The landscape in Sylvia Plath’s “Winter Landscape, With Rooks” matches the emotional state of the speaker. Motion and emotion have largely come to a stop, a winter freeze. This is a time of sleep, the seeming death of winter, but it’s also a time of preparation, a moment in between the past and the future.
Motion to Stillness
The poem begins with motion, the water in the millrace, and the nature of a millrace is important. A millrace is designed to divert water from a stream and into a more narrow channel that flows under the waterwheel, turning it, and eventually turning the milling wheel. Going into the narrower channel not only controls the direction of the water but also increases its speed.
Once the water reaches the pond, it spreads out, losing both direction and momentum, and the area around the pond is frozen, “engraved in ice”. The moment of the poem is set as close to the edge of death as the world gets each year, even to the point of sundown “as the winter night comes on.”
There are enough references to show that the speaker’s state is the same as the landscape. The ice-encased reeds are “as your image in my eye” and “dry frost glazes the window of my hurt” and last is a connection with T.S. Eliot’s “The Wasteland” with “what solace can be struck from rock to make heart’s waste grow green again?”
A relationship has ended, leaving the speaker drained of energy, direction, and purpose. Where she might once have been like the water in the millrace, she is now still as the pond, and like the fen, which is neither water nor solid land, she is caught in between states. The moment is a harsh one, and yet the poem is not entirely pessimistic or without hope.
Swan and Rook
The only motion now comes from the “absurd and out-of-season” swan, and from the speaker,
“I stalk like a rook”.
Both the motion and the bird imagery connects the speaker with the swan, although the symbolism of the two birds is as contrasting as their colors. Although the blackness of the rook initially emphasizes the speaker’s own dark mood, the swan holds hope for a later day.
The swan is a rather complex symbol with both masculine and feminine imagery, tied to both the sun (Apollo) and the moon (Diana), but either way, the symbols are positive. The swan symbolizes power when in flight and serenity as it floats upon the water. Within the poem, the emphasis is on that serenity, even if such serenity seems absurd.
The water is tied to the mind of the speaker as “the clouded mind which hungers to haul the white reflection down.” There is that part of the mind that resists anything positive during such moods, but the swan remains untouched as it’s merely the reflection that the mind attacks. The swan, with its hope, creativity, and power, swims on, waiting for the time when it will come to the fore once again.
Beyond the Moment
Despite the frozen, desolate aspects of the landscape and mindscape, the water in the millrace remains as a sign of what was, and “Last summer’s reeds” are a reminder that seasons continue. Even this “bleak place” will know another spring and summer. The ice will melt. The level of the pond will rise and overflow, moving once again.
Like the water, the speaker will find direction and movement once again. The rook is a symbol of the future, augury, sometimes a dark prediction but typically as mute as the swan. Although the swan is dominant since the mind cannot drag it down, it’s not the kind of happily ever after seen in the overly sterile versions of fairly tales.
The “heart’s waste” will, indeed, “grow green again”, but T. S. Eliot’s “The Wasteland” reminds us that “April is the cruelest month. Moments of growth and rebirth, breaking forth from the ice, is natural but neither easy nor painless. Spring is a time of promise and potential, while the swan is a symbol of power and creativity, but how these things are used remains up to the individual.
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