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What Is The Theme Of Stings By Sylvia Plath

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Serving as the ending of her last published anthology Ariel, the bee poems successfully reflect Sylvia Plath’s struggle to extricate herself from the suffocating ties of surrounding community and marriage in order to recover her creative self as a poet. From her initial depression of being conformed by the expectation of a critical community in “The Bee Meeting”, and the chaotic emotions she experiences whilst struggling free of those suppression in “The Arrival of the Bee Box”, to her metamorphosis back into a “lion red” (55) queen bee in “Stings”, Plath addresses the imminent crisis in her literary career—the anxiety of losing her inner Muse due to unfulfilling domestic life and unsupportive community, as well as anticipates her ultimate …show more content…

At the very beginning of the poem, she describes her former creative self as a meek, susceptible poet whose concern of public opinion make her eager to comply with the whim of the critical community. Upon her first meeting with them “at the bridge” (1), she is frustrated that she does not fit in, as she wears “sleeveless summery dress” while they are “gloved and covered”. “Why did nobody tell me?” (4) she grumbles, “does nobody love me?” (6) —she is eager to conform and her feeling is hurt when they seem to refuse her by not “telling” …show more content…

In the second stanza, after she is accepted and conformed by one of the prestigious member of the community—“the secretary of bees” (7), she is relieved as “they [the bees] will not smell [her] fear, [her] fear, [her] fear” (10) which is concealed under “veils tacked to ancient hats” (5), presumably evoked by the sight of the oppressive community in the first stanza. As the poem flows on, the community increasingly becomes more fearsome to her. They become “knights in visors” with “square black head[s]” (13) whose “smiles and voices” (15) changed and frightened her. Thus, she continually appears as meek frightened poet vulnerable to negative emotions such as fear and depression—a fact especially clear in the line “is it blood clots the tendrils are dragging up that string?” (19). The “blood clots” dragged up by “the tendrils” seemingly represent the hurts and depression she buried in the very core of her heart. However, she still entertains hope that they will be overcome in the future, for she deems them as “scarlet flowers” which will one day be “edible” (20) as opposed to being threatening and

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