New Year on Dartmoor
New Year on Dartmoor - meaning Summary
Newness Resists Familiar Language
Plath’s short lyric addresses a newly arrived or newborn figure. The speaker presents ‘‘newness’’ as a dazzling but treacherous landscape—shiny, glass-wrapped obstacles and a steep, inaccessible slant. Familiar words, tools, and routines cannot surmount this alien terrain. The stance is observational and cautionary: the pair have come only to look, and the addressee is "too new" to accept the world domesticated or contained by old names and comforts.
Read Complete AnalysesThis is newness : every little tawdry Obstacle glass-wrapped and peculiar, Glinting and clinking in a saint's falsetto. Only you Don't know what to make of the sudden slippiness, The blind, white, awful, inaccessible slant. There's no getting up it by the words you know. No getting up by elephant or wheel or shoe. We have only come to look. You are too new To want the world in a glass hat.
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