Mad Girl's Love Song Lesson Plan

How does the structure of the poem impact the way you understand it?

Students will learn about the villanelle in a Classroom Activity later today, but for the moment, students should observe the ways that Plath uses the repeated lines to create two distinct parts of the speaker's experience—that of something like depression, and that of the loss or abandonment of a lover. They should note that the alternating stanzas focus on these two different parts of her experience, and that they come together in the last stanza, indicating, possibly, that the abandonment has resulted in depression or delusion. The repetition of the line "(I think I made you up inside my head)" also could...