The Death of Myth-making
The Death of Myth-making - meaning Summary
Myth Tamed by Practicality
Plath’s poem depicts two anthropomorphized forces—Reason and Common Sense—riding in to dull and domesticate the unruly, mythic elements of life. They metaphorically whet knives and trim rough edges, making laborers, housewives, and animals orderly but stripping away a wild, unsettling presence called the "muddling devil." The tone observes how practical virtues suppress fear, chaos, and imaginative danger, trading mystery for tidy, civil order.
Read Complete AnalysesTwo virtues ride, by stallion, by nag, To grind our knives and scissors: Lantern-jawed Reason, squat Common Sense, One courting doctors of all sorts, One, housewives and shopkeepers. The trees are lopped, the poodles trim, The laborer's nails pared level Since those two civil servants set Their whetstone to the blunted edge And minced the muddling devil Whose owl-eyes in the scraggly wood Scared mothers to miscarry, Drove the dogs to cringe and whine And turned the farmboy's temper wolfish, The housewife's, desultory.
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