Recantation
Recantation - fact Summary
From Ariel: a Renunciation
The speaker renounces occult practices, prophetic speech, and earlier poetic postures, abandoning tea leaves, palm-reading and crystal-ball certainties. She rejects learned “tricks of sight” and exhorts a return to youthful innocence and simple bodily truths. The poem registers disillusionment and a withdrawal from previous methods of foretelling or control, reflecting Sylvia Plath's struggles with mental health and a decisive shift in tone found in Ariel.
Read Complete Analyses'Tea leaves I've given up, And that crooked line On the queen's palm Is no more my concern. On my black pilgrimage This moon-pocked crystal ball Will break before it help; Rather than croak out What's to come, My darling ravens are flown. 'Forswear those freezing tricks of sight And all else I've taught Against the flower in the blood: Not wealth nor wisdom stands Above the simple vein, The straight mouth. Go to your greenhorn youth Before time ends And do good With your white hands."
Feel free to be first to leave comment.