Recently, I’ve been revisiting some of Sylvia Plath’s poetry, particularly the ones in ‘Winter Trees’ which were compiled in the last nine months of her life. Plath was among the first poets I ever connected with on a personal level. One poem in particular has struck me as I was going through this slim volume: ‘Mary’s Song’.
Like most poems it didn’t make a lot of sense the first time round, but as I kept going over it, things started to fall in place. My eyes began to shift and refocus itself around Plath’s words and suddenly a door opened and I could see her awful meaning.
This poem is about the holocaust. Like the poem ‘Vultures’ by Chinua Achebe, it paints a picture of a Europe at a time where it was cannibalising itself. The last line of ‘Mary’s Song’ leaves a haunting echo inside me. May times like this never be repeated.
Mary’s Song
The Sunday lamb cracks in its fat.
The fat
Sacrifices its opacity…A window, holy gold.
The fire makes it precious,
The same fireMelting the tallow heretics,
Ousting the Jews.
Their thick palls floatOver the cicatrix of Poland, burnt-out
Germany.
They do not die.Grey birds obsess my heart,
Mouth-ash, ash of eye.
They settle. On the highPrecipice
That emptied one man into space
The ovens glowed like heavens, incandescent.It is a heart,
This holocaust I walk in,
O golden child the world will kill and eat.
It takes a special talent to say so much with so little. Her economy of words is astonishing. I wish she had lived to write more novels. Plath is a sore loss to the literary world.
What are your favourite Plath poems? What makes them so special to you?
This is only the second Plath poem I’ve read, the first being about some mushrooms? Which signified how she was angry at the treatment of women?
This line – The ovens glowed like heavens, incadescent. – is so raw and painful. I’ve kind of avoided books about the Holocaust because I tend to avoid depressing stories (some people have told me it’s inspirational, but I don’t really like the journey there).
Still, it was interesting to read this poem, and you’re take on it. Plath was definitely talented.
Ah yes, ‘Mushrooms’. I like that poem. I was thinking of posting it up, but decided on this one instead. How interesting, I didn’t know the meaning of the poem. I always read it as some poem about mushrooms!
Yes, that line is incredibly raw. I love how she makes the furnace seem like a gateway to heaven. The line ‘Melting the tallow heretics’ and ‘the cicatrix of Poland’ are just absolute genius. It’s so deep with meaning. I had to google ‘cicatrix’ to discover it meant scar tissue. So, so raw. And ‘Sunday lambs’… damn, she’s referring to the story of Abraham and Isaac and the Jewish Sabbath all in one line.
Glad you liked the poem. Plath isn’t one for inspirational stuff.
The Plath biographer, Linda Wagner-Martin, says that the last line in Mary’s Song refers to Plath’s son, Nicholas. It reads, “O golden child the world will kill and eat.” It seems clear to me that this was a reference to Jesus, especially since the poem title is “Mary’s Song.” karen
Can someone please explain what the message is in this poem? Please?
The first stanza refers to the lamb, meaning sacrifice and describes it being roasted; this image is then compared to the way people were sacrificed and burned alive during the Holocaust.
Plath is trying to say that even though these people have been burned to ashes, their ashes still float in the air and are still with us in some form or another. She is speaking of a type of existence after death, but one where people still horrifically ‘consumed’ them by breathing in their ashes as the smoke from the concentration camps belched out the fumes from the death chambers. This refers to a sort of cannibalism.
The last stanza is very interesting, as the metaphor illustrates the Holocaust not as we know it; a terrible crime against humanity, but as a ‘heart’. People in the areas surrounding the camps thought they were not a part of the atrocities going on behind those walls, but in fact they were walking in and breathing in the scorched remains of those people’s bodies which could have been an eye, a leg, a heart.
The poem is one huge metaphor describing the world as a monster that eats its own kind and has direct references to the Virgin Mary (Mary’s Song) and Jesus (‘O Golden Child’). It also refers to Abraham being commanded to sacrifice his own son Isaac, by God, and compares it to the Holocaust.
Woah, thank you very much, This poem is really meaningful.
You’re welcome!