Blog: Holyrood Palace Scotland

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.”

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