Summary
The speaker, presumably the title's "mad girl," begins by explaining that when she shuts her eyes, the world around her "drops dead." However, when she opens them, everything seems to come rushing back, alive again. This may be a dramatic way of describing a normal experience—the fact that we close our eyes to stop seeing—but it is conveyed in extreme, almost frightening terms. She concludes the stanza by addressing someone in the second person, saying "I think I made you up inside my head." That is, she's not even sure if the person she's speaking to is real or imaginary, and the unstable world around her, which seems to shift in and out of being every time she so much as closes her eyes, isn't helping her figure out what's real and what isn't. She then delves into a bit more detail about what she sees around her, focusing on color. The stars, she says, "go waltzing out in blue and red," creating an overwhelming image of a world in technicolor motion. In place of the stars, blackness "gallops in," replacing color with darkness. Then, repeating the first line, the speaker tells us that she shuts her eyes and the world "drops dead."
Analysis
This poem's title promises us that it will be about a "mad girl"—someone losing her grip on reality—but here, Plath is careful to emphasize that it's reality that seems suspect to the speaker. The poem's images convey her as the only still point in a rollicking, unreliable world. The speaker's actions are limited to opening and shutting her eyes. She doesn't move or act unpredictably. But the world around her spins and flashes, conveyed through Plath's colorful verbs. Stars "go waltzing," the world "drops dead," and blackness "gallops." The overwhelmed speaker, watching, feels that the madness is located outside of her rather than internally. Essentially, while the title lets us know that we have an unreliable speaker, Plath portrays the way madness might actually feel, emphasizing the way a person losing their grip on reality would feel that the problem lay in reality, rather than in their own mind. Of course, there's the telltale line "(I think I made you up inside my head)," in which the speaker confesses to her own unreliability. But this line is contained within parentheses, set firmly aside from the rest of the poem, which makes it seem like the speaker is having trouble reconciling what she knows and what she feels. She knows that her subject isn't real, but she feels as if all of the imaginary people and things she's seeing exist.
Many of the most notable and vivid parts of this poem are sound-based. Firstly, there's the issue of meter. The poem is written in iambic pentameter, a meter where each line is composed of five iambs. An iamb is a two-syllable set, with the emphasis on the second syllable. So iambic pentameter lines are ten syllables long with emphasis on every second syllable. This is a natural-sounding, prose-like meter for poems in English, which makes the poem sound conversational and unrehearsed. That unrehearsed tone fits well with Plath's use of the present tense throughout: we feel as if we're chatting with the speaker spontaneously. Meanwhile, Plath's diction, specifically on the level of sound, reflects the increasing vividness and intensity of the speaker's mindset. She uses only clipped, one-syllable words in the first stanza, sounding tentative and hedging, as if unwilling to fully delve into descriptions of what she sees. By the second, she's using much more sonorous words like "waltzing," and "arbitrary," as if fully embracing the richness of her delusions. Furthermore, while all three lines of the first stanza begin with "I," the speaker moves away from the first-person pronoun in the second stanza. It's like she's feeling more adventurous, and increasingly willing to explore and describe external events rather than simply the movements of her own body. Of course, we know those external events are all figments of her imagination—but Plath's diction tells us that she's getting wholly swept up in them rather than trying to parse whether or not they're real.
Finally, there's the question of rhyme. In each of these two stanzas, the first and third lines rhyme with one another: "dead," "head," "red," and "dead" again. Meanwhile, the second lines of each stanza are outliers, ending with the words "again" and "in." In this ABA rhyme scheme, the stanza's middle line produces unease and suspense. This is especially true because these "B" lines very nearly do rhyme with the "A" lines, but don't quite get all the way there. This is called a slant rhyme. The slant rhymes give us the impression that the speaker is trying to reach an answer or a satisfying conclusion, but coming up short. Only in the stanza's third line, after a bit of fumbling, is she able to bring the stanza to a neat conclusion by achieving a rhyme. This clues us in to her general feelings of desperation and uncertainty. While a poet might typically want to create an eloquent speaker, capable of articulating complex thoughts, Plath here portrays someone who is having trouble expressing herself.
