Elm Lyrics
It is what you fear.
I do not fear it: I have been there.
Is it the sea you hear in me,
Its dissatisfactions?
Or the voice of nothing, that was your madness?
Love is a shadow.
How you lie and cry after it
Listen: these are its hooves: it has gone off, like a horse.
All night I shall gallop thus, impetuously,
Till your head is a stone, your pillow a little turf,
Echoing, echoing.
Or shall I bring you the sound of poisons?
This is rain now, this big hush.
And this is the fruit of it: tin-white, like arsenic.
I have suffered the atrocity of sunsets.
Scorched to the root
My red filaments burn and stand, a hand of wires.
Now I break up in pieces that fly about like clubs.
A wind of such violence
Will tolerate no bystanding: I must shriek.
Cruelly, being barren.
Her radiance scathes me. Or perhaps I have caught her.
I let her go. I let her go
Diminished and flat, as after radical surgery.
How your bad dreams possess and endow me.
I am inhabited by a cry.
Nightly it flaps out
Looking, with its hooks, for something to love.
I am terrified by this dark thing
That sleeps in me;
All day I feel its soft, feathery turnings, its malignity.
Clouds pass and disperse.
Are those the faces of love, those pale irretrievables?
Is it for such I agitate my heart?
I am incapable of more knowledge.
What is this, this face
So murderous in its strangle of branches?——
Its snaky acids hiss.
It petrifies the will. These are the isolate, slow faults
That kill, that kill, that kill.
About
In this poem Sylvia Plath assumes a persona, that of a personified tree. It is appropriate, given that her name, Sylvia, means related to woods and trees. She uses the device as an extended metaphor, describing the roots reaching into dark underground depths rather than the usual exposed trunk and branches.
This signifies the person, herself, who seems ordinary from the outside but has complex deep, dark depths within. Sylvia Plath struggled with depression and mental illness throughout her life.
Sylvia Plath uses three pronouns—“she,” “I,” and “you”—which can be read as the divided selves of one identity as well as three separate roles.
“She” not only signifies the elm tree but also the artistic detachment of the poet from both “I” and “you.” Plath distances herself from the tree and merges with it. She therefore creates the multiple voices of the poet’s psyche.
Structure
The poem comprises fourteen stanzas of three non-rhyming lines each; a structure characteristic of Plath. This, like many of her other poems, is a first person monologue in free verse, with terse lines of unequal length reflecting the meaning and emotions of the poet.
Language and Imagery
Sylvia Plath’s poetry is usually dense and often obscure. She uses vivid and imaginative imagery that can be interpreted in multiple ways. Here, she conveys meaning through complex, wide-ranging and disparate ideas, rather like flashing camera shots — elm, a horse, poison, dreams etc. Random as they may seem, the images overlap and repeat themselves cleverly so, for example, the violence of the broken tree in stanza 7 is echoed by the murderous face in stanza 13; the horse in stanza 4 is repeated in stanza 5; the bird in stanza 10 reappears in stanza eleven. These serve to draw the poem together so that Plath paints a terrifying picture of depression, despair and rage, digging deep into emotional depths.
See Sylvia Plath A Critical Guide, Tim Kendall Faber and Faber
Q&A
Find answers to frequently asked questions about the song and explore its deeper meaning
- 1.Morning Song
- 2.The Couriers
- 3.Sheep in Fog
- 5.Lady Lazarus
- 6.Tulips
- 7.Cut
- 8.Elm
- 11.Berck-Plage
- 12.Ariel
- 13.Death & Co.
- 14.Lesbos
- 16.Gulliver
- 17.Getting There
- 18.Medusa
- 21.Mary’s Song
- 23.The Rival
- 24.Daddy
- 25.You’re
- 26.Fever 103°
- 27.The Bee Meeting
- 29.Stings
- 30.The Swarm
- 31.Wintering
- 32.The Hanging Man
- 33.Little Fugue
- 34.Years
- 36.Totem
- 37.Paralytic
- 38.Balloons
- 39.Poppies in July
- 40.Kindness
- 41.Contusion
- 42.Edge
- 43.Words