DEATH BY OVEN

Married to Shadow (II)

In the next stanza Plath’s imagery attacks the figures character. With the use of subtle sarcasm the speaker wonders whether perhaps the figure considered himself “an oracle, Mouthpiece of the dead, or of some god or another." Already having discovered in the previous stanza that the figure's voice is shallow and annoying it is now understood that this shallow and annoying voice thinks itself blessed. This further frustrates the speaker because she works hard to build the monument but it is not representative of the figure at all. She has to "dredge the silt” from his throat, a task that has taken her “thirty years,” a significant portion of a lifetime dedicating to the service of someone she probably hasn't even seen.

The distinct contrast between the monumental figure and the tiny, powerless speaker is solidified in the third stanza. The imagery used constructs for the speaker a mammoth structure needing to be scaled by relatively tiny ladders. One can easily imagine the speaker dull and tired with her gluepot scurrying about the structure mending "the immense skull-plates" and clearing “the bald, white tumuli of” the figure’s eyes. Plath stresses the monotony of the speaker’s dreary life by making the whole stanza one long sentence.

The third stanza also opens up the symbolism between the monument and the land the speaker lives in. Though literally she does crawl "over the weedy acres of” his brow while fixing the structure, she figuratively does so in her life as the speaker is tangled in the figure's polluted reign.

A predestined cursed fate is presented when Plath alludes to the “Oresteia” in the fourth stanza. The Oresteia is a Greek tragedy in which the house of Atreus cannot escape a curse of death and sorrow. Like the members of the house, the speaker too is cursed, unable to escape her insignificance in the world and forced to do the will of an arcane tyrant as "pithy and historical as the Roman Forum." By mentioning that the same sky falls over both the tyrant and the speaker, Plath extends the idea that it is the same fate which dooms the speaker and tries to immortalize the figure. The speaker also refers to the monument sarcastically as “father,” further implicating that she is at his will, even though she is aware of his gilded glory. Plath crystallizes the speaker's doomed fate when she says that the speaker eats "lunch on a hill of black cypress." This line also darkens the speaker’s land.

The connection between the giant monument and the speaker's world becomes almost indistinguishable when Plath writes "Your fluted bones and acanthine hair are litters in their old anarchy to the horizon line." With these powerful words it becomes clear that the land is poisoned by the figure’s turbulent presence, A presence which drowns the speaker. Plath then compares the figure's presence to a naturally destructive force and takes away from the force's impact by increasing the terror of the terror. She mentions that his destruction is wide spread, needing "more than a lightning stroke to create such a ruin."

It becomes clear that the speaker and the figure are so intertwined that she cannot have any time to herself. Even though at night she squats "out of the wind," she is still in the “cornucopia of” his “left ear.” This reinforces that his grip on her, though a bit looser, is still secure. It is on these moments that the speaker contemplates her existence, "counting the red stars and those of plum color." She notes that though the figure's life is grand and set, hers are "married to shadow." It is at this moment that the speaker loses hope. “No longer do I listen for the scrape of a keel,” she says, ”on the blanc stones of the landing.” With these ending words Plath leads us to believe that the speaker, fully aware of her condition, has become so burdened and unenthused that she no longer cares whether she lives or not. The fate that brought her there, like the figure, is in control of her life.

Sylvia Plath’s vivid imagination draws readers into a world of disillusion in “The Colossus,” where a lonely and powerless speaker is at the will of a harsh ruler. The sharp contrast between the two characters in the poem is eloquently portrayed through the use of detailed imagery and carefully constructed language.