Finisterre

Sylvia Plath · Leaving Cert Poetry

Finisterre is Plath’s poem about a headland in Brittany where the land runs out, the title being the French for land’s end. She wrote it after visiting that coast in 1961, and it moves in four steps: rock, mist, statue, stall. Each step shrinks the one before it, until the drowned, the shrine and the myth are swallowed by a stallholder selling food.

Finisterre by Sylvia Plath: a shrine that faces away from the people praying at it

Sylvia Plath builds the poem from four sights on one afternoon, and their order is the argument. Cliffs first, aged and violent. Then the sea mist, which she treats as the drowned themselves. Then Our Lady of the Shipwrecked, looking past the people at her feet. Then the stalls selling shells. Nothing there consoles anything else: the monument raised for drowned sailors cannot hear the woman praying beneath it, and the market sells the sea back as jewellery. A strong thesis is that the poem tests nature, religion and commerce and finds all three empty.

Stanza by stanza, line by line

Stanza 1 · Lines 1 to 9

The poem refuses to be scenery. The land’s end is a hand, its fingers knuckled and stiffened by arthritis in lines 1 and 2, gripping nothing. Lines 3 and 4 give you black warning cliffs and a sea with no floor and no far shore. Then line 5 makes the claim the stanza rests on: the rock is pale because the drowned are in it. Watch what follows. Lines 6 and 7 shrink that to rubbish and forgotten wars, and by line 9 the rocks sulk.

• “Whitened by the faces of the drowned.”The cliff’s pallor is explained as dead men, not weather. Your image for the coast as a graveyard.
• “Other rocks hide their grudges under the water.”Personification with a threat inside it: the violence is not finished, only submerged.

Stanza 2 · Lines 10 to 18

Lines 10 to 12 hold the only tenderness in the poem: tiny cliff flowers like clovers, stars and bells, fine as embroidery and already close to death. They also give the mist an attention of its own, and lines 13 and 14 take the leap the poem depends on. The mist is not weather. It is souls. Line 15 has them bruising the rocks out of existence and restoring them, a cycle that repairs nothing, and line 16 sends them up without hope.

• “Souls, rolled in the doom-noise of the sea.”The leap that makes the headland haunted rather than gloomy, with the dread packed into one compound.
• “I walk among them, and they stuff my mouth with cotton.”The first I in the poem, and it arrives as suffocation. The speaker joins the drowned instead of describing them.

Stanza 3 · Lines 19 to 27

The statue gets the movement the mourners lack. In lines 19 and 20 she strides toward the horizon, marble skirts blown back like two pink wings, already leaving. Lines 21 to 23 stack the figures downward: a marble sailor kneels at her foot, distracted, and at his foot a real woman in black prays to the stone sailor’s prayer. Actual grief sits at the bottom, addressing statuary. Lines 24 and 25 make her three times life size, with a sweetness carved into the lips that keeps the holiness decorative.

• “Is praying to the monument of the sailor praying.”The prayer loops from stone to stone and never lands. Your best line for arguing the poem doubts religious consolation.
• “She is in love with the beautiful formlessness of the sea.”The figure built to protect sailors adores the element that kills them. Carry this one for indifference.

Stanza 4 · Lines 28 to 36

Line 28 drops you into a market. Lace flaps beside the postcard stalls, held down with conch shells, and in line 30 the poem hands its voice to a stallholder. What follows is a sales pitch. Lines 31 and 32 turn the sea into trinkets, and lines 33 to 35 deny that any of it came from the Bay of the Dead below, insisting on a tropical place the sellers have never seen. Line 36 ends on food going cold, and that flatness is the judgement.

• “Little shells made up into necklaces and toy ladies.”The sea that drowned sailors two stanzas ago is now costume jewellery, your evidence for tragedy sold as product.
• “Eat them before they blow cold.”The last word goes to a stallholder, not the poet, and it is about crepes. Quote it for bathos.

The ideas the poem keeps returning to

• The sacred does not listen. Our Lady is the centre of the poem and its target. Line 26 states her deafness, line 27 gives the reason: she prefers the shapelessness of the sea to the people at her feet. Set it beside line 23, a prayer offered to a statue of a prayer.
• The drowned have not gone anywhere. Death here is present, not remembered. It whitens the rock in line 5, fills the mist in line 14 and names the water in line 33, so even a denial keeps the Bay of the Dead in earshot.
• Grief turns into stock. Stanza 4 sells back what the earlier stanzas feared: the sea becomes necklaces in line 32, and in line 34 the shells get a prettier birthplace because that version sells better. The deflation is structural, lines 6 and 7 doing to the cliffs what line 36 does to the poem.

Sound and image

The sound thins as the poem goes. Stanza 1 growls: the plosives of cannons and budge in line 8 carry into the grudges of line 9, and the knotted consonants closing line 1 make the cliffs sound as stiff as they look. Stanza 2 softens into sibilants, and line 16 breathes out on sighs. Line 27 lengthens on beautiful formlessness, so the sentence dissolves the way the water does. Stanza 4 stops on blow cold. Track the fabric too: embroidery in line 11, cotton in line 17, skirts in line 20, lace in line 28.

The voice you hear

For most of the poem the speaker stands back, and her judgements arrive as description, which is why line 26 lands so hard by simply saying she does not hear. The exception is lines 17 and 18, where she steps into the mist and is silenced by it. That matters more than its length suggests: having been one of the drowned for a few seconds, she has the standing to judge a statue that feels nothing. The last voice is somebody else’s, and Plath adds no comment.

Taking Finisterre into the exam

The safest routes are indifference and irony. For indifference, work through lines 19 to 27, then reach back to the mist of lines 13 to 18 for a force that at least notices the speaker. For irony, build from lines 6 and 7 to line 36. Pair the poem with Mirror for non-human observers, Elm for landscape as threat, The Times Are Tidy for comedy on grave material.

Where marks are lost

Questions to test yourself

• Do you find the last line funny, or does its casualness make the earlier deaths colder?
• Is the statue’s love of the sea’s formlessness honest, or a failure of compassion?
• Which stanza does Plath want you to trust, the mist of stanza 2 or the market of stanza 4?

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