Pheasant

Sylvia Plath · Leaving Cert Poetry

Pheasant begins in the middle of a row. Someone has said he will kill the bird, the speaker cuts across him to say no, and then spends eight short stanzas working out what her reason actually is. Sylvia Plath lets you watch that reason shift, wobble, and finally turn back on the person giving it.

Pheasant Sylvia Plath: an argument that catches itself out

Collected in Winter Trees (1971) and published after Plath’s death, it is one of the late poems that build an argument out of close watching of one creature. Eight tercets, unrhymed, in a loose metre close to speech: the line breaks follow a mind changing rather than a fixed pattern. Treat it as a case being made, not a picture being painted. The speaker justifies, doubts, indulges herself, then corrects herself, and the poem prints every stage.

Stanza by stanza, line by line

Stanzas 1 and 2 · Lines 1 to 6

There is no scene setting. Line 1 reports what the other person has said, line 2 refuses it flatly, and you are inside the disagreement before you know who is speaking. Line 3 pins down the detail that stayed with her, the blunt jut of a dark head, then leaves the sentence hanging on the bird’s pacing so the syntax walks on into stanza 2. Then the first slip: line 5 admits there is something in owning a bird like this, and line 6 reframes it as being visited, a gift rather than a possession.

• “Do not kill it.”Four flat stressed syllables landing like a door shutting. Everything after it is the speaker assembling reasons for this one instruction, so it anchors any paragraph on the conflict between her and the other figure.

Stanzas 3 and 4 · Lines 7 to 12

She heads off an objection nobody has made. Lines 7 and 8 deny mysticism twice over, in clipped negatives, which tells you she expects to be doubted. What she offers instead in line 9 is deliberately plain: the bird belongs exactly where it is. That stock phrase about being in one’s element carries the justification mysticism was refused. Line 10 escalates it into the vocabulary of monarchy and law, and lines 11 to 12 come back down to evidence: a big footprint, the line a tail dragged through last winter’s snow in their courtyard.

• “a kingliness, a right”Two abstract nouns doing heavy lifting. The bird gets royal standing and a legal claim to the ground, half seriously, so the humans deciding its fate look like newcomers.

Stanzas 5 and 6 · Lines 13 to 18

Lines 13 and 14 make rarity visible rather than stating it. The pale bird moves through the criss-crossing flight paths of sparrows and starlings, so the common birds become a sketched background it stands out from. Line 15 asks the question and answers it in the same line, which looks like the case closing. It is not. Line 16 opens with “But” and the argument tips over: a dozen would be worth having, a hundred in green and red on the hill, and line 18 ends on an exclamation that lets the fantasy win.

• “Is it its rareness, then? It is rare.”Question and answer inside one line, so you hear her thinking in real time and closing a small proof with a click. The most useful quotation for the poem’s self-questioning method.
• “But a dozen would be worth having”The turn. One conjunction undoes the rarity argument, because a hillside of pheasants would not be rare at all. Plath leaves the contradiction standing rather than smoothing it over.

Stanzas 7 and 8 · Lines 19 to 24

Line 19 brings her back to the one real bird, and line 20 shrinks the fantasy of a hundred into a single image of plenty, a little horn of abundance, so the poem keeps the bounty without multiplying the bird. Then line 21 breaks the quiet: the coined verb unclaps makes the take off sound mechanical and sudden. Line 22 sets the bird down in the elm, easy again, and line 23 remembers it sunning among the narcissi, the soft repeated s sounds slowing the poem to a stop.

• “I trespass stupidly. Let be, let be.”She names herself, not the bird, as the intruder, which settles who has a right to the hill. The doubled plea turns the sharp order of line 2 into something quieter, and fades out rather than concluding.

The ideas the poem keeps returning to

• A creature’s right to be left alone. Lines 7 to 12 build the case in stages: not mysticism, but belonging, and belonging earns kingliness and a right. The footprint in the snow settles an abstract claim with physical proof.
• Owning against wondering. Line 5 concedes the pleasure of ownership and line 6 takes it back. Lines 16 to 18 show the impulse getting out of hand, and the poem never decides the two can be kept apart.
• An argument tested in public. She asks her own question in line 15, answers it, then wrecks the answer in line 16.
• Trespass and restraint. The poem opens with an order and closes with a plea. Between line 2 and line 24 she moves from ordering somebody else about to admitting she is the problem on that hill.

Sound, colour and one sudden noise

• Enjambment. The bird paces out of line 3 into the next stanza, so the poem’s shape imitates its movement rather than describing it.
• Colour. Green and red arrive only in line 17, inside the fantasy, and they quicken it. The one flash of bright colour belongs to birds that do not exist.
• Repetition. Line 15 repeats its key word to close a proof; line 24 repeats a plea to open one out. Same technique, opposite effect, and a compact point for a language question.

The voice you hear

The tone travels a long way in twenty four lines. It starts urgent and protective, shaken by what she has just seen. Through the middle stanzas it turns rational, even irritable. Stanza 6 is where it slips, and the greed there is guilty and slightly comic: she hears herself and does not delete it. By lines 22 to 24 the voice has gone quiet and humbled. You are listening to somebody lose an argument with herself and accept the result.

Taking Pheasant into the exam

Two theses hold up. The first: Plath builds the bird’s right to live out of the language of law and monarchy, then undermines it with her own appetite for more. The second: the real subject is the speaker’s conscience, working out whether appreciation and possession can be separated. Either way your evidence sits in lines 2, 10, 15 to 16 and 24. For comparison, Mirror examines what honest looking costs, and Finisterre measures the human watcher against something wild and enduring.

Where marks are lost

Questions to test yourself

• Can you explain in one sentence why line 16 damages the argument of line 15?
• What does the vocabulary of kingship and law in line 10 claim about the bird, and who does it claim it against?
• Can appreciating something rare ever be separated from wanting to own it, or does this poem suggest the two always blur?
• Is the self-accusation in line 24 a real change of heart, or a comfortable way of ending without resolving anything?

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