Summary
The speaker reflects that, though she expected the "you" to come back to her, and though indeed the "you" promised to return, that didn't happen. Instead, she got older, and now doesn't even remember the name of the person she loved. After all, she stresses, she probably invented their love in the first place, and the person might not even be real. As a matter of fact, the speaker says, it would have been better if she had loved a "thunderbird"—a mythical creature from various Native American folkloric traditions. After all, in the spring, the thunderbird would have returned noisily, unlike the disappeared "you." She concludes with both lines of the refrain. First, she notes that when she closes her eyes "all the world drops dead," communicating a sense that the world around her is shifting, undependable, and unreconcilable with her subjective experience. She then concludes by saying, one final time, that she thinks she's invented the poem's "you," which is, perhaps, why they've disappeared with no trace.
Analysis
While the poem's fourth stanza builds up to great heights of drama, incorporating both God and Satan into its imagery, these two closing stanzas are quieter and more conversational tonally. It feels as if Plath suddenly turns the volume down or the lights off, echoing the process described in the line "I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead." Between stanzas four and five, the poem's world seems to drop dead. We're left only with the speaker and her thoughts. The register in which she conveys these thoughts is an everyday one, quite separate from the mythical, larger-than-life world we've just emerged from. The phrase "I fancied you'd return," for instance, recontextualizes the poem's conflict, making it seem like an unremarkable instance of rejection and misunderstanding. The mundane sadness of the speaker's loss appears more quietly devastating because it follows such melodrama and noise. The use of the past tense, which Plath has only used sparingly thus far, also contributes to this conclusion's sense of quiet reflection, especially when it shifts into the past conditional ("I should have loved a thunderbird instead"). This shift in tense shows that the speaker has some distance from her subject, which means that she may be less overwhelmed, but that she's also more alone.
The poem's end leaves us with two possible interpretations. One is that the speaker has completely invented the "you," and in fact that they may even be a kind of symbol or metaphor for her madness itself. In this interpretation, they're a product of her insanity. The second interpretation, however, is that the "you" has seduced the speaker and then disappeared, causing her to doubt the truth of her perceptions and making her feel as if she's going mad. According to this interpretation, the speaker really isn't as mad as she thinks she is. She feels that the world is confusing and nonsensical because a confusing, nonsensical thing has happened to her. Plath never really tells us which interpretation to believe, and to a great extent, it doesn't matter. In either case, the speaker now feels lonely, rejected, and puzzled.
