The Ravaged Face
The Ravaged Face - fact Summary
Included in Ariel
This poem appears in Sylvia Plath’s Ariel and embodies intense self-disgust and public exposure. The speaker describes a disfigured, theatrical face that elicits shame and alienation, preferring blunt emotional absence over the speaker’s own “lugubrious” display. Its imagery and tone reflect Plath’s recurring concerns with personal suffering and self-loathing, often read in relation to her struggles with mental illness.
Read Complete AnalysesOutlandish as a circus, the ravaged face Parades the marketplace, lurid and stricken By some unutterable chagrin, Maudlin from leaky eye to swollen nose. Two pinlegs stagger underneath the mass. Grievously purpled, mouth skewered on a groan, Past keeping to the house, past all discretion --- Myself, myself! --- obscene, lugubrious. Better the flat leer of the idiot, The stone face of the man who dosen't feel, The velvet dodges of the hypocrite : Better, better, and more acceptable To timorous children, to the lady on the street. O Oedipus. O Christ. You use me ill.
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