Pursuit

I know we have already gone over a good deal of Sylvia Plath's work, but I find her to be such a beautiful writer, that I can never leave her work unread for very long. I was thumbing back through our Collected Poems book and found an early poem of her's called Pursuit.

Dans le fond des forêts votre image me suit.

RACINE

There is a panther stalks me down:

One day I'll have my death of him;

His greed has set the woods aflame,

He prowls more lordly than the sun.

Most soft, most suavely glides that step,

Advancing always at my back;

From gaunt hemlock, rooks croak havoc:

The hunt is on, and sprung the trap.

Flayed by thorns I trek the rocks,

Haggard through the hot white noon.

Along red network of his veins

What fires run, what craving wakes?

Insatiate, he ransacks the land

Condemned by our ancestral fault,

Crying: blood, let blood be spilt;

Meat must glut his mouth's raw wound.

Keen the rending teeth and sweet

The singeing fury of his fur;

His kisses parch, each paw's a briar,

Doom consummates that appetite.

In the wake of this fierce cat,

Kindled like torches for his joy,

Charred and ravened women lie,

Become his starving body's bait.

Now hills hatch menace, spawning shade;

Midnight cloaks the sultry grove;

The black marauder, hauled by love

On fluent haunches, keeps my speed.

Behind snarled thickets of my eyes

Lurks the lithe one; in dreams' ambush

Bright those claws that mar the flesh

And hungry, hungry, those taut thighs.

His ardor snares me, lights the trees,

And I run flaring in my skin;

What lull, what cool can lap me in

When burns and brands that yellow gaze?

I hurl my heart to halt his pace,

To quench his thirst I squander blook;

He eats, and still his need seeks food,

Compels a total sacrifice.

His voice waylays me, spells a trance,

The gutted forest falls to ash;

Appalled by secret want, I rush

From such assault of radiance.

Entering the tower of my fears,

I shut my doors on that dark guilt,

I bolt the door, each door I bolt.

Blood quickens, gonging in my ears:

The panther's tread is on the stairs,

Coming up and up the stairs.

It is a much more overt poem than the other work we have read, but the power of the language really captures me. The panther as an image for patriarchy is frightening. It makes me think of the battle against, as Plath puts it "ancestral fault". The feminist struggle has such deep roots, so as to be traced back to the way humans were in pre-civilization. The panther is a terrifying predator (any thoughts on an essentialist argument at play here?) At the end, the speaker has a tragic acceptance when the voice "waylays me, spells a trance". Her "dark guilt" is within her submission to the panther's predacity. But still it wants more. It wants to puncture the room in which she has locked herself in. The last line is chilling and foreboding. What do you think of this poem? Any readings that differ from mine?

Also, does anyone know what the quote at the beginning means?