Admonition: An Analysis

Admonition is one of the less-publicized works of Sylvia. The analysis of Admonition present on internet were not as critical as those of her other works. I did read a blog on the poem which said that the poem looks into the relationship of Plath and her 'Unnamed lover' and that the poem does not really require a semiotic analysis so deep as it may destroy the meaning of the poem altogether.
However, I felt differently. The details of this work are unknown to me.  There wasn't any mention of the year of writing like most of the works of Plath are seen to have. None of Plath's timeline acknowledge it's presence in my knowledge and since a background is relevant for any analysis. I feel that the poem hasn't yet received justice.

Admonition 

If you dissect a bird

To diagram the tongue

You'll cut the chord 

Articulating song

If you flay a beast

to marvel at the mane

You'll wreck the rest

from which the fur began

If you pluck out the heart

to find what makes it move,

You'll halt the clock

That syncopates our love.

Analysis

The poem speaks of how the acknowledgement of intricacies of several phenomena which seem mysterious to the human mind may many a times deprive the phenomena of it's decor.

'If you dissect a bird' signifies the attempt to materialize the mystery behind the melody of the bird.

This examination, as Plath also mentions leads to the chord responsible for the same melody being destroyed as a simultaneous process of  the examination. A similar message is delivered in the second stanza in reference  to the mane of a beast which will result in the beast's death. The point here I feel that Plath conveys is, in both the cases, the subjects of examination, do not stay in the same state as they were before. They lose the charisma which built the mystery of the marvel in the first place.

The third stanza is where the poem draws a curtain and transitions to what seems a personal inspiration of Plath. She talks about how if examining the heart in order to know the reason it beats, will turn the whole romance of the heart into something material and more artificial. It will, in simple words, lose the meaning it had. 

The word 'our' in the last line of the last stanza is what shifts the reader's perspective from Plath expressing herself to being in conversation with someone whom she shares her 'love' with. '

'you'll halt the clock, that syncopates our love' The use of the word 'syncopate' expresses the unnatural and surprising element of love. Similar to the literary meaning and relevance of the word.

Footnote:

The Poem to me relates more to the time of Plath's life where she was being examined for her disorders. The poem,personally, seems to be directed at Hughes. It seems to have the undertone of intuition of Plath wherein she might remain the same after her treatment. She may lose 'wreck' the rest from which her thinking began; which modeled her creativity and what she is.