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This week’s story, “ Between the Shadow and the Soul ,” is about a fifty-year-old woman named Eliza who has
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By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University) ‘The Colossus’ is a transitional Sylvia Plath poem. The title poem of the only poetry collection published during her lifetime ( The Colossus , in 1960), it is one of the most accomplished poems in that collection, and in some ways paves the way for the mature poems, written in Plath’s distinctive voice, which she wrote from 1960 onwards. In six stanzas, each comprising five lines, Sylvia Plath explores her relationship with her dead father through the symbol of a statue, the giant Colossus of Rhodes (one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World). The Colossus of Rhodes was a statue of a Greek Titan erected in the city of Rhodes, in Greece. The statue collapsed during an earthquake in 226 BC; although parts of it were preserved, the people of Rhodes did not rebuild it because an oracle told them not to. Summary In the first stanza, the speaker of the poem addresses the broken ‘colossus’ or statue directly, stating that she will never be able to put it back together completely, as it was. This statue emits animal noises from its lips that are worse than the sounds found in a barnyard. In the second stanza, Plath’s speaker speculates on whether the colossus views itself as some sort of ‘oracle’ able to transmit the words of the dead, or even the words of some god, to the living. The speaker has tried hard for thirty years to remove the ‘silt’ or sand from the statue’s throat, but still cannot make sense of what it is trying to say. This statue is vast . In the third stanza, the speaker describes herself crawling over the ‘acres’ its brow or forehead, carrying pails of glue and Lysol (a disinfectant) like an ant in ‘mourning’ for this broken colossus. She is trying to mend its skull and clear the ‘tumuli’ – mounds, but also burial mounds, specifically – from the statue’s eyes. This suggests ‘bags under the eyes’: a common sign of weariness or exhaustion. The next stanza lays bare another classical allusion […]
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This week’s story, “ Between the Shadow and the Soul ,” is about a fifty-year-old woman named Eliza who has
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