Let's talk about a poem!

I first experienced "Mad Girl's Love Song" as read aloud by Maggie Gyllenhaal on her excellent audiobook of the novel, A Bell Jar. As soon as I got home I looked up the poem and have been re-reading it ever since. First published in 1953 and written while Plath was third-year college student (!!!), it is a unique demonstration of poetic skill in which the form of the poem perfectly compliments the meaning. "Mad Girl's Love Song" is a villanelle, an old French form thought to have originated from the songs of troubadours. It is characterized by repeating lines that get tied together in the end, and a rhyme scheme that likewise follows us through the entire poem. In this case, the obsessive consistency emphasizes the narrator's growing overwhelm about their feelings for the poem's subject (in this case, Plath's interest in a specific guy). What do you think?

Mad Girl's Love Song by Sylvia Plath

I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead;
I lift my lids and all is born again.
(I think I made you up inside my head.)

The stars go waltzing out in blue and red,
And arbitrary blackness gallops in:
I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead.

I dreamed that you bewitched me into bed
And sung me moon-struck, kissed me quite insane.
(I think I made you up inside my head.)

God topples from the sky, hell’s fires fade:
Exit seraphim and Satan’s men:
I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead.

I fancied you’d return the way you said,
But I grow old and I forget your name.
(I think I made you up inside my head.)

I should have loved a thunderbird instead;
At least when spring comes they roar back again.
I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead.
(I think I made you up inside my head.)”

If you want another villanelle, "One Art" by Elizabeth Bishop is a classic (the "Write it!" at the end goes hard!). Villanelle is one of my favorite forms so I can give more examples, but let's talk about Plath's poem.

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