Any true representation of horror, the sickening realization of what is hideous or unbelievably horrible, seems somewhat impossible. How can we say the unspeakable? How can we recreate unimaginable terror and disgust? Yet the authors of modernist literature, reflecting on the anguish of the sinister and swirling world around them, have developed clever strategies for representing a sensation that is, if not exactly similar, then at least as close as possible to the horror itself. -even. The poetry of Sylvia Plath is an example of this, employing a visceral use of metaphor and metonymy, using color and synasthesia to create an atmosphere of absolute morbid terror, with cinematic techniques emphasizing the nudity of her personal revelation. Revealing an intense fixation on death, suicide and haunting, Plath explores with vivid and unbridled vigor the terror and violence of a freak show world shrouded in darkness. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on “Why Violent Video Games Should Not Be Banned”? Get the original essay Plath's use of metaphor and metonymy is a powerful tool for conveying the nightmarish peculiarity of the world. The macabre images of death and decay present horror in its most powerful metonymic form, as in "All the Dead Dears," in which Plath describes a decrepit skeleton in vivid detail: "the woman's ankle has been slightly eaten away” – and her suicide attempt as depicted in “Lady Lazarus” eschews romanticism to present a gruesome picture of her saviors who “had to call and call/And pluck the worms from me like sticky pearls,” a horribly vivid display of death and decay that is both shocking and repulsive to the reader. Likewise, a fixation on ghosts and haunting permeates his work; for example, in “The Lady and the Terracotta Head,” a clay replica of a face refuses to disappear and the effigy haunts the woman eternally. A recurring metaphor for expressing horror in Plath's poetry is the image of bees. In “The Bee Meeting,” the protagonist identifies with the old queen bee that the virgins dream of killing, creating a terrifying sense of tension awaiting defeat. Similarly, "The Beekeepeer's Daughter" uses insects to create a sexual atmosphere with a foreshadowing of shame and tragedy, and "The Arrival of the Bee Box" presents bees as an ominous and terrifying force that the protagonist decides nevertheless to release. Plath's use of metaphor is often distinguished by a deliberate inversion of historically or socially accepted meanings. In "Aftermath", Medea, generally seen as a contemptible figure, becomes the domestic and nurturing "Mother Medea" who "moves humbly like any housewife", reversing the original characteristics and portraying her as a victim of Company. While this inversion reveals feminist undertones in Plath's imagery, the reversal of meaning takes sinister form through the use of the smile as a symbol of mischief, inspired by DH Lawrence's short story Smile. Creating an atmosphere of uneasy and menacing horror, the smile recurs throughout Plath's poetry as a "weapon of death" in "The Detective", one of the two sinister faces of "Death and Co". and in the feeling of danger which surrounds the protagonist of “Berck-Plage”. In “Edge,” the corpse “wears the smile of accomplishment”; smiles are also maliciously displayed during a sinister ritual in "The Bee Meeting", creating an atmosphereuncomfortable, surreal horror environment. Plath's poetry uses an incisive use of color to evoke different sensations in the reader, creating an atmosphere of horror through particular hues. rendered to evoke a feeling of repulsion. Black, the traditional color of death and mourning, represents in Plath's poetry not only these typical omens, but also sinister aggression and destructiveness, notably in the repetition of darkness throughout "Little Fugue", where "death opened, like a black, black tree", and in the "black shoe", "black man" and "big black heart" in "Papa", creating an atmosphere of terror. Likewise, the "black sea" described in "Point Shirley" creates an ominous omen of doom, and "Nick and the Candlestick" introduces the environment of a cavernous room full of inconsolable terrors, an innocent baby trapped in the darkness of a guilty world. Yet white, usually the antithesis of darkness, is also used to evoke negative connotations, often conveying violence and fear. In "The Moon and the Yew", the moon is "white as a joint and terribly upset", a counterpart of the yew, whose message is "blackness - blackness and silence". The white towers of "Totem" signify butchery, and in "The Bee Meeting" the queen bee is enclosed in a "long white box", reminiscent of a coffin, both having disturbing connotations with death, and "Three Women" presents a nightmare. world made up of “rooms white with screams” and “those terrible children who prevent sleep with their white eyes”, a completely horrible image of threat and fear. In this sense, color functions in a synesthetic effect, in which two or more modes of sensations are experienced through the stimulation of sight, resulting in intensely shocking images, both visual and verbal (1). In fact, much of Plath's poetry is structured around cinematic techniques, very evocative of German Expressionist film or even horror film, employing techniques such as flashbacks, slow motion, leitmotif, close-ups and rapid scene changes. This is what we can see in “Berck-Plage”, which moves with alarming speed from a beach scene to a scene of a neighbor's morbid burial, with a counterbalance of internal and external conflicts. Similarly, "Getting There" juxtaposes a wartime train journey to a concentration camp with scenes of personal inner turmoil, contrasting vignettes to heighten tension and building powerfully to a climax with the hypnotic intensity of a Bergman film (1). Plath's most famous poems were written in the last two years before her death, abandoning the ornate and self-consciously artistic works of the past in favor of distressed and powerful confessional verse. Plath's self-revealing nudity exposes a personality tormented by an obsession with death and darkness. In “The Claimant,” Plath meditates on the absurdity of human physical existence, creating horror through her bitterly ironic depiction of life as a tragic freak spectacle, poisoned by disease and misery. She presents a catalog of malformations and deficiencies: “Are you carrying / A glass eye, false teeth or a crutch, / An orthopedic appliance or a hook, / Rubber breasts or a rubber crotch, / Stitches suture to show that something is missing? and the speaker - an employer, perhaps an appearance of God? - must decide whether the candidate is able to conform to the anomalies, to be “our kind of person”. This creates a sense of a culture of deformity - where those who havesomething missing, something wrong with them are united in their deficiency, using vivid, darkly comic language to express psychological disorder through physical illnesses. Plath uses rhythmic liveliness to emphasize the horror, and images of death permeate the poem, particularly in the costume, described as "black and stiff, but not ill-fitting", an allusion to both a straitjacket and a coffin, conveying a feeling of horror. stifling environment of living death, underlines through the morbid warning “believe me, they will bury you”. This microcosm of life as a freak spectacle is a technique that Plath repeats in “Lady Lazarus,” in which the protagonist has acquired a sinister attitude. notoriety as a freak of the fairgrounds for his ability to survive death. Just as the biblical Lazarus rises from the dead, the protagonist is trapped in a cycle of perpetual resurrection to life, reflecting on Plath's own brushes with fate, first following a childhood accident ( "The first time it happened, I was ten years old/It was an accident") and his first suicide attempt at twenty ("The second time I meant/Hold on and don't come back at all.").The speaker takes a macabre and ironic pride in her achievements, conveyed by the famous fragment "Dying/Is an art, like everything else/I do it exceptionally well", an ironic glamorization of death which recapitulates the horrible central morbidity of the poem. The horror is constantly underlined by the jarring, rhythmic repetition of incantations (“I do it to make it seem like hell/I do it to make it seem real” and “It's pretty easy to do it in a cell /It's easy enough to do it and stay put"), and the reader can't help but notice the poem's final posthumous irony: Plath's final suicide attempt was one she actually couldn't not get up. Perhaps the clearest depiction of horror in Plath's work can be seen in "Daddy", a hysterical rage of hatred directed at her father and husband. Considered both an act of transference and an exorcism of pain, the poem progresses with a throbbing rhythm, an intense energy building towards a final explosion of murder, the chilling incantation "If I killed a man, I I killed two of them/…/ Dad, you can lie down now./There's something at stake in your big black heart/…/ Dad, dad, you bastard, I'm done. - the presence of images of the Holocaust, Plath developing an absurd fiction of her father as a Nazi and identifying with a Jewish woman condemned to the barbaric and relentless cruelty of an extermination camp. Plath creates a horrific war environment through her vivid descriptions of "the Polish city / Flattened by the roller / Wars, wars, wars", the rolling, repetitive sound creating a feeling of intensely oppressive sadness. Metonymic symbols such as the swastika directly evoke the horror associated with the Holocaust, and her speculative descriptions of herself being "like a Jew" or "a bit Jewish" suggest parallels between her own suffering and that which occurred under Nazism, an insinuation. which many critics have disputed. As Leon Wieseltier has argued, "Auschwitz bequeathed to all subsequent arts perhaps the most striking of all possible metaphors of extremity, but its availability has been abused." However, Jennifer Rose makes a distinctive connection between metaphor, fantasy and identification, and suggests that Plath is asking a question – is all experience simply yours, or must it be universal. Plath creates a fantasy scenario of Nazism, endowing her father with a "neat mustache" and an "Aryan eye", becoming more