The poem ward

In Plath’s ‘Stillborn’ she compares the dead, specifically dead babies, to failed poems. It is ironic since it is not the typical romantic image we would associate with poetry. I approached this piece with a solemn outlook, expecting something bloody and tragic about an experience I wouldn’t understand, but instead this funny imagery of the poem that reeks really struck me as a writer. I almost know what feeling she is talking about.

 The act of writing poetry is a common topic for poems historically but it is usually to reminisce about how easy and natural it feels, or about the presence of a muse. It’s refreshing how she humanly owns up to her ‘failure’. A lot of the genius of the poem comes from its subversion of  these poetic stereotypes. It is also beautiful that being a competent writer is compared to being a mother since it reclaims poetry from its traditional misconception as a patriarchal art form.

On the other hand, the poem does not use the narrative of the mother. Instead, it is the distant doctor looking down on the dead body he just delivered, or the little boy annoyed at his dead goldfish. Maybe Plath can’t appreciate her poetry from her own view point? The writer is the harshest critic of their work in this piece. The repetition adds to this sense of failure by emphasising ‘dead’ in the last stanza and ‘smile’ in the second one, almost to a comedic effect. The writer starts to see shame in their own work as the poem looks at them mockingly.

Though ‘Stillborn’ is not as musical as Plath’s other poems, it creates a disjointed voice through enjambement and endstopping of the lines. In some ways she references to this technique herself when she says ‘they are proper in shape and number and every part’, as if any poetic technique she uses won't make the poem sound good. The lines cut like starting and stopping the car engine that won’t budge. The feeling of miscarriage is brought back at the end since we sense the subject matter shift due to this variation in line length and the affirmation that 'they were' once 'alive'. This volta makes us really question whether we are still taking about writing, or 'they' who 'do not speak of her'.