For a Fatherless Son (1962). Content and Description

On September 26, 1962, with the composition of “For a Fatherless Son,” Plath began furiously composing poetry over a six-week period, at the end of which she had written 30 poems. “For a Fatherless Son,” as Tim Kendall describes, “introduces a period of intense creativity, during which most of the work later collected in Ariel was written. Plath’s treatment of the theme of adultery in these poems modulates into an elaborate power struggle between betrayer and betrayed, and challenges the rigidity of these categories” (105).

The poem opens with a direct, second-person address in which the speaker, with far-reaching similes, prepares a young boy for the absence of his father, who is portrayed as a “death tree” struck by lightning, denuded of its color and life (line 3). The tree stands as an illusion against the sky, which appears as a pig’s rear end. Here, in the first stanza, the speaker prophesies that the young boy, although currently naive and innocent, will know absence, which will increase throughout his life. Significantly, the first line of the poem ends with a paradox (“absence, presently”), which sets up another paradox at the end of the stanza (“lack of attention”).

The second stanza, grotesquely comic in nature, describes the boy as “dumb” and “blind” and his face as a mirror, another of Plath’s many reflective images. As the speaker peers at her son, she sees only herself, a sight that seems to be painful for her yet comic to him. For the present the son’s amusement benefits the speaker. But, as she reveals in the third stanza, the speaker knows that one day, beyond the time of grabbing noses, as children often do, her son will know loss and will feel the pain and anger she knows, the sense of betrayal that has set her adrift in the world, stripped of her illusions and hopes.

This disillusionment and abandonment are tempered in the penultimate line of the poem, focused on the child’s smile, which sustains her as would an unexpected gift or “found money.” Thus, “For a Fatherless Son” is a poem of paradoxes juxtaposing childlike wonder with an adult’s bitter disillusionment and foretelling the future pain that will be a part of the child’s growth: the necessary recognition of loss, whether it be a father, as with Ted Hughes, or of a mother, as with Plath, who, estranged from the world and abandoned, will take her own life.

For Discussion or Writing:
1. It is possible to read “For a Fatherless Son” from a biographical perspective, noting how the poem comments on the collapse of Plath’s marriage. Read other Plath poems that can be read from a similar perspective—“Word heard, by accident, over the phone,” “Burning the Letters,” “The Courage of Shutting-Up,” and “Lesbos”—keep- ing in mind the biographical details from the last year of Plath’s life. Next, respond to the following questions in a well-developed essay: Are facts about Plath’s life relevant to your understanding of her works? Are characters and incidents in the work versions of the writer’s own experiences? How are they treated in these poems?

2. “For a Fatherless Son” is in the collection Winter Trees, which also contains the experimental poem “Three Women,” a dramatic poem on childbirth written from three different points of view and with three speakers. With motherhood and childbirth in mind, compare and contrast how the two poems depict motherhood. Why does Plath focus so much on this subject? What significance do these poems have for understanding both Plath the woman and her works?

3. In her 1973 book Sylvia Plath: Her Life and Work, Eileen Aird argues that Plath’s originality “lies in her insistence that what has been traditionally regarded as a woman’s world of domesticity, childbearing, marriage, is also a world which can contain the tragic” (17). With Aird’s ideas in mind, analyze “For a Fatherless Son,” arguing how this poem elucidates Plath’s unique contributions to the literary world.