Summary
In the poem's third stanza, the speaker describes a dream. In this dream, she says, "you"—the subject of her poem—"bewitched" her "into bed," using real or metaphorical magic to get her to have sex. The "you," then sung to and kissed the speaker until she was "moon-struck" and "insane." At the end of the stanza, the speaker repeats the line "(I think I made you up inside my head)." In the next stanza, the speaker describes the crumbling of a dramatic biblical landscape. God, she says, falls from his place in the sky, and the fires of hell "fade," seemingly dying away spontaneously. Both angels and demons disappear. In other words, everything is simply gone, a sentiment echoed in the repetition of the line "I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead."
Analysis
Taken as a pair, these two stanzas stand out because they each seem pulled from a separate narrative universe. The first (stanza #3 in the poem) takes its cues from the plots and vocabularies of the romance or fairytale genres. The second, meanwhile, takes its cues from the Bible, and from related Christian texts. By exploring them one at a time, we can see how carefully Plath separates these source materials, and understand why the transition between the two stanzas feels so jarring. Stanza 3, on its more superficial level, is about sex and romance (and the connection between love and insanity—she suggests that love is what has driven her mad). But Plath's diction and her descriptions also evoke childhood bedtime stories. The word "bed" is clearly used in a sexual context here, but it carries connotations of sleep and nighttime. The words "bewitched" and "moon-struck" refer to seduction and madness, but are equally evocative of magic and children's tales. In the fourth stanza, Plath instead opts for words like "God," "hell," "seraphim," and "Satan." The over-the-top drama of biblical apocalypse is just about the only thing that can overshadow the drama of sex, magic, and fairytales. Furthermore, the abrupt switch between two lexicons and two narrative worlds makes us, as readers, feel destabilized, confused, and unsure of our surroundings—just like our speaker.
The poem's third stanza is also complicated on the level of storytelling. In it, the speaker talks about how "you" used romance and sex to "bewitch" her, making her "insane"—although, she prefaces, this happened within a dream. Of course, as she reminds us with the line "(I think I made you up inside my head)," their romance itself may be a figment of her imagination and a product of her insanity. This tangled plotline creates an inescapable, paradoxical loop: the poem's subject drove the speaker insane, and the poem's subject only exists within her madness. Once again, we begin to feel as perplexed and as unsure about what's real as the poem's speaker. Moreover, the poem's relentless repetition reinforces our feeling of being stuck in an unending loop. Not only does Plath stick to a strict iambic pentameter and ABA rhyme scheme, but she also keeps repeating two lines: "(I think I made you up inside my head)," and "I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead." No matter how dramatic the poem gets, and no matter how many settings or registers we move through, it seems that we can't avoid returning to those two lines.
This poem is a villanelle, and the sense of inescapability that Plath creates here is common in the villanelle form. A villanelle generally consists of six stanzas. The first five of them are tercets, or three-line stanzas. These stanzas are usually written in iambic pentameter and follow an ABA rhyme scheme. The poem's first and third line, meanwhile, are repeated throughout, used as concluding lines in each stanza. Thus, the poem's very first line becomes the concluding line of the second and fourth stanzas. The poem's third line, meanwhile, becomes the concluding line of the third and fifth stanzas. These two repeated lines are referred to as the villanelle's refrain. We've already seen this pattern emerge in "Mad Girl's Love Song." The first line, "I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead," is repeated in the second and fourth stanzas, while the third line, "(I think I made you up inside my head)," is repeated in the third and fifth stanzas. In a typical villanelle, only the sixth and final stanza diverges from the pattern of tercets. The sixth stanza is a quatrain, meaning that it has four lines instead of three. It follows an ABAA rhyme scheme, concluding with both lines of the refrain instead of just one. Therefore, even when we're only two-thirds of the way through the villanelle, we already know what lines it will end with. The villanelle form is extremely repetitive. It's therefore excellent for creating a feeling of being trapped or prevented from moving forward. Thus, it's no surprise that Sylvia Plath has chosen a villanelle as the vehicle with which to explore madness. She's looking at the frustrating, repetitive side of madness. Rather than portraying madness as a type of freedom from reality, she's portraying it as a prison, preventing its victims from accessing linear logic, and therefore keeping them stuck in an unending cycle.
