Sylvia Plath

Firesong

Firesong - meaning Summary

Forging Worth Amid Corruption

The poem presents birth into a damaged world where a hostile keeper snares and corrupts beauty. The speakers describe a communal labor: to carve an "angel-shape" of value out of a rotten, obstructed place. Suffering and toil are portrayed as necessary shaping forces. In the closing lines the voice urges love to lean into the wound and accept the consuming, purifying fire rather than try to extinguish it.

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Born green we were to this flawed garden, but in speckled thickets, warted as a toad, spitefully skulks our warden, fixing his snare which hauls down buck, cock, trout, till all most fair is tricked to faulter in split blood. Now our whole task's to hack some angel-shape worth wearing from his crabbed midden where all's wrought so awry that no straight inquiring could unlock shrewd catch silting our each bright act back to unmade mud cloaked by sour sky. Sweet salts warped stem of weeds we tackle towards way's rank ending; scorched by red sun we heft globed flint, racked in veins' barbed bindings; brave love, dream not of staunching such strict flame, but come, lean to my wound; burn on, burn on.

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