| Title | : | The Colossus and Other Poems |
| Author | : | |
| Rating | : | |
| ISBN | : | 0375704469 |
| ISBN-10 | : | 9780375704468 |
| Language | : | English |
| Format Type | : | Paperback |
| Number of Pages | : | 84 |
| Publication | : | First published January 1, 1960 |
The Colossus and Other Poems Reviews
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The Colossus is the coldest collection of summer poetry you will ever read. I’m certain this paradox was intentional. Moles, maggots, cadavers, suicides, dead snakes, dead things in the surf, dead things on the shore, dead things out in the water, etc. There were times I was bit numbed out by all that dead stuff. For the first third of the collection, I initially felt the influence of Robert Lowell to be obvious in some of the poems (“Point Shirley,” “Hardcastle Crags”). Now I’m not so sure. Yes, Plath studied under Lowell, and I know as a result I’m connecting dots with the seashore linking the two. But Plath takes the seashore poems into her own dark places, again and again, so that by the time you reach the late “Mussel Hunter at Lake Harbor,” you yourself (to your horror) are fingering the nasty things on the beach:
On the back of the river’s
Backtracking tail. I’d come for
Free fish-bait: the blue mussels
Clumped like bulbs at the grass-
root.
Margin of the tidal pools.
Dawn tide stood dead low. I smelt
Mud stench, shell guts, gulls’
leavings;
This is a very disturbing poem, and one that draws on Queen Gertrude’s “long purples” speech regarding Ophelia’s fate (Act IV, sc. 7). After the rot and watery decay, Plath tries to pull an Eliot, meditating on the skull beneath the skin:
The crab face, etched and set there,
Grimaced as skulls grimace; it
Had an Oriental look,
A samurai death mask done
On a tiger’s tooth, less for
Art’s sake than God’s.
I’m not sure I believe her here. “God” is not a word you encounter often with Plath. Eliot had the comfort of his belief. Plath’s interest is more on the level of one attending – quite willingly – an autopsy.
And she knows you won’t believe her, as she returns you to the death process in the here and now:
And whole crabs, dead, their soggy
Bellies pallid and upturned,
Perform their shambling waltzes
On the waves’ dissolving turn
And return, losing themselves
Bit by bit to their friendly
Element –
I suppose I could go on about several other poems, but I see no need. Her theme is apparent in every poem. By collection’s end, you can’t help but admire her uncompromising, but grim, focus. When it comes to Plath, believe the hype. -
Perhaps I shouldn't have tried to read The Colossus all at once. It's had, it's had an, it's made me. . . I'm sorry, I have to sit down and start again.
Perhaps I shouldn't have tried to read The Colossus all at once. The poems are too rich, too sensual and filling. It was like trying to eat a plateful of prime rib, that's been covered in dark chocolate and deep fried. Delicious, but.
And all the hard words! I don't mean hard like palustral is hard, as in hard to understand because I'd never before made an acquaintanceship with the word. No, I mean hard like how a seed or a nut can be hard. Hard on the teeth, hard on the gums and tongue, hard on the throat, the gullet and, I'm sorry to say, the bowels. Words that stick and clog and glutinate inside you; well, inside me, at least. And word pairs as hard and as beautiful as (but much more plentiful than) sapphires. Here are a few from her poem, Sow:
shrewd secret, pig show, public stare, sunk sty, penny slot, thrifty children, prime flesh, golden crackling, parsley halo, maunching thistle, snout-cruise, feat-foot, belly-bedded, bloat tun, dream-filmed, grisly-bristled, jocular fist, barrel nape, pig hove, lean Lent, earthquaking continent, and (my favorite) brobdingnag bulk.
Plath's book is full of such morsals. (I'll let you find the rest.) I'm sure I'm not the first to say this but I think she must be the poetic cousin (or test tube spawn) of
Flannery O'Conner and
Carson McCullers. And she died early like they did, though she by her own heavy hand. I guess I might consider offing myself if I had all of that shard-sharp genius hammering all the time at my tender cerebellum. -
Sylvia Plath has done to me twice in the last 48 hours what not many other writers has ever done before, that being keeping me up into the early hours. Having read the stunning collection of poetry in "Ariel" this was another body of work which shows off her masterful talent and already I crave for more. Troubled genius?, tortured soul?, probably true, but that doesn't bother me, just the greatness of whenever she put pen to paper.
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Sylvia Plath's words are magical, haunting, beautiful, and forever burned into my brain. May you rest in peace, you tortured, gorgeous, sensitive soul you.
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2.5 stars.
The Colossus was the first and only poetry collection by Sylvia Plath published in her lifetime, and unfortunately it was a bit of a mixed bag for me. From what I understand of the collection, the order in which the poems appear in the collection is generally chronological, and you are able to see Plath's poetry expand and her ability grow throughout the course of reading the book.
I find Plath's poetry at times to be beautiful and arresting, but more often than not in this collection I was either bored or bemused. Plath uses a great deal of metaphor in her poems, but to me it was not always that clear exactly what images she was trying to convey, which affected my ability to enjoy them and 'read into them'. Instead I just found them quite verbose at points.
I noticed another reviewer on here had commented that they would not have known when any of Plath's poems had ended if it wasn't for the fact there was a large blank space at the end - and honestly I had to agree. I didn't feel like there was a great finality or rhythm to most of the poems contained here. I also found that a lot of the poems, particularly nearer the beginning of the collection, focused a little too much on nature and fairytale whimsy for my personal tastes.
However, there are some poems in here that I am still thinking about, and that I think really show the talent for writing that Plath clearly had - the titular poem The Colossus had an amazing Lilliputian Gulliver's Travels kind of vibe, and my absolute favourite was The Ghost's Leavetaking which held a beautiful, dream-like quality and made me consider the difference between the dreamworld and the waking world. I would thoroughly recommend these two poems, if you are mulling over whether or not to pick up this collection.
Overall not a fantastic read for me, but there were enough gems in there that I'm glad I picked it up. -
Plath writes poems that are elemental, attuned to the natural world, transfixed by decay, yet at times darkly humorous. Many are inscrutable on first reading, but become magically alive on the second. Others sing with clarity from the beginning – I like these best.
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Lorelei
⏯ ◼ ⏭
It is no night to drown in:
A full moon, river lapsing
Black beneath bland mirror-sheen,
The blue water-mists dropping
Scrim after scrim like fishnets
Though fishermen are sleeping,
The massive castle turrets
Doubling themselves in a glass
All stillness. Yet these shapes float
Up toward me, troubling the face
Of quiet. From the nadir
They rise, their limbs ponderous
With richness, hair heavier
Than sculptured marble. They sing
Of a world more full and clear
Than can be. Sisters, your song
Bears a burden too weighty
For the whorled ear's listening
Here, in a well-steered country,
Under a balanced ruler.
Deranging by harmony
Beyond the mundane order,
Your voices lay siege. You lodge
On the pitched reefs of nightmare,
Promising sure harborage;
By day, descant from borders
Of hebetude, from the ledge
Also of high windows. Worse
Even than your maddening
Song, your silence. At the source
Of your ice-hearted calling-
Drunkenness of the great depths.
O river, I see drifting
Deep in your flux of silver
Those great goddesses of peace.
Stone, stone, ferry me down there. -
Plath’s first book of poetry published (quite coincidentally) on 31 October 1960 and still very much influenced by Hughes. All the hallmarks of her later work are here but there’s room to move and a slight self-consciousness too.
The rich imagery and word choice lends itself best to a straight read through, a showering of impressions and free associations before returning to each poem anew to collect its treasures. -
Poor Colossus. I've never given the collection much credit; like many, I was rather blinded by the incandescence of the Ariel poems, and tended to think of this book as a sort of worksheet preparing for those late poems. But that isn't an entirely fair assessment. Sure, some of the poems here feel like drafts for what would come later ("Man In Black" seems to predict "Medusa," "Moonrise" feels like the exercise that enabled her to write "Blackberrying"), and some seem a bit too stiflingly in the shadow of Plath's poetic ancestors, but many of these illuminate how great a wordsmith Plath really was, albeit a thesaurus-obsessed one. Thus, in "Sow," you have the beast in question
"hedged by a litter of feat-foot ninnies / Shrilling her hulk / to halt for a swig at the pink teats. No. This vast / Brobdingnag bulk / of a sow lounged belly-bedded on that black compost, / fat-rutted eyes / dream-filmed."
Or in "Aftermath," the beautiful, disturbing image of Medea: "Mother Medea in a green smock / moves humbly as any housewife through / her ruined apartments, taking stock / of charred shoes, the sodden upholstery: / Cheated of the pyre and the rack, / the crowd sucks her last tear and turns away."
Though again, I definitely see that moment in "Aftermath" as a precursor to the "peanut-crunching crowd" shoving in to see Plath's Lady Lazarus commit the "big strip tease." In any case, there are numerous brave, breathtaking, hard-edged poems here. The book is obsessed with the borders between land and sea, and so fiddler crabs and gulls and suicides off egg rocks permeate these vignettes. Death always hangs along the periphery for Plath, whether in the shadows seeping through each crack of her spot-on phrasings or in the tangible forms of faceless, darning-head muses or blue moles that have killed one another in tragedic Shakespearian battles.
This is really Plath as her "least confessional"--these are stunning glimpses into a natural world that is brutal and frightening, though perfectly ordered. The speakers of the poems and the characters in them are the ones that invoke chaos and suffer under the strict parameters of natural existence that has become so mythical in these poems, as with the sow, the blue moles, the dead snake in "Medallion." If anything is wrong with the world of The Colossus it is that we've interfered with it, unprepared for the consequences. -
Okay. Well. Wow. Need to read poetry more often, clearly.
- "What I want back is what I was"
- "My hours are married to shadow"
- "Love is the bone and sinew of my curse" -
I discovered Sylvia Plath as an undergraduate freshman, introduced to The Bell Jar by my very good friend and drama student, Linda. Linda's perspective of life was that life was art. She would often model nude for drawing studies on campus and attempted, on several occasions, to induce me to do the same. I chatted with her one evening as she disrobed in front of me for the art class and I then watched, in a mix of awe and embarrassment, as the the class of about 20 sketched her in charcoal.
The reason I mention this occasion is that as much as I wanted to understand Sylvia Plath, this book of poetry only became accessible once I began to understand Linda's ability to open herself to others. Plath bared herself in a way in which I not only felt awkward and shy, but with a power that initially made me feel like I was sitting too close to the stage, as it were. Here was a woman who wrote without any apology for who she was. In my estimation she offended the very ones who felt obliged to judge and evaluate her.
There is little doubt that she was angry that she was required to write like a woman and remain firmly ensconced within feminine issues. In fact, had this been her only demon, perhaps she might have lived, battled against the tide and produced even more marvelous poetry. She could not persevere, I suspect, with the idea that the world expected her to BE just a woman.
Today I remain surprised that this volume was ever published. Its power spits in the face of social domination. Plath will have none of that:Perhaps you consider yourself an oracle,
Mouthpiece of the dead, or of some god or other.
Thirty years now I have labored
To dredge the silt from your throat.
I am none the wiser.
I fell into Plath's spell on several occasions during my freshman year. In many ways, I felt a strange discontinuity in my life when I read her, as if what I was studying in class had little to do with the life force struggling to live and burst forth from the earth. One was in my head and the other permeated everything else inside me.
Linda would often sit or walk with me when I was under the spell and I would talk breathlessly about one point or another, all with what I thought was an emulation of Plath's deep seated passion. One morning walking across campus, me to chemistry and she to a literature class, she stopped me and we stood facing one another. She smiled at the surprised look on my face. She kissed me on the cheek, and turned and walked away. I stood stunned, unable to comprehend. Finally I went on to chemistry class, although unable to concentrate.
I thought a great deal about that moment and I cannot tell you how long I spent until I came to understand, but it was probably years later, long enough so that I recognized that Plath and my despondency went together all too well.My hours are married to shadow.
Like Plath, I became married to shadow without being inspired to proceed. She was something dangerous to me and at the same time so appealing, having touched an element deep inside. I asked myself if this was Plath's inevitable path towards tragedy.
Still, one day I understood; I understood Linda, I understood the meaning of art and I understood Linda's tender kiss. The problem was that I only understood Sylvia Plath in my head. She kept reaching inside of me and I would translate that back to an intellectual endeavor.
In order to become free of the tragedy, I had to, as it were, disrobe in front of others without fear, without modesty and without embarrassment. It was a slow process, but it was a necessary one. Sylvia Plath, through her own tragedy of a life, had shown me the way to overcome the bonds of social acceptability and live my own art of a life. Perhaps if one learns to disregard one's critics in the name of art, not looking back, the schizophrenia is optional.
This is a monumental book of poetry, beautiful imagery and excellent form. Its truths do not come gently but like a knife without warning, without expectation and without answers. She is a very fine craftsman of language, but, perhaps, language displayed not without hints of her inevitable demise. Plath may have been swinging at some of her demons without result, but she teaches us that dealing with them isn't like inviting them for tea. She is one of the great modern pioneers of literature who had to fight too hard to breathe the rarefied air of excellence.
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A lot of famous poets simply aren’t sexy.
Ezra Pound wasn’t sexy.
Charles Baudelaire wasn’t sexy.
Alexander Pope wasn’t sexy.
William Blake wasn’t sexy.
Mary Oliver wasn’t sexy.
Siegfried Sassoon wasn’t sexy.
Pablo Neruda was sexy but that’s an unfair comparison. And by ‘sexy’ I don’t even necessarily mean ‘physically attractive,’ I mean ‘sexy’ in the way an abstract concept is sexy. Like nostalgia or stained glass. Anyway, the point is that Sylvia Plath was sexy, and these poems are a great example of that. -
The Colossus
I shall never get you put together entirely,
Pieced, glued, and properly jointed.
Mule-bray, pig-grunt and bawdy cackles
Proceed from your great lips.
It's worse than a barnyard.
Perhaps you consider yourself an oracle,
Mouthpiece of the dead, or of some god or
other.
Thirty years now I have labored
To dredge the silt from your throat.
I am none the wiser.
Scaling little ladders with glue pots 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.
A blue sky out of the Oresteia
Arches above us. O father, all by yourself
You are pithy and historical as the Roman
Forum.
I open my lunch on a hill of black cypress.
Your fluted bones and acanthine hair are
littered
In their old anarchy to the horizon-line.
It would take more than a lightning-stroke
To create such a ruin.
Nights, I squat in the cornucopia
Of your left ear, out of the wind,
Counting the red stars and those of plum-
color.
The sun rises under the pillar of your tongue.
My hours are married to shadow.
No longer do I listen for the scrape of a keel
On the blank stones of the landing. -
Have this book on your bedside table for those lonely, stormy nights when you want to hide underneath your covers and read something dark and meaningful. Sylvia's a beautiful writer - there's no denying I'm a fan. I like that we get to see inside her nightmares, and subsequently, our own. My copy of this collection is filled with annotations in the margins, creased pages, and wear and tear from constant use. Many of the poems are plain out disturbing and you're not going to get a 'feel good' experience out of this book - odds are you'll get some shivers down your spine, you'll probably even shudder a time or two. But sometimes its nice to explore our dark side, run underneath the shadows of all those pent up emotions, all those forgotten dreams and hurts... and there's no better person than Sylvia Plath to make us feel afraid and love it .
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і я б ще українською її складну та депресивну поезію почитала. Багата на Образи, символи, незвична та незвичайна, як і сама Сильвія Плат! Перекладіть українською!
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"The Colossus," from what I understand, was Plath's first published collection of poetry. During this early phase of Plath's career, she still treated the act of writing poetry as a laborious and painstaking process, often diligently looking up words in the thesaurus and then inserting many synonyms of one word into a single composition. This rather pedantic attitude toward poetry shows in these poems, many of which devoutly adhere to difficult rhyme schemes (albeit frequently using slant rhymes) and all of which are marked by a studied attention to detail, both visual and sonic. These poems simply don't *soar* the way the free-verse poems in "Ariel" (Plath's second book) do; they are just not as vibrant or as lively as her later work. These are bleak poems, characterized by a wealth of vivid tactile detail, but somewhat lacking in color and movement. Plath frequently uses the terza-rima rhyme scheme that Dante patented, as though to suggest that life, for her, is a slow, laborious, yet dignified plod through hell. In this book, Plath shows that she can write good poems, but she does not make the art of writing good poems seem easy.
I do not, however, mean to imply that this is not a useful book for aspiring poets to read. It is, doubtless, a very important book to read if one wishes to understand how Plath developed into the brilliant, oracular voice that spouted "Ariel." And since Sylvia Plath started writing poetry seriously at a very early age, it is perhaps unfair to dismissively refer to this book -- which she published at the ripe old age of 25 -- as her "early work." There are many remarkable things about this book, not the least of which is the way Plath elevates mundane topics (e.g., men working the night shift, or prize pigs) to the level of high poetry, armoring them with an impervious Dante-esque dignity. To Plath, even the smallest things in life are worthy of attention. -
Plath is a poet more to be admired than loved. At times she leaves a crack to look through, displays her vulnerability, but so much of what she writes feels overly academic, overly composed, overly self-conscious. Poetry seems a scholarly exercise, rather than an expression of feeling to her. That said, 'On the Difficulty of Conjuring up a Dryad' and 'Black Rook in Rainy Weather' are beautiful exceptions.
"No doubt now in dream-propertied fall some moon-eyed,/ star-lucky sleight-of-hand man watches/ My jilting lady squander coin, gold leaf stock ditches,/ And the opulent air go studded with seed,/ While this beggared brain/ Hatches no fortune,/ But from leaf, from grass,/ Thieves what it has." -
The only way I could tell if Plath had ended a poem is when there was considerable blank space after the last line. And when a poem did indeed reach the last printable line on an odd-numbered page, it was only when I turned the page that I discovered if a poem had ended, or not. One can switch verses around, retitle them any ol' way, print everything backwards, whatever. As the "genius-with-word-and-song" Kurt Cobain famously begged, "Here we are now, entertain us." But to Plath, no doubt, he wailed only "Nevermind."
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I did not find this collection particularly enjoyable, which was a massive shame as I'm entirely obsessed with Plath at the minute. I think it's massively less confessional than Ariel so I found it a bit uncomfortable in that sense, I kind of like when poets confess all their shit! But yeah, I'm not sure what it was it just didn't strike me in anyway, no poem in particular stood out as amazing, quite disappointed
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4.5 stars. This was the first full collection of Plath's poem that I'd read and I absolutely loved it. The poems in this collection contained fresh images and there were no staleness nor redundancy. I fully ascertained the reason why Plath is regarded as one of the best poets.
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One or two poems are quite good,
the others are utterly tedious! -
Trudno mi ocenić coś tak... intymnego.
Ale, jeśli lubicie poezję, Sylvia na pewno Wam się spodoba. -
I think it's a wonderful thing to slow down and read Plath's poetry. She's such a convincing, thorough writer. Her sense of humor is so unique and slow. I'm not sure the world will ever stop mourning her death. Everybody already knows Plath was a brilliant writer, so I won't spend too much time writing a review. Instead, here are a couple excerpts:
From "Mushrooms":
"We shall by morning
Inherit the earth.
Our foot's in the door."
Funny, yes?
Plus, she has a remarkable ability to write sensuously about crustaceans:
"Could they feel mud
Pleasurable under claws
As I could between bare toes?"
Not to mention her dark side:
"The head of his cadaver had caved in,
And she could scarcely make out anything
In that rubble of skull plates and old leather."
She also writes about the ocean, bees, snakes, butterflies, mannequins, and much more, but I think my favorite poem in this collection is "Sculptor" which is about the almost unbelievable talent of a sculptor who creates something light and airy from something heavy and stubborn.
"To his house the bodiless
Come to barter endlessly
Vision, wisdom, for bodies
Palpable as his, and weighty."
Plath was born in 1932. To think she could still be alive... -
Few people immediately think of Sylvia (with her woodsy name) as a nature poet, but she is in
The Colossus and Other Poems. Our nature is to die. Forest, shore, and meadow are explored; all springing towards decay. I would have given it five stars, but she brought a curse on so many young women; I withheld.
She often evokes a lost father, a sea king/god, but the reunion is death, of course. I liked "Spinster" and the final poem "The Stones" and the ones that evoke nursery rhymes - "The sea broke in at every crack, Pellmell, blueblack." I liked the words in all of them.
Reread in one sitting 45 years after the first time. -
Reading The Colossus feels like standing on an isolated beach as a storm rolls in. The sea is grey, the air is forbidding, and thunder is just beginning to shake the clouds.
Plath’s ability to create a haunted and disturbing literary atmosphere is on full display in this collection. While each poem is unique in terms of subject matter and meaning, the collection is united by the awful sense that something is coming and there is nothing the speaker can do other than wait for its arrival.
There are a few individual lines which have stuck with me since my very first reading, including “my hours are married to shadow” (The Colossus) and “love is the bone and sinew of my curse” (Poem for a Birthday). While ‘The Thin People’, ‘Aftermath’, and ‘The Ghost’s Leavetaking’ are among my favourite poems of all time, The Colossus as a whole doesn’t quite resonate with me as much as Plath’s other works. 3.5 stars -
I was expecting to like this book, but when I started it early in the morning before class the other day, I was abruptly hit with the rich, descriptive language Plath uses in these poems. My sleepy brain was not prepared for this. I continued reading it later the next day and grew fonder with each poem. I began to relish in the rich language and the way she strings together words. It began to remind me of Shakespeare, and I started seeing the influence come through. The content reminds me of a darker, moodier version of Mary Oliver’s poems, which are all about nature and animals. I thought this would be a quick read, but I will, definitely, need to revisit this and reread to fully absorb the meaning of her words.
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my first complete poetry collection and such a marvellous one
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Bleak, Upsetting at times. Would be unreadable if it wasn’t so well written.
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'Scaling little ladders with gluepots and pails of Lysol I crawl like an ant in mourning over the weedy acres of your brow'
3.5 stars
