Thalidomide
Thalidomide - meaning Summary
Confronting Deformity and Shock
Plath's poem confronts the grotesque aftermath of congenital deformity suggested by the title. The speaker reacts with simultaneous revulsion and helpless fascination, conjuring fragmented, bodily images—amputations, knuckles, lopped faces—that resist assimilation. The poem tracks an attempt to make a place for this given "thing," a disturbed caregiving or witness consciousness, ending in a collapsing image that flees and aborts, unable to be grasped or reconciled.
Read Complete AnalysesO half moon--- Half-brain, luminosity--- Negro, masked like a white, Your dark Amputations crawl and appall--- Spidery, unsafe. What glove What leatheriness Has protected Me from that shadow--- The indelible buds. Knuckles at shoulder-blades, the Faces that Shove into being, dragging The lopped Blood-caul of absences. All night I carpenter A space for the thing I am given, A love Of two wet eyes and a screech. White spit Of indifference! The dark fruits revolve and fall. The glass cracks across, The image Flees and aborts like dropped mercury.
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