Now I'd never read this poem before Mrs. Minor chose it from the newest collection. But the first thing I want to sense about it, besides the experience that it contains or relates, is its tone. So I read it through several times, which even done carefully takes just a few minutes. And I find the tone to be rather mocking. The speaker is not peddling her subject's philosophy -- she's creating an ironic portrait that somehow gives us and her particular enjoyment.
So how about this "particular girl"? She's not looking for romance; others are looking for romance from her -- a whole string of them is hinted at by "latest suitor." Suitors are those who go down on one knee to ask for the hand of their adored one. But this "particular" girl (and that word has at least two meanings: one out of a group of girls, or a girl who insists that everything around her must be correct in every detail) finds something disconcerting in the "irregular babel" of birdsong and the leaves' litter (nice a-litter-ation, eh?). When arrogant humans attempted to construct a "Tower of Babel" to reach the heavens, the Biblical God sent the language of the builders into confusion to thwart their ambition. Maybe this arrogant girl simply fails to understand the birdsong that is the one of the primary languages of spring, as she rejects everything about the season that she doesn't understand or finds disorderly, or is afraid of.
(By the way: I don't know how she'd feel about the order of this poem, because its rhythm is often irregular; most regular, perhaps, in the stanza in which "she longed for winter then!" There's a rhyme pattern, but the rhymes are often of the type known as "slant", or inexact rhymes: "wits" & "idiots" is an example of that; so is "weather" and "either" in the last stanza. But we haven't gotten to pattern yet.)
Going through the poem a few times more, I notice that our girl is a queenly sort of person on "a ceremonious April walk" who "judged petals in disarray" and compares the season of spring to a slob ("sloven"). She's afraid of the unpredictability of spring, which could unsettle her "five wits" (a very old, even medieval expression covering common wit, imagination, fantasy, estimation, and memory) and thus reverse her standing in her own royal court from queen to jester (a "vulgar" one who wears "motley"). Such an idiot can "Reel giddy in bedlam spring" and make quite a fool of her/himself.
"Bedlam", I find, is a word that denotes a scene of mad confusion and comes from the insane asylum in old London known as "Bedlam." The allusions to ancient or medieval things somehow reinforces the image I get of a queen in royal surroundings with courtiers in attendance and a jester, or professional fool, on call at his station at foot of the throne. Part of the order of her universe are her five wits, which she keeps in check lest they get out of control -- especially imagination and fantasy. Those are too free-flowing and adventurous. And how did I learn about the five wits? I looked the term up until I found what I sort of remembered from my own reading.
That brings me to her suitor. I think suitor is a good word for him, because he's a wannabe on his way out, and Bedlam might just be the place for the likes of him. He's the jester, idiot sort. I like Hari's idea of a dog, even if he got stuck on the literal notion of one. This guy is sawing the air with romantic enthusiasm as he gestures and talks and bounds along and off the path like a happy dog -- doing everything but pee on the bushes before he puts his pair of muddy paws on her shoulders and gives her a couple of doggy licks on her puss. But the particular girl doesn't appreciate the dog-boy's Keatsian appreciation of nature and love together in bloom. To her it's all "a rank wilderness of fern and flower."
It's probably just a coincidence, but I can't help but picture this particular girl doing what's known as "playing Hamlet" (she could be an English major, after all, and she does like black!), putting on airs of sophisticated disillusionment while she mutters haughtily to herself:
That grows to seed; things rank and gross in nature
Possess it merely.
Uh uh. Not for her. She's a sharp-edged perfect snowflake, with a taste for "ice and rock". That third stanza is a marvel of hard-edged, astringent words and phrases (Scrupulously austere, frosty discipline, exact -- these are words that could give you paper cuts, and wow would those cuts ever smart in that ice-cold air!). And as I said, this one stanza really stands out for its greater order of rhythm, especially if read aloud after second, which contains such unruly, rambling lines as "Observed her lover's gestures unbalance the air" and "Through a rank wilderness of fern and flower." In fact, stanza one was pacing along in pretty good order until line four threw everything literally and figuratively off-balance: "Found herself, of a sudden, intolerably struck".
She's shaken by the sheer uncontained fertility of it all. And so she withdraws "neatly" (in what other way could she withdraw?). She's the sort of princess who enchants herself within her own chosen castle, surrounded by thorns ("barricade of barb and check") with a moat full of sharks and the drawbridge up at all times (okay, some of this is my imagery, but I think it fits). The adjectives "mutinous" and "insurgent" are appropriate for our queenly girl who will maintain the picturesque (nicely framed, of course) order of her life at all costs, including love. No revolt by an excitable, overly romantic young man could possibly succeed in dethroning this snow queen to bring the unrestricted freedom of love and the rest of that burgeoning stuff into her realm.
As far as symbols go, I think I previously noted what spring often stands for, while all the time remaining the season of spring. That symbol she rejects, and substitutes clean and orderly winder for spring's rank and gross confusion (thanks, O Prince of Denmark. May flights of angels sing thee to thy rest. None of ghat crummy bird babel for you). Winter as a symbol of order and discipline is more of a personal symbol for our heroine. Others might see winter as symbolic of death and also of disorder -- storms and wild weather that could rip a roof off, or send the queen skidding down a sleety path. The house of the final stanza we could take as a metaphor for her chosen isolation from the impetuous and uncontrollable change that spring symbolizers. I know a lot of you found symbols like that. If I were you, I wouldn't be content to simply identify a symbol or two, then re-pack the poem and turn in your puny paragraph of pathetic prose.
The cool thing is that something so compact and brief as this little poem can contain so much in it that magnifies, extends and enriches meaning. All I'm doing is looking at the "how" before I decide (if I ever do such a thing) the "what" of the poem. How did Hari imagine that dog? Well, now I understand a little better, and for me how Sylvia Plath planted the seed that made the dog grow in Hari's brain makes the poem better and more vivid than it was before.
(By the way, Hari: you really need to see a doctor sometime soon.)
Exploring the connations and multiple denotations, noting the echoes thrown off by the allusions -- these things bring me to greater comprehension.
Gee this has been fun! Really! -- So much so that I got carried away and now everything I unpacked is strewn across the floor of the room and all over the bed, too. I haven't got time to get everything back into Sylvia's suitcase and unpack those other two. No, I have to go see the nurse instead to have the staples pulled from my knee.
What? You don't like that kind of kinesthetic/organic imagery?
Sorry.
If I have time and energy enough when I get back, I'll take much briefer looks at "Barbie Doll" and "Siren Song". But I don't know. I tire very easily these days, and maybe what I did with this poem is enough.
Poetically and analytically yours,
JD
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