Polly's Tree
Polly's Tree - meaning Summary
A Dream-tree Stitched with Images
The poem describes a delicate, surreal "Polly's tree" that springs from a dream. Plath assembles thin twigs, paper flowers, downy seeds and small garden blooms into an intricate, fragile arboreal image. The tree is intimate and whimsical, combining domestic and botanical details—pillow-born, valentine-ornamented, and crowned with a larkspur—to suggest a personal imaginative vision, evanescence, and the way memory or sleep can weave disparate fragments into a coherent emblem.
Read Complete AnalysesA dream tree, Polly's tree: a thicket of sticks, each speckled twig ending in a thin-paned leaf unlike any other on it or in a ghost flower flat as paper and of a color vaporish as frost-breath, more finical than any silk fan the Chinese ladies use to stir robin's egg air. The silver - haired seed of the milkweed comes to roost there, frail as the halo rayed round a candle flame, a will-o'-the-wisp nimbus, or puff of cloud-stuff, tipping her queer candelabrum. Palely lit by snuff-ruffed dandelions, white daisy wheels and a tiger faced pansy, it glows. O it's no family tree, Polly's tree, nor a tree of heaven, though it marry quartz-flake, feather and rose. It sprang from her pillow whole as a cobweb ribbed like a hand, a dream tree. Polly's tree wears a valentine arc of tear-pearled bleeding hearts on its sleeve and, crowning it, one blue larkspur star.
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