Two Views of a Cadaver Room
Two Views of a Cadaver Room - context Summary
Smith College Anatomy Lab
Written from Plath's experience as a Smith College lab assistant, the poem places a student’s encounter with anatomical dissection alongside a Brueghel painting of lovers amid slaughter. The first section records clinical, sensory details of cadavers and specimens; the second reframes death through art, showing intimate human gestures set against indifferent violence. The juxtaposition highlights how proximity to physical mortality refracts through both science and pictorial memory. It appears in Ariel.
Read Complete Analyses1 The day she visited the dissecting room They had four men laid out, black as burnt turkey, Already half unstrung. A vinegary fume Of the death vats clung to them; The white-smocked boys started working. The head of his cadaver had caved in, And she could scarcely make out anything In that rubble of skull plates and old leather. A sallow piece of string held it together. In their jars the snail-nosed babies moon and glow. He hands her the cut-out heart like a cracked heirloom. 2 In Brueghel's panorama of smoke and slaughter Two people only are blind to the carrion army: He, afloat in the sea of her blue satin Skirts, sings in the direction Of her bare shoulder, while she bends, Finger a leaflet of music, over him, Both of them deaf to the fiddle in the hands Of the death's-head shadowing their song. These Flemish lovers flourish;not for long. Yet desolation, stalled in paint, spares the little country Foolish, delicate, in the lower right hand corner
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