Any true depiction of horror, the sickening realization of the horrendous or the incredibly frightening, seems like something impossible. How can the unspeakable be expressed? How can unimaginable terror and revulsion ever be recreated? Yet writers of modernist literature, reflecting on the anxiety of the menacing, swirling world around them, have developed cunning strategies to depict a sensation that is, if not exactly similar, then as close as they will ever get to horror itself. Sylvia Plath's poetry is an example of this, employing a visceral use of metaphor and metonymy, using color and synesthesia to create an atmosphere of absolute morbid terror, with cinematic techniques that emphasize the nakedness of her personal revelation. Revealing an intense fixation with death, suicide, and restlessness, Plath explores with vivid and unbridled vigor the terror and violence of a world of freaks shrouded in darkness. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an Original Essay Plath's use of metaphor and metonymy is a powerful tool for conveying the nightmarish peculiarity of the world. Macabre images of death and decay present horror in its most powerful metonymic form, as in "All the Dead Dears," in which Plath describes a decrepit skeleton in vivid detail: "the woman's ankle bone has been slightly gnawed away" - and his suicide attempt, as described in "Lady Lazarus", eschews romanticism to present a horrifying image of his saviors who "had to call and call / And tear the maggots off me like sticky pearls", a horrifying demonstration vivid with death and decay that is both shocking and repugnant to the reader. Likewise, a fixation on ghosts and eeriness pervades his work; for example, in “The Lady and the Terracotta Head” a clay replica of a face refuses to vanish and the effigy haunts the woman eternally. A recurring metaphor for expressing horror throughout Plath's poetry is the image of bees. In “The Bee Meeting,” the protagonist identifies with the old queen bee that the virgins dream of killing, creating a terrifying sense of tension as they await defeat. Similarly, “The Beekeepeer's Daughter” uses insects to create a sexual atmosphere with portentous foreshadowing of shame and tragedy, and “The Coming of the Bee Box” presents bees as a menacing and terrifying force that the protagonist decides to free anyway. Plath's use of metaphor is often characterized by a deliberate inversion of historically or socially accepted meanings. In “Aftermath,” Medea, generally accepted as a despicable figure, becomes the domestic and caring “Mother Medea” who “moves as humbly as any housewife,” reversing her original characteristics and portraying her as a victim of society. While this inversion reveals feminist overtones in Plath's imagery, the inversion of meaning takes on a sinister form through the use of the smile as a symbol of mischief, inspired by DH Lawrence's short story Smile. Creating an eerie and menacing atmosphere of horror, the smile recurs throughout Plath's poetry as the "weapon of death" in "The Detective," one of the two sinister faces in "Death and Co." and in the sense of danger that surrounds the protagonist of “Berck-Plage”. In “Edge,” the corpse “wears the smile of realization”; smiles are also mischievously displayed during a sinister ritual in “The Bee Meeting,” creating an uneasy atmosphere, a surreal environment of horror. Plath's poetry employs an incisive use of color to evoke different sensationsin the reader, creating an atmosphere of horror through particular tones rendered to connote a sense of repulsion. Black, the traditional color of death and mourning, represents in Plath's poetry not only these typical portents, but also sinister aggression and destructiveness, particularly in the repetition of darkness throughout “Little Escape,” where “the death opened, like a black tree, blackly”, and in “black shoe”, “man inside”.black” and “fat black heart” in “Daddy”, creating an atmosphere of terror. Likewise, the “black sea” described in “Point Shirley” creates an ominous omen of doom, and “Nick and the Candlestick” introduces the setting of a cavernous room filled with inconsolable terrors, an innocent child trapped in the darkness of a guilty world. .However white, generally the antithesis of darkness, is also used to attribute negative connotations, often conveying violence and terror. In “The Moon and the Yew Tree,” the moon is “knuckle-white and terribly distraught,” a counterpart to the yew tree, whose message is “darkness – darkness and silence.” The white towers in "Totem" signify butcher's shop, and in "The Bee Meeting" the queen bee is confined to a "long white box", resembling a coffin, both disturbing connotations with death, and "Three Women" features a nightmare. world of “white rooms of screams” and “those terrible children who disturb sleep with their white eyes”, an absolutely horrible image of threat and fear. In this sense, color works with a synesthetic effect, in which two or more modes of sensations are experienced through the stimulation of vision, resulting in intensely shocking images that are as visual as they are verbal (1). Indeed, much of Plath's poetry is structured around cinematic techniques, highly evocative of German Expressionist film or even horror film, employing techniques such as flashbacks, slow motion, leitmotifs, close-ups, and rapid scene changes. This can be seen in “Berck-Plage,” which shifts with alarming speed from a beach scene to a morbid scene of a neighbor's burial, with internal and external conflicts counterbalanced. Similarly, “Getting There” juxtaposes a wartime train journey to a concentration camp with scenes of personal inner turmoil, contrasting vignettes to heighten tension and build to a powerful climax with the hypnotic intensity of a Bergman film (1). Plath's most famous poems were written in the last two years before her death, abandoning the elaborate and self-consciously artistic works of the past in favor of anguished and forceful confessional verse. The nakedness of Plath's self-revelation lays bare a personality tormented by an obsession with death and darkness. In “The Applicant,” Plath meditates on the absurdity of human physical existence, creating horror through her bitterly ironic depiction of life as a tragic freak show, poisoned by disease and misery. It presents a catalog of deformities and shortcomings: “Do you wear / A glass eye, false teeth or a crutch, / A brace or a hook, / Rubber breasts or a rubber crotch, / Stitches to show that something is missing?” and the speaker is an employer, perhaps a mask of God? - must decide whether the applicant is suitable for the task of conforming to the anomalies, to be “our kind of person”. This creates a sense of deformity culture: those who have something missing, something wrong with them are united in their deficiency, using vivid black comic language to convey psychological disorder through physical ailments. Plath employs a rhythmic liveliness to emphasize the horror, and images of death pervade the poem, particularly in the dress, described as "black and stiff, but notevil,” an allusion to both a straitjacket and a coffin, conveying a suffocating environment of living death, underlines through the morbid warning “believe me, they will bury you in it.” This microcosm of life as a freak show is a technique which Plath repeats in “Lady Lazarus,” in which the protagonist has darkly gained notoriety as a righteous freak for her ability to survive death Just as the biblical Lazarus rises from the dead, the protagonist is trapped in a cycle of perpetual resurrection to life, reflecting on Plath's brushes with fate, primarily through a childhood accident ("The first time it happened I was ten/ It was an accident") and her first suicide attempt at the age of twenty 'years ("The second time I meant / To resist and never return.").The speaker feels a macabre and ironic pride in her successes, conveyed through the famous fragment "Dying / It's an art, like everything else / I do it exceptionally well,” an ironic glamorization of death that recapitulates the poem's central horrific morbidity. The horror is constantly emphasized through the jarring, rhythmic repetition of incantations (“I do it so it feels like hell/I do it so it feels real” and “It's easy enough to do it in a cell/It's easy enough to do it and stay there”), and the reader cannot help but notice the final posthumous irony of the poem: that Plath's final suicide attempt was one from which she actually could not rise. Perhaps the clearest depiction of horror in Plath's work can be seen in “Daddy,” a hysterical rage of hatred directed towards her father and her husband Considered both an act of transference and an exorcism of grief, the poem proceeds with an excruciating pace, an intense energy building towards a. final explosion of murder, the chilling spell “If I killed one man, I killed two/…/ Daddy, you can relax now./There's a stake in your fat black heart/…/ Daddy, Daddy, you bastard, I'm done." "Daddy" embodies one of the key controversies over the use of metaphor in Plath's writings – the presence of Holocaust imagery, with Plath developing an absurd fiction of her father as a Nazi and self-identifying with a Jewess delivered to the barbaric and implacable cruelty of an extermination camp. Plath creates a terrifying environment of war through her vivid descriptions of the “Polish city/scraped by the roll/of wars, wars, wars,” the undulating, repetitive sound creating an intensely oppressive sense of squalor. Metonymic symbols such as the swastika tap directly into the horror associated with the Holocaust, and her speculative descriptions of herself as "like a Jew" or "a bit of a Jew" suggest parallels between her own suffering and that which occurred under the Nazism, an insinuation that many critics have disputed. As Leon Wieseltier has argued, “Auschwitz bequeathed to all subsequent art perhaps the most striking of all possible metaphors for the extreme, but its availability has been abused,” but Jennifer Rose establishes a distinctive connection between metaphor , fantasy and identification, and suggests that Plath is to ask a question: is an experience simply yours or must it be universal. Plath creates a phantasmatic scenario of Nazism, endowing her father with a "trimmed moustache" and "Aryan eye," becoming more and more mimetic of a typical Nazi as the poem proceeds, until she finds her father in the image of her husband, "a man dressed in black with a Meinkampf look". Through this image a sense of terror is created, comparing him not only to Hitler but periodically to the Devil (“a slit on the chin instead of a foot/ But no less a devil, no”) and a vampire (“The vampire who said to be you / And drank my blood for a year") brought home through expression