Juveilia Sylvia Plath Analysis

Chapter - I Juvenilia: Early Disclosure of Nothingness and Finitude

The fifty poems in Ted Hughes’s selection of Sylvia Plath 's early poetry written mainly in the three or four years preceding 1956 form a volume under the title Juvenilia. Many of these poems were written as class assignments for her English Professor at Smith College, Alfred Young Fisher. Hughes placed these poems at the end of his selection of Plath 's poetry, of course, dismissively as a young woman 's exercises of writing poetry, but curiously enough they, being a college girl’s impressions, are more frankly revelatory of the dialectic of her life and art than her mature poems. It is because she being young had got to know how to hide her feelings. In the very first poem,

Quoting W.B. Yeats, Sylvia that "the centre cannot hold", making her world fall apart, and crumble, she finds that there is no integrating force, "only the naked fear, the urge of self preservation”(TJ 59). She continued to dwell on her fear, “I am afraid. I am not solid, but hollow …I want to kill myself” (TJ 59).

Which she ultimately did so, but not before fighting for self-preservation, dialectically speaking. The poem "Family Reunion" therefore should not be read as expressing Plath 's contempt for the world, because of its threatening character. The noise of the world outside, as also inside the house -- the clash of people meeting -- the laughter and the screams of greeting, the pink pleased squeak of cousin Jane not only fill her with fear near, but also at distance, the dread of death on seeing Jane’s “faded eyes” and hands like nervous butterflies. Among these death-pale relatives she feels as if: A whirlpool leers at