How long can love last of it is never given in return? In Sylvia Plath’s “Mad Girl’s Love Song” the speaker illustrates the deeply romantic and desperately longing feelings of a woman as she obsesses over an impossible and unrealistic love. Through the use of repetitive internal cognition and implicative word choice, the speaker’s vision of love begins to take new shape and direction as she realizes the inexistence of her lover and his return to her. Having been seduced by her lover and for an eternity believing that they were forever meant to be together, she upheld the idea that their love was real until she ultimately finds it to be something much less as she sees his lack of affection for her in his failure to return. Speaker shows a kind of obsession in her unrealistic love of an unnamed figure who has left her. The speaker’s continuous repetition of the way that her lover makes her feel whenever she thinks of him, constantly brings the reader back to the speaker’s obsession. Guarded by parenthesis the speaker says to herself “I think I made you up inside my head” and that as “[She] shut[s] her eyes and all the world drops dead.” Reoccurring multiple times within the narrator’s speech these phrases support the idea of the narrator’s obsession with her lover. For the speaker it’s just the mere thought of him that will bring the world to a halt and everything just seems to stop for her. Going through her words as she paints her thoughts of her lover there is no doubt that she feels strong desire to be with him. She goes so far as to saying that with him in her heart “God topples from the sky” and “hell’s fires fade”, as if he is all she needs in life. Not even the idea of religion and God, a figure seen as an everlasting all powerful being, can compare to the faith that he brings her. As he topples God he topples Satan as well when “exit seraphim and Satan’s men. The speaker believes that her love for him is everything she needs and that she will wait. In her eyes he has the ability to destroy all evil in her life and chase out the devil. Not only that but she would no longer have need for a faith or religion because he would instead be held up as her God. She aggrandizes this unknown subject as being so mystical that “[she] dreamed that he bewitched her into bed” as if like a young girl as she is deflowered. The speaker knows that he had mesmerized or cast a spell over her as she imagines him. Completely under his spell the speaker can’t think of him other than being something holier and more magical than anything in the world. Enchanted by his spell and after all of her declared everlasting love for her lover, something within the speaker’s tone shifts once she reaches the last stanza of the poem. All throughout the poem the speaker is expressing her deep love and hopeful return of her lover but, after all her proclamations of longing and the need for her to have her lover with her once again, the speaker progresses to a sarcastic annoyance in her tone, directed towards the subject or person who she is declaring her love to. Awoken from her enchantment the speaker finally
