Edge

Plath puts her poem into 10 couplets (stanzas containing two lines). The fixed stanza length tips the Fate Versus Free Will balance toward the former, with the predetermined stanza length reflecting the inevitable destiny of the woman. The woman’s “illusion of a Greek necessity” (Line 4) puts her on the irrevocable path toward death, and the couplets produce a form that inevitably produces stanzas with two lines.

Through diction, Plath’s speaker drops hints that the woman’s belief in her fate is a misperception or a fantasy, and similarly, the couplets, inevitably transgress the idea of a neat, self-contained two-line stanza. Six of the seven first stanzas end in the middle of a sentence or clause: They’re enjambments, so the line doesn’t break with a natural grammatical pause. The sudden drop to not only another line but also another stanza indicates that the stanzas are illusory. They give the impression of organization, but they can’t contain the speaker’s full thoughts.

The meter is free verse, so Plath isn’t obligated to follow any predetermined pattern of stressed and unstressed syllables. The open meter also favors the concept of free will.