A Summary and Analysis of Sylvia Plath’s ‘The Colossus’

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)

‘The Colossus’ is a transitional Sylvia Plath poem. The title poem of the only poetry collection published during her lifetime (The Colossus, in 1960), it is one of the most accomplished poems in that collection, and in some ways paves the way for the mature poems, written in Plath’s distinctive voice, which she wrote from 1960 onwards.

In six stanzas, each comprising five lines, Sylvia Plath explores her relationship with her dead father through the symbol of a statue, the giant Colossus of Rhodes (one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World).

The Colossus of Rhodes was a statue of a Greek Titan erected in the city of Rhodes, in Greece. The statue collapsed during an earthquake in 226 BC; although parts of it were preserved, the people of Rhodes did not rebuild it because an oracle told them not to.

Summary

In the first stanza, the speaker of the poem addresses the broken ‘colossus’ or statue directly, stating that she will never be able to put it back together completely, as it was. This statue emits animal noises from its lips that are worse than the sounds found in a barnyard.

In the second stanza, Plath’s speaker speculates on whether the colossus views itself as some sort of ‘oracle’ able to transmit the words of the dead, or even the words of some god, to the living. The speaker has tried hard for thirty years to remove the ‘silt’ or sand from the statue’s throat, but still cannot make sense of what it is trying to say.

This statue is vast. In the third stanza, the speaker describes herself crawling over the ‘acres’ its brow or forehead, carrying pails of glue and Lysol (a disinfectant) like an ant in ‘mourning’ for this broken colossus. She is trying to mend its skull and clear the ‘tumuli’ – mounds, but also burial mounds, specifically – from the statue’s eyes. This suggests ‘bags under the eyes’: a common sign of weariness or exhaustion.

The next stanza lays bare another classical allusion in Plath’s poem: if the broken statue of the colossus is a symbol for the poet’s dead father, then the speaker of the poem also views him much as Electra, from the Greek myth of the Oresteia, viewed her father.

The Swiss psychoanalyst Carl Jung, a follower of Sigmund Freud, formulated the Electra complex in response to Freud’s own concept of the Oedipus complex, to explain what Jung saw as every girl’s relationship with her father (whom she wanted to be close to, while getting the mother out of the picture: in the Oresteia, Electra killed her own mother, Clytemnestra, because Clytemnestra had killed Electra’s father Agamemnon).

As she works to repair the colossus, the speaker notices a blue sky above them, much like the sort of blue Mediterranean sky that might have been visible during the events of the Oresteia.

Now addressing the statue as her father directly, the speaker describes him as like the Roman Forum: that meeting-place in ancient Rome (another classical reference!) where people would speak to each other. (Latin is a very clipped and concise language, and the speaker’s father is described as ‘pithy’, suggesting the bareness – even barrenness – of his skeletal structure, which is all that remains of the once-grand statue.)

As she opens her packed lunch, the speaker notes the ‘fluted’ bones and hair like the flowers of the acanthus plant. Both hair and bones are described as being scattered across the line of the horizon. Even a bolt of lightning couldn’t create such a ‘ruin’, she reflects. At night-time, she squats in the left ear of the statue, sheltering there from the wind.

She passes the time at night by counting the stars (both red ones and stars that are a purplish plum colour) which are overhead. In the morning, the sun rises above the statue’s tongue, which is like a vast stone ‘pillar’ under which she is sheltering. She suggests that she spends all day avoiding the sun, dwelling in the shadows, out of the sun’s glare.

The poem concludes with the speaker declaring that she no longer bothers to listen out for the sound of a boat scraping across the stones of the landing ground.

Analysis

‘The Colossus’ was written in 1959, not long after Sylvia Plath – under the influence, and tutelage, of fellow confessional poet Robert Lowell – had found her distinctive voice and was starting to cultivate a less strictly formal kind of poetry, one that was less indebted to earlier poetic models and influences.

However, she was still finding her way towards the voice that would come to predominate the work she produced in the last couple of years of her life: the ‘Ariel poems’, so-called by critics because they would be collected together into her posthumously published second collection, Ariel (1965).

As such, ‘The Colossus’ is a transitional poem, which shows Plath developing her own poetic voice and beginning to emerge from the tightly formal earlier poems which she had already written.

The poem, of course, is one of a number of poems Plath would write about her father, the most famous of which would be ‘Daddy’ in 1962. Plath’s father Otto died when she was just eight years old, and his life – and death – cast a long shadow over his daughter’s life (and art).

Indeed, the speaker of ‘The Colossus’ literally spends her ‘hours’ under the ‘shadow’ of the giant colossus she is attempting – in vain – to put back together, in one of the numerous acts of attempted resurrection she would perform upon her father. She is dwelling within her father’s shadow, whom she figures as a vast, gigantic, overbearing – and, indeed, colossal – figure in her life. Even all these years after his death, he continues to cast a shadow over his daughter.

For this reason, some critics – especially since Margaret Dickie’s influential reading of the poem – have regarded the ‘father’ in ‘The Colossus’ as a kind of metaphorical father, Plath’s creative mentor or father-figure in whose shadow she still dwells. In this regard, we might link Plath’s poem with Harold Bloom’s theory of ‘the anxiety of influence’ – also inspired by Freudian ideas – whereby a poet has to ‘kill’ their predecessor in order to liberate their own creative art (so, for instance, Tennyson had to write his way out from under Keats’s shadow).

‘The Colossus’ and ‘Daddy’ 

The speaker of ‘Daddy’ would talk of being put back together with ‘glue’ following her attempt to take her own life in order to be reunited with her father; here, Plath’s female speaker is trying to put her father back together with glue. But such a futile attempt at mending him in order to restore him is not done out of any simple filial or daughterly devotion, or if it is, it is out of a conflicted, twisted kind of love for the dead father.

The nod to the Oresteia, and thus to the Electra complex (Plath was a keen reader of both Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung, whom she regarded as kindred spirits, of a sort), suggests that she harbours a deep, perhaps even slightly inappropriate love for her father (note the phallic qualities of that tongue, described as a ‘pillar’; and there is something ‘horny’ or vaguely phallic about the horn-of-plenty, of ‘cornucopia’, used to describe the statue’s ear).

So ‘The Colossus’ is probably best regarded as a stepping-stone towards the more fully developed poetry Sylvia Plath would go on to write about her father, most of all her best-known poem, ‘Daddy’.