Sylvia Plath Vertical

“I am vertical,” begins Sylvia Plath, before she pivots and reveals her true feelings with the first line: “But I would rather be horizontal” (1). In her March 1961 poem “I am Vertical,” Sylvia Plath sets up her own coordinate plane consisting of the vertical axis and the horizontal axis. The vertical axis stands for all things human, and in the eyes of Plath, the plight of her own humanity. The horizontal axis represents the plane of the natural world, and later, comes with the darker implication of death. Plath finds fault with her native verticality, her natural state of being alive and upright and human. The tension between the vertical and the horizontal vocalizes Plath’s inability to reconcile the chaos of her inherent nature with the propriety of the natural world.
The direct interaction between the poem’s title and the first line of the poem is unique in that the title of the poem is not detached from the body. The title plays an active role and this interplay
Her first baseline of comparison is the tree: “I am not a tree with my root in the soil / Sucking up minerals and motherly love / So that each March I may gleam into leaf,” (2-4). The notion of roots in the soil connotes a sense of connection with the earth. As the roots of the tree burrow deep into the dirt, their existence is innately intertwined with that of the earth beneath them: the Earth is their lifeforce. This implies a deep, fixed connection to the natural word that no human or vertical being may ever aspire to achieve. This is the first, brief glimpse of Plath’s desire to be rooted in the earthen soil as well. The closest she can get in her current circumstances, however, would require a coffin buried several feet below ground. It is the exact opposite notion of soil feeding and nurturing the roots of a tree to