“I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead;
I lift my lids and all is born again.
(I think I made you up inside my head.)
The stars go waltzing out in blue and red,
And arbitrary blackness gallops in:
I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead.
I dreamed that you bewitched me into bed
And sung me moon-struck, kissed me quite insane.
(I think I made you up inside my head.)
God topples from the sky, hell’s fires fade:
Exit seraphim and Satan’s men:
I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead.
I fancied you’d return the way you said,
But I grow old and I forget your name.
(I think I made you up inside my head.)
I should have loved a thunderbird instead;
At least when spring comes they roar back again.
I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead.
(I think I made you up inside my head.)”
Summary / Analysis
“Mad Girl’s Love Song” is my favorite villanelle. The form which repeats the 1st and 3rd line alternating in each stanza, really works well in enhancing emotional impact. “Do not go gentle into that good night” by Dylan Thomas, is an example of another villanelle that uses the repetition of the form to enforce an emotional theme.
Sylvia Plath in this poem describes a woman madly in love, because she has been gaslighted. This is the reoccurring theme of “I think I made you up inside my head”. She is not just referring to making up the person entirely (through solipsism, which we will tackle later), but also dreaming up their character into something it was not. She believed he would return to her and always love her, and she realizes she might of made up that noble part of him inside her head.
When she says she shuts her eyes and the whole world drops dead, she is referring to solipsism. Solipsism is the belief that the world is just a projection of your own mind and your consciousness is the only real, true thing. As such, when she closes her eyes, there is no more world. When she opens her eyes, she recreates the world.
Plath mixes solipsism with gaslighting here, to draw on the importance of knowing what reality is. How does she know what is real and what is not, if she is capable of being gaslighted? Ultimately, she describes a woman who is losing grip of reality, because of this trauma of living in a false reality.