The Full Text of “Words”
The Full Text of “Words”
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“Words” Introduction
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Sylvia Plath's "Words" ruminates on the power and limitations of language. Words, the speaker says, are like the sharp thwacks of an ax into a tree, the "echoes" of which travel far and wide. While this might give the writer a sense of power and control, words can also quickly take on a life of their own—and ultimately become freer than the person who wrote them. The poem's meditations on the way words can become independent of their creators become all the more poignant when readers consider that Plath wrote "Words" on February 1, 1963, just 10 days before she died by suicide.
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“Words” Summary
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The speaker compares words to axes. After an ax cuts into a tree, the wood reverberates, and the echoes of this ringing wood travel far and wide. They travel away from the spot the ax struck like galloping horses.
The tree's sap comes brimming to the surface of the wood much like tears well up in a person's eyes, or in the way that the water in a pond tries to return to its calm, perfectly reflective state after being disrupted by a rock that falls into it and swirls the waters around.
The speaker re-imagines this rock as a colorless skull being picked clean by underwater plants. The speaker then says that after much time has passed, they come across the words they initially compared to axes out on the road.
These words now seem withered, and though the speaker once compared them to horses, they now appear to be horses with no riders, trotting along tirelessly, even relentlessly. In the meantime, the speaker says, the depths of the pond reflect the inflexible stars above, stars that rule over the speaker's fate.
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“Words” Themes
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The Power and Limits of Writing
“Words” is about language itself. Comparing words to axes whose strokes echo far and wide, the poem highlights the sense of power and control the speaker feels when writing. At the same time, the poem implies that this feeling of mastery is short-lived: once words are written and sent out into the world, they stop belonging to the writer. Instead, they're like “riderless” horses galloping along “the road” while the writer themselves remains trapped, “govern[ed]” by forces outside of their command. The poem thus suggests that writing provides only the temporary illusion of control, as the speaker writes things that ultimately become freer than the speaker themselves ever can.
The poem begins by comparing “Words” to “Axes,” a metaphor highlighting the power of language. Just as axes cut down trees so that their wood can be made into something else, the speaker can transform raw experience into art by writing about it. The ax metaphor also implies words’ ability to hurt; words can cut—those who read them and, perhaps, those who write them.
The speaker also suggests that writing can be cathartic, describing “sap” that “wells like tears” after this ax-stroke. This image evokes the way writers may wring art out of their own pain and also might again speak to words’ power to hurt—to draw sap-like tears from those who read them.
Yet though the writer may feel power and control while writing, their words can't be contained after being written. After these ax-like words strike, a chorus of “Echoes travel[s] / Off from the center like horses.” That is, words swiftly travel away from the writer. And that aforementioned “sap” becomes like “water” in a pond trying to calm itself after a falling rock has disturbed it—another image that suggests the writer grappling to re-establish control, to make those words turn back into a “mirror” after being disrupted (this “mirror” might further speak to the way that poetry reflects truth back to the world).
The speaker goes on to re-imagine the “rock” dropped into the water as a “white skull / eaten by weedy greens.” This image again suggests that the speaker’s anxiety about their words existing without them: the living (represented by those “weedy greens”) will hungrily devour the speaker’s words even as the speaker themselves is forgotten. It’s also possible to read these lines as illustrating the way that these words may continue to nourish the living after the speaker’s death.
However readers take these images, it’s clear that the speaker’s words have taken on a life of their own. Returning to the metaphor of words as galloping horses, the speaker envisions encountering them years later “dry and riderless,” with “indefatigable hoof-taps”—still tirelessly trotting along.
That the “horses” are no longer controlled by riders implies that they’ve freed themselves of the speaker’s intentions, while the word “dry” suggests that they’ve shaken off all the “sap” and “water” from earlier in the poem. The word “dry” might also suggest that these words are lacking in humanity, perhaps, and somehow wild and mechanical at once. In any case, it’s as if the speaker sees no trace of themselves in the poems they’ve written; the writer has been erased, even as their words live on.
The speaker ends with the image of “fixed stars” being reflected “[f]rom the bottom of the pool.” This echoes the earlier image of the submerged skull, suggesting that the speaker doesn't have control over their own life. Instead, that life is “Govern[ed]” by the cosmos, something mysterious and out of reach. Thus even as the speaker’s words are free, the speaker themselves is not.
Where this theme appears in the poem:- Lines 1-20
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Line-by-Line Explanation & Analysis of “Words”
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Lines 1-2
Axes ...
... the wood rings,The poem's title, "Words," announces its subject right away: language. Readers can take the speaker to be a writer and perhaps Plath herself, though it isn't essential to do so; the important thing is the speaker's relationship to language.
The poem itself begins with a metaphor, describing "[w]ords" as:
Axes
After whose stroke the wood rings,While Plath could have chosen to describe "[w]ords" as just about anything, she chose axes—tools used for chopping down trees or splitting wood. The metaphor has a couple of different implications:
- Axes are sharp and dangerous, perhaps suggesting the potential words have to hurt (to cut) their subject.
- But axes are also powerful tools that can turn trees into lumber, which can then be used to construct just about anything. In this way, words might be seen as filled with great creative potential—as agents of meaning-making and change.
Note the pun of "wood rings" here as well:
- "Rings" most obviously refers to the reverberating sound of the ax thwacking into the tree trunk (especially since the following line describes the "echoes" of this sound). But this word also plays on the fact that trees literally have rings—lines inside their trunks that reflect how old they are.
- In a way, then, words, like axes, have the ability to reveal what is normally hidden from view—to cut into the heart of things.
However readers specifically interpret these lines, there's no denying that the speaker links writing with a sense of power and control.
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Lines 3-5
And the echoes! ...
... center like horses. -
Lines 6-11
The sap ...
... drops and turns, -
Lines 12-13
A white skull, ...
... by weedy greens. -
Lines 14-17
Years later I ...
... The indefatigable hoof-taps. -
Lines 18-20
While ...
... Govern a life.
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“Words” Symbols
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Echoes
In the poem, echoes symbolize the way that words (and their impact) may travel far and wide. Just as a single sound can produce echoes that carry into the distance, a single word can resonate across time and space. In this way, words take on a life of their own, outliving the person who put them down on paper.
At the same time, echoes might be seen to symbolize the failure of words: while echoes may ring out into the distance, they are, at the end of the day, only echoes. And when the speaker says that these echoes "travel[] / Off from the center," this perhaps suggests that something "cent[ral]," or essential, to the speaker is being lost in translation.
Where this symbol appears in the poem:- Lines 3-5: “And the echoes! / Echoes traveling / Off from the center like horses.”
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The Water/Mirror
In the second stanza, the "mirror" of the water's surface might symbolize a kind of stasis or neutrality—a state that the writer's words disrupt.
In the first stanza, the speaker compares words to axes whose sharp edges cause "sap" to well up to the surface of the wood "like tears." This image speaks to words' ability to stir up emotions.
The speaker compares this phenomenon to "water" that's been disturbed by a "rock" falling into it. Just as the rock stirs the waters, words agitate the writer's or reader's feelings (or both!). The speaker then says that the water tries to "re-establish its mirror," suggesting that the person impacted by these words is going to very quickly attempt to return to a place of calm and control—a place of reflecting the world rather than being stirred up by it.
This suggests a contradiction: although words are "indefatigable" (i.e., they are tireless and their impact can be felt for a long time after they've been written/read), in another sense their impact is quite temporary. They may stir up emotions for a few brief moments, but ultimately those emotions even out. This hints at the speaker's feelings of being stuck, as words can't really change their life, only very briefly make hidden things visible.
Where this symbol appears in the poem:- Lines 7-9: “like the / Water striving / To re-establish its mirror”
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The Skull and Greens
In the third stanza, the speaker introduces the image of a "white skull" being feasted on "by weedy greens." This image is open to a few different symbolic interpretations. On the one hand, it might symbolize the way that a writer's words sustain others long after the writer themselves has died:
- The skull, in this reading, represents the dead speaker/writer. The fact that "weedy greens"—something still alive—are feeding on the skull implies the power of words to outlive the people who write them.
- This image also suggests that words extend the life of the writer, who's able to nourish others with their words long after they themselves have ceased to exist. In this reading, the writer's words—and thus a piece of the writer themselves—live on after death.
On the other hand, the "weedy greens" might be seen as greedy readers who devour the writer's life force in their hunger for more and more writing. In this less positive reading, the image might represent the way readers pick a writer dry, gobbling up every trace of their life in an attempt to get more "words" from them.
Where this symbol appears in the poem:- Lines 12-13: “A white skull, / Eaten by weedy greens.”
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“Words” Poetic Devices & Figurative Language
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Enjambment
The poem uses a mix of enjambed and end-stopped lines to vary its tone and pacing. In the first stanza, for instance, there are two enjambed lines and three end-stopped lines:
Axes
After whose stroke the wood rings,
And the echoes!
Echoes traveling
Off from the center like horses.The poem's initial, one-word line is enjambed, giving this opening a swiftness befitting the metaphor of words as sharp, cutting objects. Visually, the first line seems almost to have been hacked off and separated from the following line, again suggesting the power words have to arrange reality. The next two lines are then end-stopped, adding emphasis to the sound of the metaphorical ringing and echoing of these words. Altogether, the mix of enjambed and end-stopped lines illustrates the command and control a writer has when wielding language.
By contrast, the second stanza uses only enjambed lines:
The sap
Wells like tears, like the
Water striving
To re-establish its mirror
Over the rockThese enjambments draw attention to the fluid way "sap" wells to the surface of the cut tree (and how tears well up in the reader/writer). It also might evoke the swift, hurried movement of that water as it tries to right itself after being disrupted by a falling rock.
Where enjambment appears in the poem:- Lines 1-2: “Axes / After”
- Lines 4-5: “traveling / Off”
- Lines 6-7: “sap / Wells”
- Lines 7-8: “the / Water”
- Lines 8-9: “striving / To”
- Lines 9-10: “mirror / Over”
- Lines 10-11: “rock / That”
- Lines 14-15: “I / Encounter”
- Lines 18-19: “While / From”
- Lines 19-20: “stars / Govern”
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Simile
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Imagery
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Metaphor
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Assonance
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Repetition
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"Words" Vocabulary
Select any word below to get its definition in the context of the poem. The words are listed in the order in which they appear in the poem.
- Sap
- Re-establish
- Encounter
- Indefatigable
- Hoof-taps
- Govern
- Fixed stars
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(Location in poem: Lines 6-7: “The sap / Wells like tears”)
A watery, sugary fluid that flows through a plant.
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Form, Meter, & Rhyme Scheme of “Words”
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Form
"Words" is made up of four quintains, or five-line stanzas. It doesn't have a traditional form such as a sonnet or a villanelle, but these short, terse stanzas and almost splintered lines (some only containing a word or two) are pretty characteristic of Plath's later poetry. The consistent stanza length evokes the sense of control that the speaker so desires, while the clipped, frequently enjambed lines create a sense of fragmentation—of that control splintering and breaking. All in all, the form creates a sense of someone trying to control something that, in fact, feels completely out of their control.
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Meter
The poem is written in free verse and therefore doesn't follow a set meter.
While this is often the case in contemporary poetry, it's worth noting that even by contemporary standards, this poem is chiseled down to an almost skeletal sparseness! And the absence of meter adds to the poem's clipped, truncated feel. For instance, the first line feels hacked off not only because of its brevity but also because the word "Axes" is made up of a stressed syllable followed by an unstressed syllable. Emphasis lands on the first half of the word and then falls away. Without a steady meter, readers are kept on edge, unsure of where the poem will go next. This, in turn, might subtly evoke the speaker's anxiety.
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Rhyme Scheme
Just as the poem avoids conventional meter, it also steers away from using a traditional rhyme scheme. While there are a couple of near end rhymes at the beginning of the poem ("rings," "traveling," and "striving" in lines 2, 4, and 8), overall the poem refuses outright musicality. Instead, the lack of rhyme seems to suggest the speaker's practical, craftsman-like relationship to language; words aren't strung together simply because they sound beautiful together but are chosen painstakingly one by one, an effort that feels especially obvious in lines where there are only one or two words.
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“Words” Speaker
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The speaker of "Words" is, most likely, a writer—someone who works with language. It's fair (though not necessary) to take the speaker as Plath herself talking specifically about her relationship to her own poetry.
The speaker is also someone whose life feels out of their control. They view their destiny as "Govern[ed]" by the cosmos (those "fixed stars"). Perhaps it's because their life feels ruled by outside forces that the speaker has such an intense relationship to words: language is something the speaker is able to exert control over, to bend and shape to their will—at least, momentarily. Yet the speaker also recognizes that this powerful tool has its limits: the words the speaker writes ultimately run "[o]ff from the center"—that is, away from the speaker themselves, and end up "riderless."
Of course, it's difficult to talk about the speaker of this particular poem without considering Plath's own mental state at the time she wrote it. The poet took her life 10 days after writing "Words," and it's fair to interpret the struggles of the speaker as reflecting issues Plath herself was grappling with in the days leading up to her death.
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“Words” Setting
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Like much of Plath's poetry, the setting of "Words" is an internal one. Rather than looking out at the world and describing literal things and places, the speaker is expressing inner thoughts and emotions through vivid imagery.
Those "Axes" aren't real axes, but rather a metaphor for words themselves; likewise, the "Water striving / To re-establish its mirror" is not an actual pond, but a metaphor for (depending on one's interpretation) the speaker or the reader of the speaker's words.
Even when the speaker says they "later [...] / Encounter[ed]" the words they wrote "on the road," they aren't describing a physical road but a figurative one—perhaps the highway of one's life, so to speak.
The "fixed stars" that "Govern a life" are also more figurative than literal; the speaker is most likely referring to astrology, to the idea that one's person is largely determined by the stars one was born under.
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Literary and Historical Context of “Words”
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Literary Context
Sylvia Plath wrote “Words” on February 1, 1963—just 10 days before her death by suicide at the age of 30. Before her death, Plath had completed writing and arranging a new manuscript of poems entitled Ariel. She didn't include “Words” in this manuscript; her husband, the English poet Ted Hughes, added it in later, while also changing the order of Plath’s manuscript before publishing it in 1965. While Plath’s earlier poems brought her a moderate amount of recognition, it was the posthumous publication of Ariel—not to mention the sensationalization of her death and marriage—that catapulted Plath into a household name.
The imagery, themes, and voice of “Words” echo many of the poems included in Plath's original manuscript. Of these, Plath’s daughter, poet Frieda Hughes, has said: “They had an urgency, freedom, and force that was quite new in her work [...] They are poems of an otherworldly, menacing landscape.” They tackle such subjects as death and rebirth, gender roles, power, and oppression.
Plath's later poetry was also influenced by the American poet Robert Lowell, whose 1959 collection Life Studies featured deeply emotional and at times culturally taboo subject matter (a good deal of which was autobiographical in nature). Likewise, Plath was influenced by (and in turn influenced) her fellow American poet Anne Sexton, who was grappling with similarly autobiographical (and taboo) material.
It's for this reason that Plath is often considered, along with Lowell and Sexton, a Confessionalist poet. That being said, it's important not to read Plath’s speakers as mere projections of herself; to do so undermines the complexity of the voices in her poems, which can be interpreted in often conflicting ways.
Historical Context
Plath struggled with mental illness throughout her life, and in the months leading up to her suicide was in the middle of a particularly bad depressive episode. While many of her last poems, including “Words,” attest to her state of mind, Plath was also fighting hard to get her depression under control; in the final days of her life, Plath was open with her doctor and her therapist about her struggles and had been prescribed an anti-depressant.
Readers can see Plath’s contradictory desire for both life and death in the different published versions of Ariel. While Hughes's 1965 arrangement of the Ariel poems ended with the more emotionally resigned outlook of “Words,” Plath had intended for the manuscript to end with the more hopeful (though still ambivalent) "Wintering." As Frieda Hughes wrote in the forward to the Restored Edition of Ariel:
[Plath] had described her Ariel manuscript as beginning with the word ‘Love' and ending with the word 'Spring’, and it was clearly geared to cover the ground from just before the breakup of [Plath’s and Hughes’] marriage to the resolution of a new life, with all the agonies and furies in between.
In other words, even as Plath was struggling against the depression that would eventually overcome her, she was working towards and dreaming of the future, and her poetry from this time deftly captures these opposing states of mind.
It's also important to note that although Plath’s work is too often read almost exclusively through the lens of her suicide, the death suggested by the “white skull” in this poem doesn't have to be interpreted literally. Plath was interested in astrology and tarot, which the “fixed stars” of the final stanza might allude to.
Plath’s specific "sun sign" was Scorpio, a “fixed” sign. In astrology, “fixed” signs are signs that are determined and immoveable. The Scorpio sign is also associated with death, and with the Death card in tarot. In both cases, death isn’t meant to be taken literally but is rather a symbol for transformation and rebirth, for unconscious influences, and for the unknown. All of these were important aspects of Plath’s work, and an understanding of these influences enriches the poem.
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More “Words” Resources
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External Resources
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Plath's Life and Work — A biography of the poet and additional poems via the Poetry Foundation.
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A Reading of the Poem — Listen to "Words" read aloud.
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The Poet's Voice — Get a sense of Plath's own reading voice in this recording of her reading from Galway Kinnell's poem, "Flower Herding Pictures On Mount Monadnock."
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Foreword to Ariel — Check out the foreword to the Restored Edition of Ariel, written by the poet's daughter, Frieda Hughes.
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LitCharts on Other Poems by Sylvia Plath
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