welcome to coverlet where we squeeze the bigger picture out of literature i'm adrienne ford and we are here uh for another poetry discussion today's poem comes to us from sylvia plath and the title of the poem is morning song and i'm going to warn you right off the bat here i almost always screw up the poetry readings but this one i'm definitely going to ruin i'm going to ruin this one hard because this poem has all the rhythm of imagism and it's going to destroy me when i try to read it out loud here we go morning song by sylvia plath love set you going like a fat gold watch the midwife slapped your foot souls and your bald cry took its place among the elements our voices echo magnifying your arrival new statue in a drafting museum your nakedness shadows our safety we stand round blankly as walls i'm no more your mother than the cloud that distills a mirror to reflect its own slow effacement at the wind's hand all night your moth breath flickers among the flat pink roses i wake to listen a far see moves in my ear one cry and i stumble from bed cow heavy and floral in my victorian nightgown your mouth opens clean as a cats the window square whitens and swallows its dull stars and now you try your hand full of notes the clear vowels rise like balloons i think a good place to start with this is you've never read this before you may have read this poem but you've never read this as a poem before this is not something stereotypical this is not something which is easy to replicate this is not something that you can just pick up and find so what's this poem about i have to be very clear with you sylvia plath is still and i've i've practiced plath i've tried with plath sylvioplast poetry is still something that takes me at least three readings to really get any type of purchase upon sylvia plath's poems to me are words on a page at least the first two times i read them this poem uh notwithstanding her language is very difficult for me and so a hundred percent honesty i never really paid a whole lot of service to the idea of um [Music] gender defining a reading i i i didn't really get it i didn't understand exactly what it meant and it's not because i didn't read women my first favorite writer ever was emily dickinson and in emily dickinson's words i never felt um alienated from the poem itself i never felt outside the text i never felt other from the words there are things that emily dickinson described and speakers who were undoubtedly effeminate speakers who were undoubtedly women in emily dickinson's poetry but never i understood it right i i never felt um as if the text were meant for someone else some other type of someone sylvia plath i feel that way about and maybe i'm not being fair to the text maybe i'm not being fair to the difficulty of the poetry i but i think i am i think so the reason i think it has to do with gender is that i've known so many women who identify with sylvia plath identify with sylvia plath the way that someone hits the weights the with the urgency that someone becomes a power lifter they identify with sylvia you know uh crossfit people how do you know someone does crossfit don't worry they'll tell you right that's the sort of identification that i've i've many women that i've known have with sylvia plath and i just don't i don't get it i can once i intellectualize the soviet poetry i really enjoy it but until that point it is completely foreign to me um this poem is about a baby more specifically it's about parenthood more specifically yet it's about motherhood and though there is the i'm i'm no more your mother than the cloud that distills a mirror to reflect its own slow effacement at the wind's hand that stands us in there but you could read that literally or ironically you could read that it's written ironically right i'm no more your mother than x despite the fact yeah this is the mother figure but if you read it literally it could be a stranger or it could be the father right but we've got this stanza here one cry and i stumble from the bed cow heavy and floral in my victorian nightgown your mouth opens clean as a cat's so that pretty uh well cements the fact that what we're dealing with here probably is the mother oh but this was written by sylvia plath of course it's the mother that doesn't have to be right that doesn't have to be emily dickinson's eye died for beauty what was scarce adjusted in the tomb when one who died for truth was laying in an adjoining room is not really written by a dead person right so the speaker does not have to be the author so it it would be possible that this poem was being written from another's perspective possibly a father figure but that does not seem to be the case um now what i want to talk about really with this poem is maybe a larger observation about sylvia plath so i want to here um i want to want to read something from my trusty literary dictionary of literary and thematic terms by edward quinn this is a definition of existentialism a philosophical and literary movement rooted in the 19th century that came into prominence in the aftermath of world war ii this historical context helps to explain the broad appeal of the movement existentialism mirrored the spiritual crisis that had become palpable in the wake of the war alienation the loss of sustaining religious beliefs the sense of anxiety and guilt the growing conviction that life was at bottom meaningless all of these attitudes and ideas were given powerful and explicit voice in existentialist thought then it has a subheading after this philosophy this is talking about the philosophy of existentialism not the criticism of existentialism philosophy central to existentialism is a crit is a critique of the traditional idea that within each human being there there is an essence a universal defining characteristic that is independent of existence in place of this conception of humanity as a shared collective essence existentialism focuses on the fact that we create ourselves through our choices that one's individual quote unquote essence has nothing to do with the sum has not is nothing more than the sum total of one's existence the existential formula expressing this conception is quote existence precedes essence end quote one 19th century progenitor of existentialism was soren kierkegaard a danish theologian who depicted the individual as estranged from god and needing to make an absurd quote-unquote leap of faith the forerunner the other forerunner was frederick nietzsche the prophet of both existentialism and postmodern knit post modernism also nihilism guys who proclaim well i'll i'd take that back who proclaimed the death of god kierkegaard and nietzsche represent the two strains of the movement that were to persist into the 20th century religious and humanistic existentialisms the religious strain attempted to demythologize the new testament while humanistic existentialism celebrated the strength of the human mind capable of confronting the ultimate meaningless nature of existence the subsequent development of existentialist thought grew out of the philosophical method called phenomenology phenomenon as developed by the german philosopher edmund herserl hercerl husserl's method consisted of a rigorous attempt to describe what happens when the subject perceives an object one example might be to describe what happens when a person reads the writing on a page hustle's method to adopt was adopted by his pupil martin heidegger in beginning and time 1927 heidegger provides a phenomenological description of human existence which he calls dassain being there dassain is a time-bound being who is aware of and riddled with anxiety by the knowledge of his own death in the attempt to avoid awareness dassain uses language to shield himself thus living an inauthentic life a life of denial characterized by depersonalizing generalizations an example of the latter is the statement all men are mortal the truth rendered abstract by unreal and universal formulation in saying all men we arm ourselves against the reality of i immortal heidegger's arcane and difficult ideas later to form what heidegger's arcane and difficult ideas later to form the basis of hermeneutics were adapted and made more accessible by jean-paul sartre whose work bridged the gap between literature and philosophy kind of um so when i read sylvia plath it is to me inseparable from the idea of existentialism there is in plath so oftentimes what we're doing with poetry is we're taking two things and saying how alike they are my love is a red red rose right not really your love is not actually a red rose it's not really there but what we're doing is we're gonna say hey my love is like a red red rose right because it smells so sweet but if you touch it just wrong there's that prickly part right what you're doing is you're putting comparison side by side to make a symbol want you to listen to this poem one more time and there are images here but the symbolism i think is a bit different than what we normally see love set you going like a fat gold watch the midwife slapped your foot souls and your bald cry took its place among the elements our voices echo magnifying or arrival new statue in a drafting museum your nakedness shadows our safety we stand round blankly as walls i'm no more your mother than the cloud that distills a mirror to reflect its own slow effacement at the wind's hand all night your moth breath flickers among the flat pink roses i wake to listen a far see moves in my ear one cry and i stumble from bed cow heavy and floral in my victorian nightgown your mouth opens clean as a cat's the window square whitens and a lot and swallows it still stars and now you try your hand full of notes the clear vowels rise like balloons let's just pick the last one the clear vowels rise like balloons okay so you've got a comparison there but what we're doing is not trying to make it more familiar what we're doing with that comparison is making something more strange what we're doing with one cry and i stumble from bed cow heavy cow heavy this is not a phrase used to make our speaker more relatable it's used to distance our speaker from the norm i rise not motherly cow heavy right [Music] i do not prance into the room in joking fashion i stumble from bed so in a lot of sylvia plath's poetry at least my experiences as a reader what happens is the poet succeeds not at making something familiar but making it new again and that so that's one of the um sort of literary thrusts of her century right make something new again not make it familiar not make it relatable but make it new and in this way oftentimes sylvia plath's poetry to me feels like othering making something or someone other which is when you take a poem-like morning song often times when criticism of silvioplast poetry is brought up and i don't mean criticism as in this is wrong that is bad i mean criticism is in sort of the encompassing discussion around a poem or a well in sylvia plath's case these poems um when the discussion is brought up around the poems almost as inescapable as bringing up ted hughes almost as inescapable as bringing up plath's father is bringing up plath's mental health and i can see that argument here i can see that argument here especially when what we're talking about is motherhood not often is it that motherhood or one's own child is put into these terms this is in that way a massive other ring other ring the speaker from her child other ring the speaker from the idea of motherhood but that other ring does not need to be disrespectful or disjointed often times in existentialist literature there is sort of this great what am i doing here moment where the litter where the setting or the theme or the um main act of the speaker the main character is sort of reimagined by that character from a distance oftentimes that reimagining is the breaking point sort of in the story whereby that character ends up winning the day or losing the day right um so in um the stranger my mom died today or was it yesterday i don't remember right this is such a focal point in the main character's life and it's the opening statement but he can't really remember what's going on there there is a great distance from that thing which is changing in the realization of this change so in in literary fiction the realization of that change normally evolves into some interchange in the character versus normally um an existentialist theme in a genre type of book wherein that moment of distance from the thing happening offers a clear insight to the character um a moment of existentialism in star wars episode 1. darth maul flips over obi-wan kenobi obi-wan kenobi in the midst of the great battle where spoilers he lost his teacher has this moment of clarity as darth maul is jumping over him i'm just going to cut him in half and he does right so that is that is just it's a stupid example i know but it's the only only thing i could come up with so fast that is a moment where the character is offered an insight from without sylvia plath in this poem is offering sort of an outside from within sylvia plath is the the speaker the poet the speaker here is the mother but is offering you those terms in every way but the terms for which you're ready um and it's as someone who will never be a mother i could read all of the [Music] lovey-dovey held my baby warmth of flesh on flesh type stuff and never been any closer to being a mother but by being outside of that i am the outsider here and sylvia plath are a speaker i keep doing this our speaker comes to my side and looks in and is offering these terms so i don't think that it's necessary to really evoke the mental health of the of the author here because it is not a mentally defunct thing to be offering it is not necessarily the traditional sense pardon me that we get from poetry perhaps whereby things are made more universal here we're getting poetry that makes things odd but thereby allows access that is all i have for this poetry discussion i hope to have you back for the next poetry discussion that i do on this channel poetry review that i do on this channel uh short story discussion short story review novel read along opening paragraph discussion all that stuff that i do here on this channel um make sure you hit that like button if you do like this type of thing because it really does help me out here on the channel if you are not subscribed if you are here by chance but not design consider hitting that subscribe button and sticking around for the rest of stuff that i do on this channel and uh yeah like i say i hope to have you back for the next video get lost