Child (1963). Content and Description

Composed during the last week she wrote and just 14 days before she took her own life, “Child” juxtaposes images of a beautiful child with a troubled speaker. In the first stanza the speaker describes the exquisite, singular beauty of her child’s eye, which appears throughout the poem as a clear pool, one the speaker desires to fill with love and hope-filled dreams. Yet, the speaker herself, wringing her hands as if debating the inevitable end of things, perhaps even her own demise, stares at a “Ceiling without a star.” As with all of Plath’s works, “Child” is a carefully crafted work of art filled with stunning descriptions.

Thus, the speaker does not merely want to teach the child and help it discover the world but to fill its eye with “The zoo of the new.” Just as the poet plays with language, so does the child meditate on sonorous words, names such as “April snowdrop, Indian pipe, / Little.” Innocent, open, ready to receive the world and all it has to offer, the child appears as a vessel capable of infinite love, a tender creature dependent upon love, nurturing, and understanding for growth. Yet the speaker knows that even though she can understand the child and its embracing of the world, this world is not hers.

As if ruminating on her own poetry and her own wish fulfillment, the speaker, as does Plath, wants to create a different kind of art for the child, one that is “grand and classical” rather than the “troublous” art she weaves. But, as with the speaker, this is not the world Plath inhabited; even such a poem as “Child,” which speaks with tender love and appreciation for childlike wonder, also acknowledges the dark vision that plagued her life and animates her poetry.

While we may do a disservice to Plath’s poetry when we read it in terms of her own life and not for its aesthetic merits, knowing Plath’s destiny makes reading “Child” a bittersweet experience, as we feel the love she has for her own children, her desire to preserve their innocence, and her ability to envision their growth, all the while unable to escape the devastation she feels with her separation from Hughes, the bleak midwinter in London, her own demons. If one of the hallmarks of all great art is the expression of paradox, then “Child” is surely a great work that captures the wonder of life and the inevitability of death, the boundaries that frame human life and make up our day-to-day existence.

That Plath in her final days was still able to imagine innocence and joy and order artful creations is the sort of paradox that lies outside any sort of reasoned understanding. It is this paradox that “Child” captures; it is this paradox that makes “Child” one of Plath’s most poignant works.

For Discussion or Writing:
1. Read other Plath poems that deal with children, such as “For a Fatherless Son,” “By Candlelight,” “Nick and the Candlestick,” “The Night Dances,” and “Edge.” What image of motherhood emerges when you think about these poems together? To extend this comparison, read The Bell Jar, noting the many references to birth and motherhood. Does the novel present similar notions of motherhood? How do the novel and poems differ? After thinking these questions through, write a well-developed essay on mother imagery in Plath’s works.

2. Like “Child,” William Butler Yeats’s poem “The Circus Animals” is a self-reflexive poem, one that takes a critical survey of his works of art. With these two poems in mind, compare the two writers’ visions of their own creations. Why is it significant that both reflect in their art on the art they have fashioned?