Sylvia Plath

Doom of Exiles

Doom of Exiles - meaning Summary

Return to Ruined Inner City

Plath’s poem portrays a return to consciousness as a bleak homecoming. After emerging from a vast sleep, speakers find their inner world transformed into a ruined metropolis of catacombs where joy and music are silenced and time marks alienation and death. Attempts to recover a lost wholeness or original innocence end in decay and obscenity, yet the speakers persist in probing the impenetrable core that contains humanity’s enigma.

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Now we, returning from the vaulted domes Of our colossal sleep, come home to find A tall metropolis of catacombs Erected down the gangways of our mind. Green alleys where we reveled have become The infernal haunt of demon dangers; Both seraph song and violins are dumb; Each clock tick consecrates the death of strangers Backward we traveled to reclaim the day Before we fell, like Icarus, undone; All we find are altars in decay And profane words scrawled black across the sun. Still, stubbornly we try to crack the nut In which the riddle of our race is shut.

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