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Poet: Sylvia Plath
Poem: Mystic
Volume: The Collected Poems
Year: Published/Written in 1963
Comment 3 of 3, added on October 19th, 2007 at 7:21 PM.
This is about getting on with your life. It begins with a kind of agony which Plath writes about a lot, here as the sensation of joy, or transcendence, of having "seen God", begins to fade. That kind of experience she talks about in the second verse, and seems to relate to the revelation of death ("the dead smell of wood cabins") which she depicts as a voyage ("stiffness of sails"). But what makes all this interesting, is that she never focuses on that moment of epiphany, only on the torment of its after-effects. There what she felt in full, other public takes for granted as dogma ("bright pieces of Christ in the faces of rodents"), carrying out rituals of whose meaning they are oblivious. She wonders whether she can join them one day by forgetting what she saw ("Meaing leaks from the molecules"), and once again grow accustomed to the mundane world to which she returned from her travels.
The conclusion is that no matter the torment of "Questions without answer", "the heart has not stopped". That is to say, the people that suffer are the ones with the vision of something better, because once they unavoidably lose sight of that, all that is left to do is keep breathing.
Cameron Morse from United States
Comment 2 of 3, added on March 2nd, 2006 at 11:17 PM.
She is describing her version of the dark night of the soul. But unlike known mystics, she calls this God. The mystic experiences it ha a great travail on the journey.
Larry Syldan from United States
Comment 1 of 3, added on February 11th, 2006 at 1:34 PM.
plath is disturbed, which that is shown in her poems, especially this one.. u can see the depression in her mood, and the satisfactory out of life.. she always describes death, and talk abt them.. this poem she implies the metaphorical ways of inscribing her inner feelings, to make them appeal to the reader, with different reading everytime read..OMAR
Omar from Egypt
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Comments
This is about getting on with your life. It begins with a kind of agony which Plath writes about a lot, here as the sensation of joy, or transcendence, of having "seen God", begins to fade. That kind of experience she talks about in the second verse, and seems to relate to the revelation of death ("the dead smell of wood cabins") which she depicts as a voyage ("stiffness of sails"). But what makes all this interesting, is that she never focuses on that moment of epiphany, only on the torment of its after-effects. There what she felt in full, other public takes for granted as dogma ("bright pieces of Christ in the faces of rodents"), carrying out rituals of whose meaning they are oblivious. She wonders whether she can join them one day by forgetting what she saw ("Meaing leaks from the molecules"), and once again grow accustomed to the mundane world to which she returned from her travels.
The conclusion is that no matter the torment of "Questions without answer", "the heart has not stopped". That is to say, the people that suffer are the ones with the vision of something better, because once they unavoidably lose sight of that, all that is left to do is keep breathing.
Cameron Morse from United States