Child Sylvia Plath Though short and relatively uncomplicated

Child Sylvia Plath

�Though short and relatively uncomplicated, ‘Child’ is an effective and stark illustration of the hopelessness of depression. �The poem succinctly conveys the despair felt by a person unable to respond in an adequate fashion to an unspoilt thing of beauty and wonder. �The speaker of the poem observes the innocent and unblemished eye of her child and is moved to suggest all the wonderful things she would love to grant the child, objects and images of purity and joy.

�However, ultimately the speaker is unable to give the child anything she names throughout the poem. �Her own depression and despair prevent her from feeling and mirroring the child’s joy and innocence. �The fact that the child’s eye is “the one absolutely beautiful thing” implies that everything else in the speaker’s world is somehow tarnished, compromised with imperfection. �She therefore wants to do justice to this one pure and rare thing “I want to full it with colour and ducks, / the zoo of the new”. � The speaker wants to give the child great and beautiful things, objects and colours that will not contaminate the beauty of the eye.

�The second and third lines effectively convey in very short detail a wonderful world of beautiful innocence. �This is the world of the child, one far removed from the hopelessness of the adult world in which the speaker exists and suffers greatly. �The “zoo of the new” suggests a park where all is uncontaminated by the lived-in world.

�These are things the child can “meditate”. The mother is naming things that the child has never seen or known. �For the child, therefore, these things are magical and mysterious, containing all the wonder and fascination the mother wants to convey. �The “April snowdrop, / Indian pipe, / Little// Stalk without wrinkle” are images inspired by the child itself. �They suggest the purity of the child, that which is unmarked by the passing of time and the scars of experience.

�However, the speaker is unable to provide the beauty and happiness the child’s eye warrants. �She is suffering and anguished. Instead of the wonderful items mentioned in the first three parts of the poem, the speaker can only provide the child with “this troublous/ Wringing of hands, this/ Dark ceiling without a star”. �This is a cause of great concern and anxiety for the speaker. �She is incapable of offering the child what it deserves. Somehow the joy she ought to be able to give the child has been removed from her life.

�The poem is ultimately about the suffering if the mother and the guilt she feels at not being able to provide the joy the child deserves. �The child’s eye becomes a terrible reminder of her own suffering and incapacity to perform in a more positive way. �It may not judge her, but it forces her to judge herself. Consequently her despair is intensified. �Her own world is dark and without light. She wants to be able to provide “colour and ducks”, but these things are not part of her own desperate world. �The terrible desperation of the poem is enhanced by the tragic biographical fact of the poet’s own suicide two weeks after the poem was written.