There are poems that arrive in a life the way weather does, quietly at first, almost unnoticeable, and only later do you realize the atmosphere has changed around you. I find that poetry often becomes less an academic practice and more a kind of barometric pressure on my thinking, a certain subtle shift of meaning, tone, or breath within a line that serves to make me suddenly aware of how language builds the rooms we live in. Of the works I have recently encountered, Sylvia Plath’s “Morning Song” and Jack Spicer’s “Thing Language” linger with particular insistence. They remain because of their beauty or strangeness, because to truly read them one must strive to witness emotional truth disguised inside metaphor.
Both poems confront, in radically different ways, the problem of expression, in how a world interior to the self enters language, and how language often fails or betrays the interior world even as it exposes it. Through sonic texture, figurative language, lyric address, and shifts in perspective, each text constructs an emotional architecture that refracts the human condition, motherhood in Plath’s case, lyric alienation in Spicer’s. In studying these poems, I found myself not merely analyzing their techniques but undergoing a kind of apprenticeship in attention. They taught me that poetry is a discipline of noticing, of sound, of silence, of meaning as it flickers on and off like a light in an old house.
Sylvia Plath’s “Morning Song” appeared early in the semester, but its resonance grew as we learned to read poems not only for narrative content but for form, for the way sound, structure, and metaphor reshape emotional meaning. The poem is Plath’s meditation on early motherhood, yet it is not sentimental. Instead, she approaches maternity as a field of estrangement, wonder, and ambivalence. What struck me on first reading was the tenor of distance in the opening line: “Love set you going like a fat gold watch.” The simile is at once tender and mechanical, marking the child as both beloved and uncanny. Only later, once we studied figurative language and the tradition of the lyric self, did I realize how radical this opening is. Plath begins with a metaphor that displaces the maternal bond into objecthood, signaling the emotional ambivalence that shadows the poem.
From the start, the poem engages the theme of sonic awakening. The newborn’s arrival is not described visually but aurally, a tendency we traced throughout lyric poetry where subjective feeling becomes a matter of sound. Plath’s lines echo with breath, ticking, crying, singing, the noises that mark life as it begins. The child’s cry becomes a form of music: “And now you try / Your handful of notes.” Here, Plath structures the poem around an implied musical metaphor, where the infant’s sounds initiate the mother into an altered mode of listening. Our course discussions on prosody helped me realize that this is not merely figurative; the poem enacts its sonic concerns formally. The short lines, that being five tercets, create a clipped, inhalational rhythm, mirroring the uncertain, hesitant breath of a new mother listening for the infant’s voice.
A central technique we studied this semester, apostrophe, appears subtly in “Morning Song” through its continual address to the child. The poem is framed as a private communication, almost a whispered confession. This direct address makes the lyric intimate even as the speaker confesses a sense of detachment: “I’m no more your mother / Than the cloud that distills a mirror to reflect its own slow / Effacement at the wind’s hand.” These lines capture one of the poem’s most haunting effects: motherhood appears less as a fixed identity and more as a dissolving process. The metaphor of the evaporating cloud emphasizes the speaker’s uncertainty and the transient boundary between self and child.
It was only after studying ekphrastic and documentary modes that I realized how observational the poem really is. It operates almost as a documentary of early motherhood, as the speaker wakes, walks the halls, listens to the child’s breath, notices the moonlight on the walls. These sensory details create what our class called “lyric realism”, the capacity of poetry to capture lived experience while remaining attentive to emotional nuance.
Yet the poem ends in a tone of hard-won affirmation. When Plath writes, “And now you stand / At the window, the clear vowels rising like balloons,” the final image suggests an ascent into clarity and joy. The vowels, altogether pure, round, lifted into the air, become emblems of linguistic possibility. In this moment, the child’s voice becomes the poem’s closing gesture of hope. Studying poetic closure in class helped me understand why this works: the poem initiates in estrangement and settles into recognition, mirroring the emotional trajectory of many lyric poems that end in epiphany.
“Morning Song” taught me that poetry is an instrument for listening to oneself. It revealed that motherhood, like language, is a process of perpetual translation: between fear and tenderness, distance and devotion, silence and sound. If “Morning Song” illuminated the emotional world of sound, Jack Spicer’s “Thing Language” illuminated the world of silence, of what is unsaid, or unsayable. Spicer’s poetics troubled me at first, partly because the poem seems to resist us, to avert its gaze. But as we learned more about non-referential lyric, negative space, and documentary fragmentation, the poem opened into something both eerie and revelatory.
The poem begins with the confounding declaration: “This ocean, humiliating in its disguises / Tougher than anything.” Immediately, the sea becomes both literal and metaphysical. Spicer’s ocean functions as a metaphor for language itself, vast, unstable, resistant to mastery. Our exploration of metaphor theory made me aware of how often poets use natural landscapes to represent linguistic or psychological terrains. But Spicer’s version of the landscape is hostile and impersonal. The ocean humiliates; the world speaks through objects rather than through human intention.
The poem’s most arresting gesture is its refrain-like line: “Objects talk to each other.”
This line situates the poem within the realm of object-oriented lyric, a concept often discussed during our readings of documentary and experimental poems. Spicer posits a world where objects possess agency independent of human meaning. The speaker becomes estranged within his own poem, forced to admit: “We say ‘I love you’ and the paper / Lays it out.” The act of writing becomes a translation of desire into an inert material surface, a flattening of emotion into text.
When talking about the limits of lyric expression, I began to see “Thing Language” not as nihilistic but as deeply self-aware. The poem critiques the lyric tradition even as it participates in it. Instead of using apostrophe to address a beloved or a deity, Spicer addresses the very failure of language to signify. This is an inversion of the lyric mode, a negative apostrophe, a speaking toward something that cannot respond. The poem also engages with ekphrastic absence, as though no painting or object is explicitly described, the poem imagines an entire world of objects conversing outside of human understanding. This creates an uncanny sensory field that echoes theories of the sublime we touched on in our readings of Romantic poems: the overwhelming vastness that exceeds human comprehension. But here the sublime is not in nature but in the inhumanity of language itself.
Spicer’s concluding lines, “No one listens to poetry,” feel almost like a dare or accusation. Yet in a paradox we admired during our group annotation of the poem, the very fact that we are reading the poem disproves its claim. The silence Spicer invokes becomes a rhetorical device that intensifies the reader’s awareness of presence. The poem ends not in resignation but in a ghostly echo, reminding us that listening, the primal act of reading poetry, is an ethical practice, a refusal to let meaning dissipate.
This poem changed the way I think about language. It taught me that words are not obedient. They resist us, warp us, possess their own gravitational pull. In a way, “Thing Language” is a poem about surrender, about accepting that meaning is always partial, fractured, always speaking slightly beside the truth we hope to name. Studying these two poems together, Plath’s intimate lyric of early motherhood and Spicer’s experimental lyric of linguistic estrangement, revealed the astonishing range of the poetic mode. Plath writes at the threshold of a new life; Spicer writes at the threshold of meaning’s dissolution. Yet both poems depend on the same tools: sound, metaphor, address, the delicate interplay of presence and absence. They showed me that poetry is not a static genre but a living practice that teaches us how to inhabit complexity without fleeing from it.
In “Morning Song,” I learned how poetry can enact tenderness through form, how short lines and shifting metaphors mirror emotional vulnerability. In “Thing Language,” I learned how poetry can expose the fractures beneath communication, how a poem can be built from negation as much as affirmation. And in both, I learned to read not only the lines but the spaces between them. Perhaps that is the most important lesson of this course: poetry transforms the reader into a different kind of listener. It alters the frequencies at which we receive the world. Plath taught me how the self breaks open in moments of love; Spicer taught me how the world speaks back, sometimes in voices we cannot name. Together, these poems trace a map of interior life that feels truer than any single narrative could.
To read poetry, I’ve learned, is to enter a conversation with something both intimate and immense. It is to stand, like Plath’s speaker, beside a window at dawn, listening for vowels rising like balloons. Or to stand, like Spicer’s speaker, on the edge of an ocean that refuses to translate itself. In either case, the work of reading becomes a form of ethical attention, a way of being porous to the trembling of the world. These poems impressed themselves on me not because they resolved anything, but because they illuminated the ongoingness of being human: the perpetual effort to speak, to listen, to translate inner weather into words.
