Chapter 12: Sound and Sense

In Sylvia Plath's poem "Old Ladies Home" she uses a omnipresent speaker to portray death through a journey in the home of  elderly women.  The poem slowly leads up to the concept of death. In the first stanza, the speaker observes what the surroundings. Most of the words she uses to describe the house relate to nature like "beetles," "earthenware," "sun," "rocks," and "heat." I think this is to show how connected to the earth the elderly women are. In a really dark way....they will soon be in the earth, but on a lighter note they are so old and distracted by so little. Plath even writes that the pictures of their grandchildren are distant, showing they dont care so much about things anymore.Also, the pieces of nature she chooses to describe seem to be very frail like the breath and the beetles. If someone just steps on a beetle it will die and that echoes the condition the women could be in.  Next, the speaker observes what they are doing like knitting and the different sounds of their voices. I think this is a retirement home where maybe a funeral is taking place. She uses the word black a lot and writes about bonneted ladies, which makes me picture a funeral. One of the questions pointed me to the last line of the poem in which there are only 6 syllables in the last line. Throughout the poem each stanza is 7 lines with 7 syllables in each line, except for the last line of the last stanza. This represents death. It is all of a sudden and goes along with a line that talks about a shortening of breath. I really liked how Plath did this because it made me appreciate how rythm and meter can do more than just make the poem sound pleasing to the ear, but they can really have a deep meaning.