Things Fall Apart: A Comparison of Plath, Dickinson, and Bronte Anonymous 12th Grade

Throughout their poems, authors Sylvia Plath, Emily Dickinson and Charlotte Bronte convey their ideas regarding the despair they have felt throughout their lives, and in particular the concept that ‘thing fall apart’. Through a range of engaging stylistic techniques such as personification, repetition, symbolism, metaphor, alliteration, simile, homoioptoton, synecdoche, rhyme, and tone, each author, in contrasting ways, is able to explore the idea that life does not always go to plan, and things can very easily fall apart.

Through her poem Tulips, poet Sylvia Plath is able to convey her idea that when things fall apart, depression can play a major part in a person’s life, and often can evoke suicidal thoughts. Plath employs symbolism through the motif of the tulips, [flowers that [she] didn’t want, [she] only wanted to lay with [her] hands turned up and be utterly empty. Through this, Plath conveys how when things fall apart, often it’s hard to want to continue living, something that the tulips, full of life, remind the subject of. Furthermore, Plath personifies the tulips, stating that the vivid tulips eat up her my oxygen, demonizing them and conveying how the subject feels victimized by all the things in her life that have...