Mad Girl's Love Song

Mad Girl's Love Song

By Sylvia Plath

I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead;
I lift my lids and all is born again.
(I think I made you up inside my head.)

The stars go waltzing out in blue and red,
And arbitrary blackness gallops in:
I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead.

I dreamed that you bewitched me into bed
And sung me moon-struck, kissed me quite insane.
(I think I made you up inside my head.)

God topples from the sky, hell's fires fade:
Exit seraphim and Satan's men:
I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead.

I fancied you'd return the way you said,
But I grow old and I forget your name.
(I think I made you up inside my head.)

I should have loved a thunderbird instead;
At least when spring comes they roar back again.
I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead.
(I think I made you up inside my head.)

            The poem, Mad Girl’s Love Song by Sylvia Plath, is a villanelle which is characterized by 19 lines and 5 tercets followed by a quatrain. There are two refrains and two repeating rhymes with the first and third line of the first tercet alternately repeating until the last stanza. The last stanza includes both repeated lines. In this piece, the two repeating lines are, “(I think I made you up inside my head.” And “I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead”. These two repeating lines play to the title, Mad Girl’s Love Song, by mimicking the words uttered by a “mad girl” in her brief moments of sanity before she dives back into her own insanity. There’s almost a schizophrenic kind of quality about the phrase “I think I made you up inside my head”. By adding the two extra words “I think”, she changes the meaning drastically. Without it, “I made you up inside my head” sounds confident, sure, and sane. By adding, “ I think”, Plath gives us the impression that the speaker is unsure of the divide between reality and her imagination.

            Plath also makes several allusions within the context of this poem. Nearly the whole fourth stanza is a religious allusion. She mentions God, Hell’s fire, Seraphim, and Satan. In the first line of the fourth stanza Plath states, “God topples from the sky, hell’s fires fade;” God represents the structure, stability, and presence of religion in her life. So when she tells us that “God topples from the sky”, she implies that her belie in religion has faded along with “hell’s fires”. Seraphim refer to the celestial beings that appear in the Hebrew Bible. Though the word “seraph” can translate into “the burning ones” these beings with six wings and four heads that surround God are what our society knows as angels. Satan’s men, probably refers to the damned. In this stanza, the speaker expresses that her faith in religion is lost, and that she does not believe in heaven or hell.

            In the last stanza she writes, “I should have loved a thunderbird instead;” A thunderbird is a creature that appears in Native American mythology. This bird is capable of creating storms and thunderous noise with the flapping of its wings, and he is known to be intelligent, powerful, and wrathful. It is peculiar that she chooses this particular bird, especially since it is wrathful. Plath conveys the speaker’s need for loyalty and security by alluding to the thunderbird. The speaker would be willing face the wrath of the thunderbird and the storms it creates as long as it returns back to her. The second line of the last stanza, “At least when spring comes they rear back again” further emphasizes the speaker’s desire for consistency with her lover.

            Since this poem appears in Plath’s semi-autobiographical novel, The Bell Jar, this too, may be slightly autobiographical. The publication date of this poem is in 1953, and since her marriage to Ted Hughes was in 1956, it is quite possible that this poem is about him. The lines, “I dreamt you bewitched me into bed/ And sung me moon-struck, kissed me quite insane” refers to a lover of some kind. And Plath herself described Hughes as “ "a singer, story-teller, lion and world-wanderer"”, so since she writes that the lover “sung me moon-struck”, the poem very well might be referring to her soon to be husband, Ted Hughes.