Taken by itself, the poem works as a mythic warning: "Put down that Lysol, girl, and get a life!" But examined in the context of her entire opus, the huge statue can be seen not only as an outsized obsession with her father, but as Sylvia’s colossal and ongoing grandiosity. In one of her last poems, Ted Hughes is Gulliver surrounding by antlike people, "the shadow of his lip, an abyss." How far is that from "The Colossus?" During the three years between the writing of the two poems, her work develops no insight into the fatal danger of ego-inflation. In "Edge," her final poem, she says, "the woman is perfected." She is a Greek statue.
Although she writes in the first person, Plath is anything but a confessional poet. She is the little man behind the curtain in the Wizard of Oz, keeping her real self hidden, projecting super powers with smoke and mirrors. She could not confess that she was not as powerful as her poems make her out to be; probably she didn’t know it herself. A poet like Theodore Roethke, who died in the same year as Plath, does confess weaknesses and dreams, childlike vulnerability and pain. But his ego is healthy enough to grant others their equality as things-in-themselves: it’s not all about him. "I believe!" he writes, "in the sparrow, happy on the gravel."
Plath was more delusional than Roethke was. There were many signs that if the grandiose edifice of her ego-defenses collapsed, she would be in grave danger: on her honeymoon with Ted Hughes, she wrote a short story about a woman who kills herself because her dreams are less impressive than the heroic adventures her husband dreams. No one read the signs as omens.
Plath was more delusional than Roethke was. There were many signs that if the grandiose edifice of her ego-defenses collapsed, she would be in grave danger: on her honeymoon with Ted Hughes, she wrote a short story about a woman who kills herself because her dreams are less impressive than the heroic adventures her husband dreams. No one read the signs as omens.
There were others. The associative linking of metaphors in some of Plath’s poems is esoteric and private to the point of being schizoid. In "Cut," her bleeding thumb is compared to a pilgrim, a carpet roll, Redcoated soldiers, a homuncleus, a saboteur, a Kamikaze man, a dirty girl, a trepanned veteran, and its bandage is "A Ku Klux Klan babushka." We can make some wild guesses as to why this mad hodge-podge of imagery is strung together, but the connections are hermetically sealed within the bell jar of the writer’s psyche. Rather than functioning as effective tropes, revealing meaning by their juxtapositions, the metaphors refer to Plath’s private world of associations, meaningless as art but alarming as symptoms of a cognitive breakdown.
As she got older, she could not maintain her fantasied superwoman status against the onslaught of evidence against it. Life cut her down to size, but her disordered psyche prevented her from adjusting. She really was very ill: a few days before she died, her neighbor found her immobile in his hallway, staring "beatifically" at the ceiling. She couldn’t eat or sleep, or dress the children for cold weather. Lacking medication or therapy, she used poetry to prop up her collapsing self. It worked sometimes, for her and for the poetry, but eventually delusions of grandeur proved fatal, for her and sometimes for her work.
