truly reached the goal in mind. Through this seen act of bravery, the woman is finally perfected as if this woman viewed herself as flawed and imperfect while she was still alive, showing the insecurities and negative self reflection that tends to be associated with the prior actions and thoughts before one takes their own life. 

Through research, I found Plath referencing allusions to Greek mythology, "The illusion of a Greek necessity/ Flows in the scrolls of her toga". This is the author's way of showing her opinions once again, towards suicide but in this example, through agreeing with the Greeks when it was considered honorable to take your own life, and one of the only options during that time period. This allusion once again reiterates a sense of accomplishment and pride taken through suicide, as if Plath feels the need to thoroughly convince others of her justification of her actions.

"Her bare/ Feet seem to be saying:/ We have come so far, it is over.," is an example of Plath's use of symbolism. The choice of the pronoun "we" is to represent women as a whole and how they collectively have come far in their journey of traumatic experiences and negative personal reflections, perhaps implying they have gone further in that specific journey than men have as if women go through relevant experiences in their life and letting it impact them directly to great lengths. This can be related with the pressure woman feel they have today to have this perfect body image, be the perfect wife and to be a role model mother to their kids; especially during that time period.  

The symbolism of bare feet is directly relating to narrator's ability to continue on with life and has accepted defeat before it even occurred; bare having an annotation of exposed and worn-out over time. With that annotation, being worn-out over time can correlate to the journey she has walked throughout her life and exposed by every monumental moment leading up to her depression and decision to act on it. Plath chose to word this line as "Feet seem to be saying:" as if her feet metaphorically are a sign to her and with taking that sign into consideration, her journey was coming to an end. 

Half way through the poem, we find the woman has women by referencing "Each dead child coiled, a white serpent/ One at each little/ Pitcher of milk, now empty." Plath herself had two children of her own. Through the first line "Each dead child coiled" the reader would assume through her death she is taking her children with her, assumingly in spirit. "Pitcher of milk" referring to her breast feeding as raising her children, "now empty" due to her leaving her children behind and motherless. "She folded/ Them back into her body as petals" referring to her children as petals shows her views of her children as innocent and fragile. 

 "The moon has nothing to be sad about, / Staring from her hood of bone" was another example of Plath's use of symbolism and diction. The moon itself is a symbol of women and even referred to as a "her". The moon reflects the mystery and fear within our souls and despite when the author writes "She is use to this sort of things", the moon is still a reflection of her fear of being on edge and contemplating crossing the internal bridge to external, from life to death. "She" referring to the moon, is "use to this sort of things" meaning that the narrator has been having these detached and dark feelings for awhile now and has been contemplating the correct solution to solve this ongoing feeling. The author then takes the next step to reiterate that death was the solution by ending the poem with "Her blacks crackle and drag." The reader can infer that the words "blacks" to represent her feelings, thoughts, and any negative associations of her depression to then "crackle and drag", in other words to finally be broken and out of her mind forever. The reader can associate "crackle and drag" as a more complicated process although the woman sees death as a relief and a want at point in her life, those words are as if even through death the pain won't instantly go away. It would break and linger on for a time period, and eventually drag away. 

The structure of the poem itself is a free verse but still unusual and impulsive, probably linking to her inability to further continue herself and her thoughts because depression is taking over. Free verse by having no actual structure or commitments to form to, can be related to how Plath feels within her life, along with allowing it to be viewed in third person. By having a third person point of view, this allows the readers to first read everything from an outsider view point. If she were to write this in first person, it would be entirely made up of Plath's experiences and reasoning why she took her own life. Within the first few stanzas, Plath is introducing her initial thoughts on death by coming out very abruptly to transitioning to her perspective on death and how it impacted her surroundings, in this case her children. To follow on, she confirms her actions in the last two stanzas through the use of the moon and words like "crackle and drag".

Plath's use of diction, symbolism and structure, including her use of third person, portrays a story a unique interpretation of death. The description of the woman being dead and her internal thoughts powerfully invoke the reader to look at suicide and death in a new way that society today usually doesn't associate with people committing suicide. The descriptive diction adds movement to the poem and reiterate that dismal tone that Plath is trying to represent. Plath does an exceptional job of using objects to represent a mood and how she views things. Nothing could be more poetic than someone as artistically expressed as Plath, taking her own life after leaving her last poem for the world to get a glimpse of what she was feeling for the past few years and time being. 
