Years
Years - meaning Summary
Motion Versus Stasis
Plath’s poem contrasts restless life and mechanical motion with cold, static eternity. Images of animals, pistons and hooves convey bodily urgency, mortality and the appetite for violent movement. The speaker rejects timeless, decorative immortality and instead prefers the brutal, finite churn of living and dying. Underlying the imagery is a struggle with depressive inertia and a desire to assert control through action, even when that action leads toward destruction.
Read Complete AnalysesThey enter as animals from the outer Space of holly where spikes Are not thoughts I turn on, like a Yogi, But greenness, darkness so pure They freeze and are. O God, I am not like you In your vacuous black, Stars stuck all over, bright stupid confetti. Eternity bores me, I never wanted it. What I love is The piston in motion . . . My soul dies before it. And the hooves of the horses, There merciless churn. And you, great Stasis . . . What is so great in that! Is it a tiger this year, this roar at the door? It is a Christus, The awful God-bit in him Dying to fly and be done with it? The blood berries are themselves, they are very still. The hooves will not have it, In blue distance the pistons hiss.
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