The Times Are Tidy

Sylvia Plath · Leaving Cert Poetry

The Times Are Tidy is a fifteen-line satire by Sylvia Plath about a world so well organised that nothing dangerous is left in it. Collected in The Colossus in 1960, it is an early fable-like poem, written before the confessional intensity of the Ariel work, and it runs on one joke: heroes have no work, dragons have shrunk, the last witch died eighty years ago, and the milk is richer than ever. Whether that is a good trade is the question the poem refuses to settle for you.

The Times Are Tidy by Plath: a world with the danger taken out

The poem’s method is mock-heroic: it borrows the register of epic and drops it into a flat modern town where there is nothing to fight. Stanza one has the town running itself while skilled workers stand idle. Stanza two shrinks the monster a hero would once have ridden against to something you could hold in your hand. Stanza three kills off the last witch and offers thick cream as compensation. Nothing shouts. That deadpan surface is the technique, and your job is to say what is going on underneath it.

Stanza by stanza, line by line

Stanza 1 · Lines 1 to 5

The first line inverts normal word order, adjective first and verb held back, so it arrives with the formality of classical epic. Line 2 then strands that register in a modern image: a province like a stuck record, a needle looping one groove forever. Lines 3 and 4 supply the local evidence: the most watchful cooks are out of work because the mayor’s rôtisserie, a rotating spit for roasting meat, turns without anyone attending it. Skill and vigilance have been made redundant by machinery. Line 5 is end-stopped, landing on the machine turning of its own accord and closing the stanza with a small, self-satisfied click.

• “Unlucky the hero born”Four words that ape the grammar of epic, undercut immediately by the flat modern setting of line 2. Use it to open a paragraph on how Plath deflates heroic convention.

Stanza 2 · Lines 6 to 10

Stanza two converts heroism into a job market. Line 6 reports that there is no career in the venture, businesslike vocabulary that sounds wrong for what used to be epic. Line 7 names the venture, and here is the poem’s central joke: the creature the hero would ride against is a lizard, not a dragon. That is not a stray word choice but bathos, the deliberate drop from the mythic to the mundane, and you should name it as such. Lines 8 and 9 shrink the creature to leaf-size from lack of action, as though danger were a muscle that wastes without use.

• “History’s beaten the hazard”The stanza’s thesis in four words, with History personified as the winner and hazard carrying both its meanings, danger and chance. The strongest quote for a topic sentence on the poem’s central argument.

Stanza 3 · Lines 11 to 15

The poem now names an actual death without raising its voice. Line 11 reports the last crone, an old woman cast as a witch, burned alive, and the phrasing is the point: Plath uses an offhand phrasal verb where you would expect the vocabulary of execution. Line 12 files the event more than eight decades back, safely historical. Line 13 lists what went into the fire with her, a love potion and a talking cat, set side by side with no conjunction. Line 14 cuts that list off and pivots, and line 15 supplies the proof: the cow’s milk now comes out as cream, measured by the inch, an image so literal it is almost absurd.

• “But the children are better for it,”The turn of the whole poem, from nostalgia to a flat, unproven claim of progress. Build your personal response around it: the claim is left open, not proved.

The ideas the poem keeps returning to

• Mock-heroic deflation. Lines 1 to 10 raise a heroic register and drop it every time: the hero is unlucky, the quest is a career with no openings, the dragon is a lizard. Plath is not mourning dragons for their own sake but measuring what a world without them feels like to live in.
• Automation and lost agency. Lines 3 to 5. The watchful cooks are jobless because the spit turns itself: judgement replaced by mechanism, and the poem treats that as the defining fact of civic life.
• The loss of magic. Lines 11 to 13. The witch, the potion and the familiar are gone, and gone a long time. Placing the loss safely in the past is what makes it register as a loss rather than an escape.
• The ambiguous cost of a safe world. Lines 13 to 15. Argue ambiguity, not celebration. The closing image is too neat and too literal to settle the question it is offered to settle.

A nursery-rhyme music under the satire

Three stanzas of five lines each, all the same undecorated shape: the form performs the tidiness the title names. The metre leans towards a loose iambic tetrameter, and the rhyming is faint but real, with an end-of-stanza chime closing stanza one and another sounding through stanza three. That gives it a ballad or nursery-rhyme cadence, which suits the fairy-tale material and makes the satire sound harmless. Two clipped monosyllables slow line 2 to a halt, and the falling rhythm of line 5 mirrors the wheel’s unforced rotation. The near rhyme between the herb and the cat in line 13 keeps things light right up to the turn; the heavy monosyllables of line 15 thud the poem to a blunt, unpoetic stop.

The voice you hear

There is no I in this poem and no raised voice. The speaker reports a witch-burning in the same tone used for local unemployment, and that flatness is the technique, not a limitation. Because stanzas one and two are comic, the violence of stanza three lands far harder than it would in an openly serious poem. The voice also declines to tell you what to think about the ending. If you want to argue that the poem is bitter, you must prove it from tone and placement, because the wording never admits to bitterness.

Taking The Times Are Tidy into the exam

Two theses work well. First: Plath uses mock-heroic deflation, dragons reduced to lizards, to argue that a safe modern world has been bought at the cost of wonder. Second: the flat, comic tone of the first two stanzas is what makes the violence of the third land so hard. For comparison, set it beside Mirror, where the same deadpan voice unsettles a calm surface, or Morning Song, which also ends ambivalently on what the next generation inherits.

Where marks are lost

Questions to test yourself

• Is a tidy world, one with no dragons, witches or genuine danger left, worth the safety it buys?
• Does the closing image of material comfort answer the loss described in the line before it, or dodge it?
• Where exactly does the tone of the poem change, and which single word makes the change happen?
• How would your reading differ if the poem stopped at the end of line 13?

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