Plath uses personification in 'Mad Girl's Love Song', giving the stars in the ability to 'waltz' and darkness the ability to 'gallop'. In this poem, the refrains are the lines, 'I think I made you up inside my head' and 'I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead'. Two lines of the opening tercet, the first and the third, are known as refrains and are repeated alternately throughout the poem as the final lines of the following tercets. These lines consist of five tercets and a quatrain at the end. The poem is written in the villanelle or villanesque form, which contains nineteen lines. The speaker says she wished her lover was a thunderbird, a final implication that he never returned to her. At the end of the poem, the speaker compares her lover to a Thunderbird, which is a mythological bird that comes back every spring. The speaker balances imaginative imagery with more realistic seeming memories, she explains that she once knew her lover’s name and that he’d promised to return to her, but had not returned. It follows the thought process of the speaker reflecting on a lost love, and struggling to decide whether the memories and feelings associated with the love were real or imagined. “Mad Girl’s Love Song” is a poem by Sylvia Plath that explores love, heartbreak, and delusion. After her suicide, 'Mad Girl's Love Song' appeared in the afterword of the reprint of The Bell Jar. However, the poem was never republished or found in any of Plath's later collections during her lifetime. She wrote this poem as a third-year undergraduate at Smith College and described it as being one of her favorite poems that she had written. The poem explores a young woman's struggle between memory and madness. ' Mad Girl's Love Song' is a poem written by Sylvia Plath in villanelle form that was published in the August 1953 issue of Mademoiselle, a New York based magazine geared toward young women.

The bell jar sparknotes