SYLVIA PLATH

“Snakecharmer”

Study Guide

Summary 

       In the first and second stanza, the speaker demonstrates how the creative imagination can build a visionary world, which is different from the world created by gods.  The juxtaposed verb tenses ("began" and "begins") indicate the human world that had already been created by gods and the imaginative world that the snakecharmer is going to build.  The speaker then combines the sound of the pipe, the rippling water and the coiling snake together into one spiral image, with the descriptive words: "waver," "reedy lengths" and "undulatings."

From the third to seventh stanza, the speaker explores the steps of creation.  First, the piping snakecharmer arouses snaky shapes from the green river.  Then he gradually pipes a world of snakes.  When the snakecharmer completes his creation, his snaky kingdom is compared with "Eden's navel."  And God's command in the Old Testament (Genesis 1:3), "Let there be light, and there was light," is echoed with "let there be snakes! / And snakes there were, are, will be."

The eighth and ninth stanza take an unexpected turn.  Unlike God in Genesis, the snakecharmer feels tired, or bored, and destroys what he has just created.  The speaker uses a weave metaphor ("fabric," "cloth," "warp," and "weft,") to illustrate how the snakecharmer unknits his invention little by little.  By putting away his pipe and closing his eyes, the snakecharmer finishes his creation with a circular effect that ends where it begins, since he begins his "snaky sphere / With moon-eye, mouth-pipe," and ends when he "Puts up his pipes, and lids his moony eye." 

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Pictorial Background 

       Henri Rousseau's The Snake Charmer was inspired by Robert Delaunay's mother, who commissioned the painting with her own reminiscences of her visit to India.  However, the painting itself reveals Rousseau's vision of a corner in the exotic landscape, where the fantastical flowers and verdant trees and grasses are bathed in warm moonlight.  The snakecharmer plays a small pipe to the gigantic, intoxicated, and even frightful snakes, leading them into exciting dances.  The unfamiliar birds in the tree and the pink flamingo show that dreams reinvent animals as well as plants, for the common and bizarre are combined together.  And the objects suggest an imaginary pastiche in our subconscious world, rather than a real landscape.  Everything in the picture is beautifully ordered and lucid.  The trees, the birds, the flamingo, and the snakecharmer, all have their characteristic shapes.  Yet the impenetrable foliage and the halted pose of the animals create a haunting atmosphere.  The painting thus illustrates a mixture of tranquility and a notion of menace. 

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Form and Diction 

       The poem is in terza rima with interlocking rhyme scheme of imperfect rhymes, until the last two stanzas break down the rhyme scheme to reflect the snakecharmer's dissolving world.  Also, the three-line stanzas, the run-on lines and the enjambment from stanza to stanza create a long slim image that reflect the snakecharmer's "thin pipe," the shape of snakes, and even the waving movement of water.  Key words are repeated to arouse an incantatory effect: "snake(s)" (seventeen times), "pipe(s)" (twelve times), "green" (nine times), and "water" (six times).  While the sound of "p" reflects the sound of the pipe, the "s" sound evokes the slow motion of snakes.

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Commentary 

        Sylvia Plath's ekphrastic poem transforms Rousseau's painting on the theme of the creative power of the artist.  The painting portrays a reinvented dream world of Mme. Delaunay's memories.  The landscape indicates how Rousseau uses his artistic imagination to establish a visionary land he had never seen.  Yet Plath broadens the theme into a celebration of poetic creativity, which can be destructive and creative.  The snakecharmer in the poem is characterized as a powerful creator with an allusion to God in Genesis.  However, Plath also indicates how this snaky world created by the snakecharmer is different from the human world created by gods.  The snakecharmer invents snakes—the dark side of the world.  He can produce a new life as he wants, and then command it to disappear as he wishes.  From creation to destruction, and to the next possible creation, the poem demonstrates a cycle of artistic imagination.  It is through the imagination that the painter, the poet, and the snakecharmer, can move from nothingness to a complete creation and then erase it.

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