Background to the poem

Consider the opening line and the striking image that compares the newborn baby to a ‘fat gold watch’. The three words vividly but unsentimentally suggest shape and preciousness, while the implied ticking of a watch is associated with the heartbeat of the baby and reinforced by the monosyllabic nature of eight of the ten syllables of the opening line. The title of the poem implies hope and celebration, but we quickly see and hear words of detachment and exhaustion. Notice how we never learn anything about the baby or its gender. What do you make of the tone of the poem?

After the rather impersonal comparison with a watch, the baby is described as a ‘New statue’ and its mouth as ‘clean as a cat’s’. Any thought that the reference to the baby’s ‘moth breath’ might lead to a consideration of its vulnerability is banished when Plath responds to the baby’s cry by stumbling from her bed,‘cow-heavy’.

How do you respond to the final stanza and the description of the crying of the baby when ‘The clear vowels rise like balloons’?

About Sylvia Plath

Born in America, Sylvia Plath was an exceptionally talented student who studied at Cambridge on a Fulbright scholarship. While in England she met and married the poet Ted Hughes, and they had two children in the early 1960s.

Her first collection of poems, Colossus, was followed by her semi-autobiographical novel, The Bell Jar, which deals in part with her clinical depression. Plath had made earlier suicide attempts but, in 1963, separated from Hughes and living with two small children in a flat in London during one of the bitterest winters on record, she killed herself.

Her collection of poems Ariel was published after her death and shows the influence of ‘confessional’ poets such as Robert Lowell in its intensely personal examination of all aspects of her life, including her battle with depression. The poems are strikingly original and at times both painfully raw in their presentation of deep emotion and extremely skilfully crafted.

Read more about Sylvia Plath in the
Oxford Dictionary of National Biography