This poem by Sylvia Plath was written in 1959 and gave name to her first collection of poems The Colossus and Other Poems in which it is already included. This collection was published in 1960 and since this moment she was recognized as a young new talent because of her poetry techniques. Regarding some biographical data, we should take into account that Otto Plath, that is Sylvia’s father, died after a long period of untreated diabetes when she had just eight years old. Facing the death of someone you love is not something easy to deal with for an eight-year-old girl; she was strongly affected by the loss of her father. Many of her poems were influenced by her father’s death. For instance, this poem seems to make a tribute to the legacy and memory of Plath’s deceased father, a poem dealing with the loss of someone who was important for the speaker. The poem is divided into six stanzas, five lines each. It recounts a current day in the life of a person who takes care of a statue, for instance, she describes many cleaning and repairing processes. From the beginning of the poem up to the first half of the poem (until the fifth stanza) there is a long extended metaphor for a woman who is suffering the loss of someone she really loved, in this case her father, symbolized by the colossus, a statue which represented a deceased person in the ancient era and was meant to evoke the individual's presence as well as his absence. In this first part of the poem, she attempted to reconstruct her father’s absence which strongly increases in her mind. She is emotionally affected by his death and it is shown throughout the poem. By contrast, at the second half of the poem (the last two stanzas) denote the unhealthy situation she is going through, for instance, she is attached to the past and she does not find a way other than living in that way, trying to recover the loss of her father, living in dark as she already mentions (“my hours are married to shadow”). The speaker of the poem is a first person speaker, probably Plath herself addressing to her own father, in this case to his memories. The repetition of the personal pronoun “I” throughout the poem serves as clear evidence to state a first person speaker. Considering rhyme and rhythm, this poem does not follow any specific pattern. It is characterized by the use of free verse although all the stanzas are formed by five lines each. This regular and tidy appearance of the poem resembles the way the speaker of the poem is trying to collect and tidy up all the broken pieces of this colossus’s statue. Besides, there is no rhyme in the poem since Plath doesn't use any of the typical poetic techniques like assonance or alliteration among others. We could say that the poem acquires the form of a conversation, and hence it has a conversational tone. The imagery used in the poem and the lack of those poetic conventions (conversational form) we have already mentioned above, contributes to make this poem an intimate and personal one. Syntactically, there are several points in the poem which visually breaks the tidiness described above when referring to meter. As an example, in line 17, it appears a caesura or a pause just before she directly addresses her father: A blue sky out of the Oresteia
Arches above us. O father, all by yourself By doing so, Plath highlights the importance of those words, referring specifically to her father since he is actually the main topic during the whole poem. She wanted us to focus on that concrete part of the line so she uses this technique (caesura) to emphasize these key words in the poem. She explicitly states “O father” which undoubtedly In addition, the structure of the poem is broken in more parts. For instance, we find some stanzas continues in the transition on the following stanza, as in lines 19-22 and lines 24-27: Lines 19-22I open my lunch on a hill of black cypress.
Your fluted bones and acanthine hair are littered In their old anarchy to the horizon-line.
It would take more than a lightning-stroke | Lines 24-27Nights, I squat in the cornucopia
Of your left ear, out of the wind, Counting the red stars and those of plum-color.
The sun rises under the pillar of your tongue. | By these visually broken parts on the poem, it acquires the form of a fractured poem, resembling the shattered pieces or remnants of the statue, the colossus, and also representing Plath’s damaged and disturbed psyche, broken because of her father’s loss. Regarding vocabulary and terminology, she uses some hyphenation (“mule-gray”, “pig-grunt”) just to transmit the terms in her own words to the reader. These neologisms help to perceive the sounds of the animals in our minds as well as the image of the animals too.
In the first two lines, the speaker is attempting to collect and piece the different parts of this broken colossus. The colossus is a metaphor used to refer to her father during the whole poem; as the colossus broke into many pieces and felt into the ground, so did her father when he died. She feels frustrated when trying to fix all the pieces into which her father had become once he is dead. It is impossible to recover something that is already lost forever, that is, dead. The imagery in these two lines, mainly the colossus in this case, reflects that something that was quite majestic and grandiose in the past suddenly broke into millions of pieces that could now be hardly mended.
The frustration of the speaker when realizing the difficulty of this task is shown at the very beginning (“I shall never get you put together entirely”). This is a clear metaphor for death; words like “piece” or “glue” constitutes the image of someone trying to fix all the remnants of the broken colossus (his deceased father who cannot be back again having all his pieces “glued” ).
In lines 3, 4 and 5 the speaker depicted an image consisting of all kinds of animals coming out of the statue’s mouth. All the animals coming from the mouth share one characteristic: they are all “bawdy”, that is, it simulates something that is lubricious, indecently sexual, and obscene. This imagery could be linked with that of a brothel if we consider the laughter of women and men in those houses, moaning and braying. The speaker considers it as a “barnyard” because what is inside of the mouth is just animalistic, plain, and basic.
In the following stanza, it appears a kind of mockery to the fallen statue:
Perhaps you consider yourself an oracle,
Mouthpiece of the dead, or of some god or other.
There is a reference to the Oracle of Delphi, an important center of prophecy in the classic era in line 6 (“you consider yourself and oracle”). The speaker is trying to transmit that the statue was once important and impressing in the past, but nowadays it is not, and it has nothing to say (except for the animal noises coming from the mouth). Again, this is a continuation of the extended metaphor used to refer to her dead father; he was someone important and appreciated when he was alive, now he is dead nothing is left and hence, he became just a collection of broken pieces the speaker is now trying to fix them up.
However, this is not an easy task. The frustration of the speaker is exposed in lines 8,9,10 when she realizes her inability to rescue what she has lost by collecting all the pieces. In line 10, she realizes that removing the “silt” from the statue’s throat is a hopeless task and it would be a waste of time. She knows that it is completely impossible to achieve this task although she has been laboring it for 30 years. In these lines it appears again the impossibility of getting back a person who has passed away since there are some limits that could not be exceeded, that is, life and death. You cannot cross the limit, once you are dead you cannot be turned back does not matter how much efforts you make.
In the next two lines (11-12), the speaker is described as a caretaker of the statue, repairing and cleaning the statue. Furthermore, there is a reference to a very modern cleaning product (Lyson) which breaks out with all the classical references made previously. The allusion to this product denotes the difference between her herself and his deceased father: she is a woman belonging to the modern period, captured and attached this ruined, classical world of the colossus statue to which her father actually belongs because he has passed away. The simile in line 12 “I crawl like an ant in mourning” explains the fact of how small she feels in front of the pieces of the colossus: she is not capable of doing nothing to recover what she has lost, it is a huge and impossible task to achieve. The use of the term “mourning” in this line, emphasize the idea of the strong suffering produced by a great loss of some kind.
The imagery of the ruined statue appears continuously and we are given many details of the gloomy state of this statue. Mainly, it consists of intense death imagery (“skull-plates”, “tumuli”, “weedy acres”). As mentioned, all is related to death, to the loss and of her father. The use of these terms contributes to create a funeral atmosphere in which she is involved.
We have already commented that the colossus serves as a metaphor for Plath’s defunct father but it is not until line 17 when this extended metaphor is clearly explained and the reference is clear. In this line, the speaker alludes explicitly to her father:
A blue sky out of the Oresteia
Arches above us. O father, all by yourself
The fact of having a daughter mourning to the loss of her father is directly connected to another classical allusion; the Aeschylus's tragic trilogy, the Oresteia. Electra also mourned the loss of her father who was murdered and so does our speaker with her own deceased father. The blue sky in line 16 could be a reference to the reign of gods, the place where gods are, and the place where her father is supposed to be indeed.
The poem is full of ancient references. For instance, there is a reference to the Roman Forum in line 18: You are pithy and historical as the Roman Forum. The adjectives used in this sentence again deal with the idea of something who is already ancient by now (historical) and . These classical references emphasize the idea of something glorious, magnificent, which had a great splendor in the past era, but it has lost all of its value in the present days, as if it has suffered as deterioration. The process of deterioration of the statue is directly related to the deterioration of her father during the diseases he endured until he died, deteriorating himself until the point of being complete destroyed (dead) as the statue is.
In line 19, “I open my lunch on a hill of black cypress”we find some adjectives such “black” which is the particular color in a funereal background and also that she is having her lunch “on a hill of black cypress”. These terms contribute to create a funereal setting, for instance, cypresses are usually found in cemeteries.
In the following lines (20-21), the image of the ruined Forum is again depicted when stating “fluted bones and acanthine hair”. The ancient columns were fluted and acanthine in the forum, and she mixes up the image of this deteriorated columns with that of her dead bones (something particular of someone dead) and hair: Your fluted bones and acanthine hair are littered
In their old anarchy to the horizon-line.

The colossal fragments are dropped into the horizon transmitting the reader the magnificent this forum has in the past (“old anarchy”). It does not only shows an image of chaotic ruin spreading atmosphere it also helps to understand how strikingly devastating was the loss of the speaker’s father, to the point of ruining her as because of the pain she has been dealing for a while (since she was eight years old).
Lines 22-23 shows that her suffering was something bigger and more complex “than a lightning-stroke”. It could possibly be a reference to an earthquake, which originally destroyed the original Colossus of Rhode. Anyway, what the speaker is again claiming is that her father’s death was accompanied by a great devastation in her life.
We have been told what the speaker does in her day of work but in lines 24-25 what is being told is how she spends the nights. The image of a cornucopia to describe the ear canal is a symbol used by Plath to describe a thriving life. A cornucopia is a curvy, cone-shaped thing you get from the fruits of the harvest. It could also means the lack of sustenance she suffered when her father died since she had no shelter to stay in.
In the last stanza, she keeps on narrating what she does at night. The “red stars” and those of “plum-color” are images used to describe the sun rising from under the tongue of the statue. It could be understood as a reference to the taste buds. The ancient imagery is continuously present and the speaker brings back again some of this Roman Forum imagery when describing the statue’s tongue as a “pilar”: the sun rises under the pillar of your tongue.
At the end of the poem, as I have already pointed out, the speaker is trapped in darkness, she is “married” to darkness, meaning that she is so affected by her father loss that she cannot find a way to stop suffering and struggling in darkness. She feels like if she was forever tied to the depression provoked by the death of her father (“my hours are married to shadow”). The term “hours” denotes a feeling of time passing slowly, agonizing her.
The last two lines end with a little boat imagery. The Colossus was by the harbor or Rhodes so it makes sense to use this kind of imagery when dealing with the image of the colossus. The idea of scrapping a landing means that a boat has returned home:
No longer do I listen for the scrape of a keel
On the blank stones of the landing. With this imagery, she explains that she no longer waits nor hopes her father coming back to life. It is curious that the stones are blank, which actually resembles the stones in cemeteries. The saddest fact is that she is so attached to the ruins that although she knows he will never come back, she still waits. If we consider the whole poem, she is continuously insisting on putting all his broken pieces back together to life, but every day she realizes she is just wasting her time doing so because she is just trapped in the ruin of what was her father. The scene is meant to be translated into a psychological and emotional state dedicated to death.
In conclusion, this poem supports the idea of Plath’s poetry being full of ideas, images, honest and deep thoughts with no sugar-coating; images directly expressing bad things. Almost all of the images are destructively negative, which makes her poetry disturbing. She rejects hope and cruelly chooses the worst aspects in everything. She is afraid of loss as it is expressed in this poem with the loss of her father. However, those transient moments of inspiration are the ones who kept her alive. This poem is an example of Plath’s tumultuous life and how her personal conditions affected her poetry.