Elm

Sylvia Plath · Leaving Cert Poetry

Elm is a poem spoken by a tree, and once you accept that, most of what looks difficult in it settles. Sylvia Plath gives forty-two lines of free verse to an elm that claims to know more about the woman it is addressing than she knows about herself.

Elm Sylvia Plath: the tree does the talking

Plath, who lived from 1932 to 1963, dedicated this poem to her friend Ruth Fainlight, and it appeared after her death in Ariel (1965). The shape looks orderly, fourteen three-line stanzas with no rhyme and no fixed metre, but what fills it is a dramatic monologue spoken by the tree to a silent “you” who never answers back. None of it is botany. The hooves, the poison, the moon and the wind all stand for emotional and psychological violence.

Stanza by stanza, line by line

Stanzas 1 to 3 · Lines 1 to 9

The poem opens with a claim, not a scene. The tree says twice in line 1 that it knows the bottom, the depth the woman it addresses fears. Stanza 2 turns to questions: is it the sea she hears, or her own madness, a voice belonging to nothing. Stanza 3 defines love as a shadow, then makes it bolt.

• “I know it with my great tap root”A tap root grows straight down, so the authority rests on depth rather than distance.
• “I have been there.”Four monosyllables, no persuasion. The calm comes from having already survived the thing under discussion.
• “it has gone off, like a horse”An emotional departure becomes an animal bolting, and the imperative opening line 9 makes her stand and listen while it happens.

Stanzas 4 to 7 · Lines 10 to 21

Stanza 4 climbs onto that horse and gallops all night. Line 12 is two words, one repeated, thinning out into the sound it names. Stanza 5 offers instead, almost sweetly, the sound of poisons, and the fruit that follows is the colour of “arsenic”. Then the voice stops threatening and starts hurting: sunsets become an atrocity, burning branches a hand of wires, and in stanza 7 the tree breaks into flying pieces while a personified wind refuses to let anything stand by. The cry in line 21 is compelled, not chosen.

• “your pillow a little turf”A domestic object becomes burial ground in four words, with no announcement made of it.
• “Scorched to the root”A four-word line lands hard, and the injury reaches the very part the speaker boasted about in line 1.

Stanzas 8 to 9 · Lines 22 to 27

A second figure arrives. The moon is cruel too, and line 23 gives her a motive: she is barren, so she drags at what she lacks. The clause repeated inside line 25 does the work of stanza 9, and line 26 sends emotional loss to an operating theatre.

• “The moon, also, is merciless”One word, “also”, ties the moon back to the woman addressed, so cruelty becomes a pattern rather than a single relationship.

Stanzas 10 to 11 · Lines 28 to 33

Here the threat moves indoors. Line 28 makes the speaker a container for something with a life of its own that goes out nightly to hunt. It hunts with “hooks”, and it hunts for something to love, which collapses tenderness and predation into one act. Stanza 11 names the second inhabitant only as a dark thing, and that vagueness keeps the fear total.

• “I am inhabited by a cry.”The passive makes pain a tenant rather than a feeling. Build any answer on the divided self around this line.
• “its soft, feathery turnings, its malignity”Two soothing adjectives against a word meaning a deep wish to harm. Threat disguised as comfort.

Stanzas 12 to 14 · Lines 34 to 42

Clouds break apart and become a question: were those the faces of love? Plath coins a plural noun for them, “irretrievables”, filing loss away as a category. Stanza 13 admits the voice can take in no more knowledge, contradicting the claim the poem opened with, and line 39 lets the tree’s own branches do the strangling. The last stanza hisses, then flattens: faults called isolate and slow, damage that is geological and unstoppable.

• “That kill, that kill, that kill.”Three stressed monosyllables, repeated with no variation and no explanation. The poem does not conclude, it stops.

The ideas the poem keeps returning to

• Love arrives as violence. Love is a shadow in line 7, bolts two lines later, and by line 30 it is hunting with hooks. No version of it here is not also an injury.
• A speaker at war with itself. Lines 28 to 33 turn inward. The cry and the dark thing are not sent by anyone, they live in the voice, so the elm is describing a mind rather than a garden.
• Knowledge bought too dearly. The boast in lines 1 to 3 depends on having already been destroyed, and by line 37 the same voice can take in nothing more.

Sound and image: a poem you hear before you see it

• Sibilance for opposite ends. In lines 4 to 5 the hissing imitates water dragging off a shore; in lines 40 to 41 it makes the line hiss like acid.
• The mechanical inside the natural. Branches become wires in line 18, loss becomes surgery in line 26. A poem voiced by a tree keeps reaching for hospitals and electricity.
• Questions nothing answers. The voice asks in lines 4, 6, 13, 35, 36 and 38 and is never answered, which keeps the poem unstable even when it sounds certain.

The voice you hear

Track the tone and you have the structure. It begins superior, turns seductive as it offers poison, goes raw as it burns, frantic in the wind, cold under the moon, then confessional once the cry and the dark thing are named. It ends flat.

Then get the pronouns right. The “I” and the “you” do not stay separate. The tree starts by telling the woman about her fear and finishes by finding that fear inside itself, so the closing stanzas read as two versions of one suffering mind. Treat them as two fixed people and you lose the ending, because it only works if the threat has come home.

Taking Elm into the exam

Two arguments will carry a full answer. One: Plath uses a non-human speaker to dramatise a mind at war with itself, where love, fear and knowledge all become forms of violence. Two, and sharper: the tree can only claim to know the bottom because it has already been wrecked by what it describes, so insight and damage are the same event.

Mirror is the obvious comparison, another non-human speaker claiming harsher knowledge of a woman than she has herself. Morning Song suits a question on address, The Times Are Tidy one on form.

Where marks are lost

Questions to test yourself

• Is the claim in line 3 strength, or another kind of self-harm?
• What has changed between the root in line 1 and the root in line 17?
• Does leaving the dark thing unexplained make the ending more honest, or more hopeless?

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