In my AP Lit. class, we did a unit on “Death” and we went through a list of poems that we needed to analysis. I, along with two others, got stuck with Sylvia Plath’s A Lesson in Vengeance. Now, for anyone who has read this poem, you can agree with me when I say that it’s a difficult poem to understand. Plath is a hard person to understand and so are her writings.
My group and myself were looking online for some sort of analysis or summary from someone else to help us get a better understanding of what Plath was trying to say. We found nothing. We had to analysis every line of the poem and look up the two characters, Suso and Cyrus, and their lives to better understand their place in the piece.
The whole point of this post is to state what we came up with as a group. So, if someone else looks online for some sort of analysis of Plath’s A Lesson in Vengeance, this will come up and they can have a look.
A Lesson in Vengeance
In the dour ages
Of drafty cells and draftier castles,
Of dragons breathing without the frame of fables,
Saint and king unfisted obstruction’s knuckles
By no miracle or majestic means,
But by such abuses
As smack of spite and the overscrupulous
Twisting of thumbscrews: one soul tied in sinews,
One white horse drowned, and all the unconquered pinnacles
Of God’s city and Babylon’s
Must wait, while here Suso’s
Hand hones his tack and needles,
Scouraging to sores his own red sluices
For the relish of heaven, relentless, dousing with prickles
Of horsehair and lice his horny loins;
While there irate Cyrus
Squanders a summer and the brawn of his heroes
To rebuke the horse-swallowing River Gyndes:
He split it into three hundred and sixty trickles
A girl could wade without wetting her shins.
Still, latter-day sages,
Smiling at this behavior, subjugating their enemies
Neatly, nicely, by disbelief or bridges,
Never grip, as the grandsires did, that devil who chuckles
From grain of the marrow and the river-bed grains.
Our Summary:
- She sarcastically describes the “latter-day sages”, or doctors, as having neat and nice diagnoses of her mental illness and clear-cut plans to help her overcome it. However, none of their “precise” plans help her overcome her illness.
- Plath’s life was obviously plauged with mental instability and since the rest of the poem compares her highs and her lows we can deduce that the last stanza in the poem is made to reflect the confusion in her life.
We looked up information on Henry Suso and Cyrus the Great:
Henry Suso:
Cyrus the Great:
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King of Persia
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Died in Battle – Foretold that he would never be conquered and he never was
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Respected those who served him and lived in his empire; allowed them to practice whatever religion they so desired
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Spent the summer and his men dividing up the River Gyndes rather than attacking Babylon because of a horse
Tone/Mood:
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Depressing; Tormented; Sarcastic – “In the dour ages/Of drafty cells and draftier castles…”; “…Twisting of thumbscrews: one soul tied in sinews…”; “…Hand hones his tack and needles,/Scouraging to sores his own red sluices…”; “…Smiling at this behavior, subjugating their enemies/Neatly, nicely, by disbelief or bridges…”
Diction:
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Smack, spite, twisting, unconquered, scouraging, squanders
By using words with harsh sounds, such as these, including an onomatopoeia with “smack”, Plath creates the intense tone of the poem. Through these and other words she is able to suggest the menacing feelings within herself.
Personification:
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“…unfisted obstruction’s knuckles…”
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“…Twisting of thumbscrews: one soul tied in sinews…”
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“…the horse-swallowing River Gyndes…”
Lit. Techniques:
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Alliterations:
- “…As smack of spite…”; “…soul tied in sinews…”; “…Hand hones his tack and needles…”; “…Scouraging to sores his own red sluices…”
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Allusions:
- Henry Suso and Cyrus the Great; also references to the Bible: “God’s city and Babylon’s” as well as King Cyrus being in the Bible
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Symbolism:
- The whole poem symbolises Plath’s struggle with her mental illness with the allusions she made throughout
