fact that the car is also ‘ steel ’ indicates the permanence of death ; the connotations of metal being unbreakable and non-negotiable is another association of death . It cannot be reckoned with nor changed .
Plath also focuses predominantly on the concept of personifying time as an enemy draining all life of its energy and essence . In order to depict this , Plath incorporates an interesting metaphor of a ‘ most plasticwindowed city ’. The intensifying determiner ‘ most ’ reinforces the effect of the gerundive ‘ plastic-windowed ’, portraying that there is a false illusion of time ; not all is as it seems , for time is artificial . Inherently , the concept of a window and a city constructs an ideation of an outsider looking in ; a voyeuristic approach which conveys a sense of potential loneliness , as an ambiguous character watches people enjoying their time on this Earth while their own slips away , outside of their control . There is a consistent lexical field of death , constructed by dynamic verbs ‘ mourn ’ and ‘ weep ’. Plath is therefore constructing
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the ideology that death is inescapable .
Moreover , it is interesting to analyse the mode of the address of the title , which incorporates preposition ‘ to ’, in order to reinforce a sense of an epistolary structure . For the text type - a poem - this is a very unique feature , and the abstract noun ‘ time ’ ( which is indicated as the addressee ) is subsequently personified . This generates the ideology that time has a mind of its own ; the prospect of speaking or writing directly to this supposedly intangible concept allows a reader to suspend their disbelief and accept the physical presence of ‘ time ’ for the purpose of gaining a better understanding of this poem . Personification appears to be a recurring theme in this sonnet ; ‘ the lone wind raving in the gutter ’ utilises the dynamic verb ‘ raving ’ to personify the wind . This promotes the sombre mood of the text , accentuating sorrow , despair and struggle which intertwine with the lexical field of death to create a negative , deflated tone . Markedly , Plath assigns a gender to the wind , as ‘ his //
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