Wuthering Heights Analysis

The horizons ring me like faggots,
Tilted and disparate, and always unstable.
Touched by a match, they might warm me,
And their fine lines singe
The air to orange
Before the distances they pin evaporate,
Weighting the pale sky with a soldier color.
But they only dissolve and dissolve
Like a series of promises, as I step forward.

There is no life higher than the grasstops
Or the hearts of sheep, and the wind
Pours by like destiny, bending
Everything in one direction.
I can feel it trying
To funnel my heat away.
If I pay the roots of the heather
Too close attention, they will invite me
To whiten my bones among them.

The sheep know where they are,
Browsing in their dirty wool-clouds,
Gray as the weather.
The black slots of their pupils take me in.
It is like being mailed into space,
A thin, silly message.
They stand about in grandmotherly disguise,
All wig curls and yellow teeth
And hard, marbly baas.

I come to wheel ruts, and water
Limpid as the solitudes
That flee through my fingers.
Hollow doorsteps go from grass to grass;
Lintel and sill have unhinged themselves.
Of people and the air only
Remembers a few odd syllables.
It rehearses them moaningly:
Black stone, black stone.

The sky leans on me, me, the one upright
Among all horizontals.
The grass is beating its head distractedly.
It is too delicate
For a life in such company;
Darkness terrifies it.
Now, in valleys narrow
And black as purses, the house lights
Gleam like small change.

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What is this shit? lmao what a waste of bloody time.

| Posted on 2009-10-18 | by a guest

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Sylvia Plath is being tempted by the landscape to just lie down and die. She is in a suicidal state of mind and we can speculate that it has something to do with the promises that have been broken to her. This is expressed in the lines:
'But they only dissolve and dissolve
Like a series of promises, as I step forward.'

| Posted on 2008-04-22 | by a guest

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Plath’s poem is written in response to her visit to Haworth. It is very egocentric. Unlike Hughes’ "Wuthering Heights", the beginning is particularly attention grabbing, as Plath informs the reader of how
“The horizons ring me like faggots,
Tilted and disparate, and always unstable.
Touches by a match, they might warm me”.
The fact that the horizon calls to her mind an image of being burnt alive is startling, as horizons are associated with a sense of freedom and liberation. From this detailed account of how the horizon makes Plath feel, her ego-centricity is immediately established, as Plath is the subject of both sentences, and the pronoun “me” is repeated.


| Posted on 2007-03-18 | by a guest