The Colossus-VB

The Colossus was written by Sylvia Plath in 1959. The form of the poem is 6 stanzas containing 5 lines each and there is a total of 30 lines of the poem. The tone of the poem is very disheartening and has a feeling of someone who is done and giving up or realizing the fact that they cannot c0omplete or conquer a task. I get this from the first stanza where the writer is talking about never being able to put soemthing together completely. She can be talking about life as a whole or understanding the people in her life. However, the references seem to be talking literaly about a statue which I feel is a metaphor for the ideas listed above. The writer talks about scaling ladders with glue pots and put the image of people building a huge statue or pyramid in ancient times using simplistic ways to do so compared to the tools we have now. The last stanza seems to be where the writer has come accustomed to failure and hardship at this point in her life and no longer trys to solve others' problems or figure out what else she has to do to make the people around her appreciate her.

The Colossus-WR-

“The Colossus” is written by Sylvia Plath in 1959. I think she compares colossus to her father. “The Colossus” has six stanzas (of thirty) which is cinquains. From the first stanza, the colossus is taking apart and it seems unable to be repaired. Also I think “Mule-bray, pig-grunt and bawdy cackles” (Line 3) is the sound that she hears from the conversation with her father in her dream. From the second stanza “ I am none the wiser” explains how she does not understand who he is because her father was taken from her too early to share his wisdom with her. From the third stanzas “I crawl like an ant in mourning” (Line 12), she describes herself as ants and it makes the image of the colossus even larger which gives me an image of authoritative. Not only giving the colossus larger image, she also describes it ugly. Also from the last stanza “My hours are married to shadow” (Line 28), I think she did not wanted to be exposed to the sunlight because the sunlight shines the tongue of the colossus which reminds the sounds that she wrote in line 3 in first stanza. I think the last stanza also connected to the first stanza because she will hear voice again from the colossus someday.

The Colossus-FK

"The Colossus" is a poem written in 1959 by Sylvia Plath. The poem consist of thirty lines arranged in six cinquains. There seems to be no apparent rhyme scheme within the poem. The title of this poem is "The Colossus" which I believe is a reference towards Greek mythology. I looked up Colossus and found out that it was a statue of Greek god Helios. The poem is written in the narrators perspective towards her dad. For the most part I believe the narrator is comparing the building of Colossus to the narrators own troubles trying to construct and understand her fathers character as a person. The first stanza of this poem paints a picture of someone trying to construct a statue that they are never going to be able to complete the way they want to. In the second stanza the narrator admits to trying to piece together the statue for thirty years, but not being able to. The narrator uses the simile "I crawl like an ant in the mourning." Along with stanza three, this simile paints a picture of the narrator looking so small in compared to the statue he/she is trying to construct. In stanza four the narrator refers to the statue as his/her father. Stanzas four and five are a little confusing to me, but I believe the narrator is trying to get the point across that he/she is done trying to make this statue perfect. By the narrator implying that he/she is done trying to make this statue perfect I believe he/she is actually saying that he/she is done trying to understand his/her father because he/she is never going to see him as perfect.

The Colossus - BK

I understood the Colossus to be a statue, which she compares to her father.

The statue is in pieces and the speaker admits "I shall never get you put together entirely, / Pieced, glued, and properly jointed." This is congruent with the plea to her father later in the poem "O father, all by yourself / You are pithy and historical as the Roman Forum."

All throughout the poem there is a mythical element that made me think of old Roman and Greek culture, "great", "oracle", "god", "skull-plates", "Roman Forum", "cypress (which sounds like the island), and "old anarchy".

It seems as though the speaker is trying to put together her father in her memory "Scaling little ladders with glue pots and pails of lysol", but the damage is too much, "It would take more than a lightning-stroke / To create such a ruin."

Therefore the speaker isn't able to recreate her father in her head, so her "hours are married to shadow", or she is all alone.

The last two lines "No longer do I listen for the scape of a keel / On the blank stones of the landing," I took to refer to the actual statue of the Colossus of Rhodes, which constantly hears the sounds of ships (keel is the hull of a ship) coming in and out of shore.

'The Colossus' - R. Abbott

Written in 1959, 'The Colossus' consists of six five-lined stanzas. The poemk begins with what seems to be the discription of someone who has lectured the speaker his/her whole life but has really made no sense. The second stanza reinforces this notion when the speaker says he/she is "none the wiser" after listen to this person for 30 years (10). In the third stanza the speaker goes on to describe the person of which he/she speaks as very old, whom is later revealed as the speakers father. The second to last stanza opens up to the reader that she really dislikes who her father is saying, "it would take more than a lightning stroke/to create such a ruin" (22-23). The speaker concludes the poem with what appears to be a description of the death of his/her father, but the speaker seems indifferent or even satisfied with his passing. Throughout the poem, there is no set ryhming scheme.

LAdy Lazarus-WR-

Sylvia Plath suicide several month after she wrote this poem. So when I read the poem I cannot get rid of an idea that she was suffered from her life. The poem has tercet form, and her tone is very pessimistic. The first stanza gives me an idea of suicide. She has tried killed herself every ten years, and she is counting her suicide. The thirteen stanza is about her desire to death “The second time I meant To last it out and not come back at all”. She did not want to be survived, but she failed to die.
The poem really made me sad because I felt her weakness throughout the poem. In the seven stanza and third line she wrote, “And like the cat I have nine times to die”. She may believe she could live until ninety years old because she said she “done it again one year in every ten…”(1). When she wrote the poem, she was still young. She did not live enough to say the world is terrible. The overall image is of the poem is very dark and painful. However, after reading this poem, I only had one thought in my mind. I really wanted to help her.

Lady Lazarus (M.A)

The poem has 29 stanzas and has three verses in each stanza.
The poem seems to be about dying three times out of nine. She refers to herself as a cat, because it is a myth that cat have nine lives. She starts talking about her injuries, of how her right foot was "like paperweight", which means she couldn't feel it and it was broken.
She then mentions how she has gone through this three times, although the first one was an accident, and the other two were purposely done. That means that the first time she had an accidental near death experience and the other two were suicide attempts.