The Rival — Key Facts
General
- Author★
- Sylvia Plath
- Title★
- The Rival
Dates
- Year written★
- c. 1961
- Year published
- 1971, in the posthumous collection Crossing the Water (Faber & Faber / Harper & Row)
Locations
- Geographical reference in poem
- Africa is mentioned to suggest the rival's physical distance offers the speaker no relief; his influence reaches her regardless of how far away he travels.
People
- Biographical subject (widely interpreted)
- Many scholars interpret the rival as Ted Hughes, Plath's husband, whose perceived emotional coldness and infidelity informed much of her late poetry.
- Speaker
- A first-person speaker widely identified with Plath herself, who addresses the rival with controlled fury and a sense of psychological suffocation.
Structure
- Poetic form★
- Free verse lyric poem composed of four tercets (three-line stanzas), with no strict rhyme scheme but strong use of imagery and direct address.
- Tone
- Bitter, accusatory, and controlled; the speaker addresses the rival directly in second person, creating an atmosphere of cold resentment.
- Central extended metaphor
- The rival is persistently compared to the moon: beautiful yet cold, reflective rather than self-generating, and capable of exerting a destructive gravitational pull on the speaker.
Themes
- Destructive rivalry★
- Emotional coldness and indifference
- Suffocation and psychological harm
- Death and entombment