I’ve married a cupboard of rubbish.
I bed in a fish puddle.
Down here the sky is always falling....
I housekeep in Time’s gut-end Among emmets and molluscs,
Duchess of Nothing,
Hairtusk’s bride.

Sylvia Plath’s ‘Poem for a Birthday’ (The Colossus) is a complex dramatic monologue, a seven-part narrative in which a psyche struggles towards birth, in ‘the city of spare parts’ which is the world. It draws for its imagery on that teenage suicide attempt fictionalised in The Bell Jar and on the experience of actual childbirth, so that at times the speaker is mother, at times child, and frequently both. Its main literary sources are the Brothers Grimm and Theodore Roethke’s early poetry, particularly Praise to the End (1951). Its heroine is a Cinderella or Snow-White princess in nightmare exile among incomprehensible and uncomprehending powers. The second chapter of David Holbrook’s Sylvia Plath: Poetry and Existence offers an extended commentary on this poem, ‘trying to foster the reader’s possession of poetic meaning, while endeavouring to discuss universal truths about the dynamics of human personality as seen by “philosophical anthropology”.’ For this enterprise he asks the reader’s patience, ‘ignoring for the moment certain problems of the concepts and theories I shall be using’.

In fostering our possession of poetic meaning he glosses the above lines (from section 4, ‘The Beast’) as follows: ‘For “marry” here, I believe, we may read “identify”. Her concept of marrying belongs to the infant’s primitive belief that Mummy and Daddy virtually eat one another in marriage’; ‘a cupboard full of fragments of impingement—memories of her father and fragments of the mother’s “male element”;’ ‘Hairtusk is maleness, again, her father’s penis.’