Classic and Contemporary Poetry: Explained

In Sylvia Plath's "Medallion," the reader encounters a bronze snake, lifeless yet vibrant in its anatomical details. The poem functions as an allegory of mortality, aesthetic beauty, and the sublime horror of existence. While the poem initially may read like an observational narrative, its thematic core reveals an underlying tension between life, death, and the artistic transformation of both.

The snake is "inert as a shoelace" but still "pliable," its "jaw unhinged" in a "crooked" grin. These vivid details breathe life into an otherwise dead creature, similar to how art immortalizes its subjects. The bronze snake-already a work of art due to its material-becomes reanimated by Plath's poetic scrutiny. Its tongue is likened to a "rose-colored arrow," a symbol not only of its predatory nature but also of its remaining vestige of life-force. Hanging the snake "over my hand," the speaker is almost like a puppeteer, manipulating this creature back into the semblance of life.

As the snake catches the light, its "little vermilion eye" ignites "with a glassed flame." Here, beauty is rendered through the lens of death-quite literally through the glassy eye of the lifeless snake. This illuminating moment evokes a time when the speaker split a rock to find garnet that "burned like that." Here, we are led to understand that beauty can be latent, waiting to be discovered even in the most unsuspecting places like a rock or a dead snake.

However, this beauty is not without its disquieting aspects. The snake's underside keeps its "fire going under the chainmail," alluding to a kind of warrior beauty that is as dangerous as it is fascinating. The "old jewels smoldering there" are like coals, revealing not just the aesthetic value but also the unsettling decay, depicted later as "white maggots coil / Thin as pins in the dark bruise." The symbols of jewels and maggots juxtapose preciousness and putrefaction, highlighting the duality of existence.

Towards the end, the snake's lifeless form is described as "pure death's-metal," solidifying the connection between the physicality of death and its aesthetic transformation. The "yard-man's / Flung brick perfected his laugh," implying that the very act that killed the snake also 'completes' it as a subject of art. This chilling realization adds complexity to the earlier images of beauty; the snake is made more compelling not despite but because of its encounter with mortality.

"Medallion" is an unsettling foray into the world of beauty, decay, and the thin line that often separates the two. Plath masterfully navigates this territory, employing vivid imagery and metaphor to elevate a simple observation into an existential musing on life's inherent contradictions. In the end, we are left pondering the uneasy alliance of death and beauty, and how each grants the other a form of imperishable life through art.

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