Death As Inevitability In ‘Totem’
Plath once described this poem as “a pile of interconnected images like a totem pole” (Padel, 2013). Even the title resounds a spiritual significance. A totem is kinship related, and the interconnected images that compose the poetic totem explore an almost ritual, visceral blood relationship to death in which all life forms are implicated. Life, thus, is adopted as an emblem for death. Plath’s Totem is in fact a culmination of her fatalistic attitude, the greatest evidence that it would be perverse to suggest she welcomes death in her poetry as many critics have intimated. Rather, she sees it as inevitable, impossible to avoid.
Throughout Totem, as the lexical fields of food and ingestion are aligned with those of blood and murder, death is accompanied by consumption, and transformed into a perverse communion where the most mundane situations, such as visiting a meat …show more content…
The speaker evokes the image of a hare “[aborted] in the bowl/ …embalmed in spice, /flayed of fur and humanity” (lines 11-13) and tells the readers invitingly, like a priest introducing the Eucharist, “let us eat it like Plato’s afterbirth, let us eat it like Christ” (lines 14-15). The diction of bowl and abortion have more than just a literal implication of temporally preparing food: it is as though the bowl and the abortion become figurative of a greater basin, perhaps even a uterus belonging to Mother Nature which is caustic given that what comes from her is eating itself, as though she is a nurturing Cronus. Effectively, the world becomes a platform for universal consumption, a dining table that has already been set, and the food to be served prepared much in anticipation. Paradoxically, this implies that the nature of death is unnatural as it requites life be hungry for
Plath once described this poem as “a pile of interconnected images like a totem pole” (Padel, 2013). Even the title resounds a spiritual significance. A totem is kinship related, and the interconnected images that compose the poetic totem explore an almost ritual, visceral blood relationship to death in which all life forms are implicated. Life, thus, is adopted as an emblem for death. Plath’s Totem is in fact a culmination of her fatalistic attitude, the greatest evidence that it would be perverse to suggest she welcomes death in her poetry as many critics have intimated. Rather, she sees it as inevitable, impossible to avoid.
Throughout Totem, as the lexical fields of food and ingestion are aligned with those of blood and murder, death is accompanied by consumption, and transformed into a perverse communion where the most mundane situations, such as visiting a meat …show more content…
The speaker evokes the image of a hare “[aborted] in the bowl/ …embalmed in spice, /flayed of fur and humanity” (lines 11-13) and tells the readers invitingly, like a priest introducing the Eucharist, “let us eat it like Plato’s afterbirth, let us eat it like Christ” (lines 14-15). The diction of bowl and abortion have more than just a literal implication of temporally preparing food: it is as though the bowl and the abortion become figurative of a greater basin, perhaps even a uterus belonging to Mother Nature which is caustic given that what comes from her is eating itself, as though she is a nurturing Cronus. Effectively, the world becomes a platform for universal consumption, a dining table that has already been set, and the food to be served prepared much in anticipation. Paradoxically, this implies that the nature of death is unnatural as it requites life be hungry for