Wuthering Heights

Analysis of the works of the Confessional poets, such as Sylvia Plath and Robert Lowell, sometimes disproportionately relies on biographical context; this tendency is even more pronounced in the case of Plath, with her deeply personal subject matter and history of clinical depression. However, though Plath’s poems draw from her experiences, they are works of artifice and craft. Plath uses the intensely personal to deliberately dive into the universal, making her themes identifiable. In “Wuthering Heights,” the biographical context of the poet having depression and an increasingly fraught marriage is transformed into the experience of the universal isolated self. The speaker of the poem is the only human in the landscape, which immediately establishes their loneliness. The landscape is described in terms of how it frames and menaces the speaker, as seen in the first line itself: “The horizons ring me like faggots” (Line 1, emphasis added). Instead of being a part of the landscape, the speaker’s self is in opposition to the horizon, the moor, and the sheep. Throughout the poem, the speaker uses multiples where one would suffice, such as “horizons” (Line 1), “distances” (Line 6), and “solitudes” (Line 29). The sheep, the “grasstops” (Line 10), the wheel ruts all exist in multitudes.