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
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