Edge Sylvia Plath

The diction, tone, and structure of Sylvia Plath’s poem “Edge” create disturbingly calm imagery and symbolism that illustrate the peace and perfectness found in the finality of death.
The poem opens with diction emphasizing the unsettling imagery that carries throughout the poem. The detached third-party speaker looks on a “dead body” with “bare feet” “perfected” and wearing the “smile of accomplishment” under a white “toga.” This raw, pure and positive diction in the presence of suicide creates a sense of wrongness in the reader because people usually portray death as a harsh and bitter end instead of as a fulfilled and flawless one. The speaker finds the body in a restful, natural state, like a “rose” with its “petals” folded into itself; she contrasts the preconceived view of death as an avoided obstacle through diction describing it as a soft “accomplishment,” an obtained goal of final stillness and
tranquility. The word choice emits a calming connotation; “it is over” and “folded” do not reveal submissiveness but relief in release. As the speaker views the corpse, she finds nothing but a tranquility that only death can give.
The removed tone, created by the third-person limited point of view and the calm description of death, matches frequent symbolism in the poem.
The “pitcher of milk, now empty” reflects both the absence of life from the woman and feeling from the speaker. The milk itself symbolizes life as it sustains and strengthens children from birth; the emptying of the pitcher symbolizes the removal of purpose and necessity from life. The woman’s life exhausted itself serving its purpose, and it has no more left to give. The “night flower,” symbolizing death, “bleed[s]” a “sweet” odor. Plath’s choice of flowers, usually a symbol of life and hope, to symbolize death reveals the speaker’s alternate view on death. She does not find it unappealing, but beautiful. The personified moon “has nothing to be sad about,” mirroring the neutrality of the speaker’s tone, because it symbolizes the world itself without the woman. The world witnesses tragedies everyday, it “is used to this sort of thing,” and it moves on swiftly and apathetically even though the woman’s world has
ended.
The fragmented structure of the poem, with short two-line stanzas and enjambments between all but two stanzas, parallel the exhausted mind of the woman before she commits suicide. The lines, fragments until combined with later lines, symbolize the exhausted continuity of life. For some people, it drags on too long after the removal of purpose and the exhaustion of the mind and body. The poem shifts to a heavier and gloomier tone after stanza four when the image of a “dead child coiled” at the emptied “pitcher of milk.” This overtly dark imagery symbolizes the woman’s removal from innocence. She has nothing left to contribute to the world; she folds her innocence back into herself in death once again supporting the speaker’s view of death as pure and “perfected.”
The increasingly dark imagery and heavy symbolism throughout the poem reveal the finality of death. This, paired with the detached tone, pure, calm diction, and fragmented structure reveal the exhausted mind in life and the final, peaceful perfection of death.