The Death Of Myth Making - Analysis

Two riders as a cleanup crew

The poem stages a small fable about how a culture can decide to stop tolerating the unruly and the strange. Its central claim is bluntly ironic: when Reason and Common Sense take charge, they don’t simply clarify the world—they shave it down, and something living is lost in the process. The opening image makes these virtues feel less like inner qualities than like officials on patrol: Two virtues ride, one on a stallion and one on a nag. Even that detail suggests hierarchy and tone: Reason gets the proud horse, Common Sense the workhorse, both moving as a pair whose job is to regulate.

From the first lines, their mission is practical, even surgical—To grind our knives and scissors. These are tools for cutting, paring, trimming. The poem’s humor is barbed: it calls Reason Lantern-jawed (a harsh, bony face lit like a lamp) and Common Sense squat (sturdy, unglamorous). They are not muses. They are enforcers.

Respectability’s audience: doctors, housewives, shopkeepers

Plath sharpens the allegory by showing who welcomes these riders. Reason goes courting doctors, while Common Sense courts housewives and shopkeepers. Together they cover the social spectrum of what counts as legitimate knowledge and decent behavior: professional authority and everyday respectability. The word courting matters because it hints this takeover is consensual—flirted with, invited in. The poem’s voice feels brisk and slightly mocking here, as if it’s watching a community congratulate itself for choosing the sensible option.

Trimming the world until it behaves

The second stanza reads like a montage of grooming. The trees are lopped; the poodles trim. Even the worker’s body is subject to this tidying: The laborer’s nails pared level. The repetitions of clipping and leveling create a tone of relentless neatness. What’s striking is how the poem makes this orderliness feel quietly violent. Lopping trees isn’t gentle pruning; it’s a decisive removal. Paring nails level suggests not health but standardization—anything that sticks out must be cut back.

The riders are called civil servants, which is funny on the surface and chilling underneath: rationality becomes bureaucracy. They set Their whetstone to a blunted edge, implying society’s cutting tools had grown dull—perhaps through neglect, perhaps through mercy. Now they’re sharp again, ready to reduce what they can’t categorize.

The poem’s real target: the muddling devil

The third stanza reveals what the sharpening is for: to mince the muddling devil. This devil isn’t a cartoon of pure evil; it’s the poem’s figure for the chaotic, mythic element that makes people fear, imagine, and misbehave. He lives in the scraggly wood, with owl-eyes—a detail that mixes wisdom and eeriness, as if the devil’s power is tied to a kind of night-knowledge. The devil’s effects are ugly and real: he Scared mothers to miscarry, makes dogs cringe and whine, turns a farmboy’s temper wolfish, and the housewife’s into something desultory, slack and wandering.

Here the poem’s tension tightens: if the devil brings genuine harm, then Reason and Common Sense seem justified. Yet the title, The Death of Myth-making, pushes us to notice what else dies when the devil is minced: the very engine that produces myth—fear, ambiguity, animal impulse, the dark woods where explanations fail. The poem refuses to let the reader rest in a simple moral that says good virtues defeated bad superstition.

A clean village, a poorer inner life

What makes the poem unsettling is its suggestion that a community’s victory over the muddling devil may also be a victory over intensity. The devil makes the farmboy wolfish—dangerous, yes, but also vivid, alive in a way that civil servants are not. Common Sense courts the housewife, but the housewife’s inner weather is already named: desultory. The poem implies that even domestic respectability contains drift and dissatisfaction, and that cutting away the mythic doesn’t cure that; it only makes the landscape look tidier.

What if the devil is also the imagination?

The poem dares a hard question: if the town truly succeeds—if every tree is lopped, every poodle trimmed, every nail pared level—what remains for the mind to do besides comply? Plath’s devil is called muddling, not simply malignant. That word leaves open the possibility that what’s being destroyed is not only terror but the productive confusion from which stories, symbols, and other ways of knowing are born.