Gail, thanks for this thread!
I guess I am in the distinct minority here, in that I am a fan of Plath both early AND late. (And I think it is her life that is hysterical rather than, necessarily, the poems--but we tend to look at the poems through the prism of the life.)
I do think that the early formal apprenticeship serves her well in later poems. True, she later largely gives up meter (while retaining strong rhythms), but she retains an interest in rimes. She is a virtuoso of the slant rime, especially in intricate stanza patterns, as Lisa's post. Here is another. Not only do the stanzas go abcabc, but the whole poem hinges on only three, possibly four, consonantal rimes (ts, gs, n, t rather than ts). It is aptly entitled, "Rhyme," as in nursery rhyme, but rather darker than Mother Goose, if not than the Brothers Grimm:
Rhyme
I've got a stubborn goose whose gut's
Honeycombed with golden eggs,
Yet won't lay one.
She, addled in her goose-wit, struts
The barnyard like those taloned hags
Who ogle men
And crimp their wrinkles in a grin,
Jangling their great money bags.
While I eat grits
She fattens on the finest grain.
Now, as I hone my knife, she begs
Pardon, and that's
So humbly done, I'd turn this keen
Steel on myself before profit
By such a rogue's
Act, but--how those feather's shine!
Exit from a smoking slit
Her ruby dregs.
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