Classic and Contemporary Poetry: Explained

"The Hermit at Outermost House" by Sylvia Plath offers an exquisite meditation on individual resilience against the unyielding forces of nature and destiny. The hermit, a figure often associated with wisdom and solitude, becomes a site of enduring strength and even rebellion in Plath's narrative. While the elemental gods may have presided over humanity with their "stone-head" and "claw-foot," their power stops at the hermit's doorsill. With spare, evocative language, the poem manifests the tension between the irresistible might of nature and the indomitable spirit of a solitary man.

The opening lines "Sky and sea, horizon-hinged / Tablets of blank blue" establish the dominion of the great gods. They are vast and seemingly eternal; however, the poem immediately contradicts this by asserting that even these colossal forces "couldn't, / Clapped shut, flatten this man out." The hermit remains unbowed. He is not subject to their "rock-bumping" and "claw-threat," highlighting his refusal to conform to their dominion.

It's fascinating how Plath engages with the dualities of human experience-strength and vulnerability, resistance and surrender, meaning and emptiness. The gods have "endured / Dourly the long hots and colds" as immutable entities, but they seem almost perplexed by the hermit's inexplicable resilience. Why does he sit "Laugh-shaken on his doorsill," unafraid of their grandeur?

The line "Backbone unbendable as / Timbers of his upright hut" introduces the hermit's secret: a resolute sense of self that is architecturally reinforced by his very abode. His house, simple yet "upright," mirrors his character. If his home stands, so does he; the timbers and backbone become metaphors for each other. And in a world where "Hard gods were there, nothing else," the hermit manages to "thumb out something else."

The poem subtly transitions from the hardness of rocks and claws to a "certain meaning green," an ambiguous phrase that might refer to life, nature, or perhaps a sense of hope and renewal. The hermit withstands the elemental gods not by strength alone but by aligning himself with a different kind of force, one that is "verged on green." The concluding image of "Gulls mulled in the greenest light" evokes a moment of stasis, where time and elemental power seem to pause, albeit temporarily, in reverence to the hermit's resilience.

In "The Hermit at Outermost House," Sylvia Plath showcases the perennial struggle between humans and the forces much larger than themselves, a theme she explores elsewhere but which here finds a quiet kind of triumph. The poem posits that even when confronted with the daunting, eternal forces of nature or fate, the individual spirit has the capacity for enduring resistance. And in that resistance, there lies an undying green-a seed of something undefinable yet profoundly human.

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