Old Age in Sylvia Plath’s Poetry

Leaving cert study notes Paula OSullivan Plath and venerable age. Plath has a fear of growing old, and deals with the passage of time and old age in many of her poems. Morning Song, written after the birth of her first child, deals with Plaths preoccupation with growing old. The poet has birthed a child, and therefore fulfilled her requirement as a human being to procreate. Humans get to an optimum age for bearing children, and after that, it is a slow decline into old age and necessary death. Plath speaks of Effacement at the winds hand, which basically means she will be rubbed out and forgotten with the passage of time.Related reading How to be Old PoemThe poet uses a complex image of rainwater reflecting its mother cloud to tell us that she sees herself in her daughter, and now all thats remaining is to disappear into nothing. The condensed water of a cloud falls to the ground, and the cloud is no more. Mirror follows the theme of growing old very closely. Time moves on and on in this poem. The first stanza contains phrases like so long and over and over to tell us that time keeps moving. The second stanza continues to chart the march of time. She comes and goes and each first light reflect the poets unrest and constant awareness that time is still ticking away. The poet sees her youth as wasted, the young girl has been drowned. She has a premonition of the future, in which an old woman has failed to break the cycle, and describes her condition as a terrible fish. The poet sees herself as elderly and is afraid. The metaphor of the fish is as if the poet is stuck, netted and helpless. Plath shows she is dreading old age in the final lines of the poem. The passage of time throughout the text points to the inevitability of growing old.