Life of a Poet - Sylvia Plath

Sylvia Plath (1932 - 1963)

Born to middle class parents in Jamaica Plain, Massachusetts, Sylvia Plath published her first poem when she was eight. Sensitive, intelligent, compelled toward perfection in everything she attempted, she was, on the surface, a model daughter, popular in school, earning straight A's, winning the best prizes. By the time she entered Smith College on a scholarship in 1950 she already had an impressive list of publications, and while at Smith she wrote over four hundred poems.

Sylvia's surface perfection was however underlain by grave personal discontinuities, some of which doubtless had their origin in the death of her father (he was a college professor and an expert on bees) when she was eight. During the summer following her junior year at Smith, having returned from a stay in New York City where she had been a student guest editor at Mademoiselle Magazine, Sylvia nearly succeeded in killing herself by swallowing sleeping pills. She later described this experience in an autobiographical novel, The Bell Jar, published in 1963. After a period of recovery involving electroshock and psychotherapy Sylvia resumed her pursuit of academic and literary success, graduating from Smith summa cum laude in 1955 and winning a Fulbright scholarship to study at Cambridge, England.

In 1956 she married the English poet Ted Hughes, and in 1960, when she was 28, her first book, The Colossus, was published in England. The poems in this book, formally precise, well wrought, show clearly the dedication with which Sylvia had served her apprenticeship; yet they give only glimpses of what was to come in the poems she would begin writing early in 1961. She and Ted Hughes settled for a while in an English country village in Devon, but less than two years after the birth of their first child the marriage broke apart.

The winter of 1962-63, one of the coldest in centuries, found Sylvia living in a small London flat, now with two children, ill with flu and low on money. The hardness of her life seemed to increase her need to write, and she often worked between four and eight in the morning, before the children woke, sometimes finishing a poem a day. In these last poems it is as if some deeper, powerful self has grabbed control; death is given a cruel physical allure and psychic pain becomes almost tactile.

On February 11, 1963, Sylvia Plath killed herself with cooking gas at the age of 30. Two years later Ariel, a collection of some of her last poems, was published; this was followed by Crossing the Water and Winter Trees in 1971, and, in 1981, The Collected Poems appeared, edited by Ted Hughes.

http://famouspoetsandpoems.com/poets/sylvia_plath/biography

Contusion (1963)

Color floods to the spot, dull purple.
The rest of the body is all washed out,
The color of pearl.

In a pit of rock
The sea sucks obsessively,
One hollow the whole sea's pivot.

The size of a fly,
The doom mark
Crawls down the wall.

The heart shuts,
The sea slides back,
The mirrors are sheeted.

Edge (1963)

The woman is perfected.
Her dead
Body wears the smile of accomplishment,
The illusion of a Greek necessity
Flows in the scrolls of her toga,
Her bare
Feet seem to be saying:
We have come so far, it is over.
Each dead child coiled, a white serpent,
One at each little
Pitcher of milk, now empty.
She has folded
Them back into her body as petals
Of a rose close when the garden
Stiffens and odors bleed
From the sweet, deep throats of the night flower.
The moon has nothing to be sad about,
Staring from her hood of bone.
She is used to this sort of thing.
Her blacks crackle and drag.

Lady Lazarus (1962)

I have done it again.
One year in every ten
I manage it-----

A sort of walking miracle, my skin
Bright as a Nazi lampshade,
My right foot

A paperweight,
My featureless, fine
Jew linen.

Peel off the napkin
O my enemy.
Do I terrify?-------

The nose, the eye pits, the full set of teeth?
The sour breath
Will vanish in a day.

Soon, soon the flesh
The grave cave ate will be
At home on me

And I a smiling woman.
I am only thirty.
And like the cat I have nine times to die.

This is Number Three.
What a trash
To annihilate each decade.

What a million filaments.
The Peanut-crunching crowd
Shoves in to see

Them unwrap me hand in foot ------
The big strip tease.
Gentleman , ladies

These are my hands
My knees.
I may be skin and bone,

Nevertheless, I am the same, identical woman.
The first time it happened I was ten.
It was an accident.

The second time I meant
To last it out and not come back at all.
I rocked shut

As a seashell.
They had to call and call
And pick the worms off me like sticky pearls.

Dying
Is an art, like everything else.
I do it exceptionally well.

I do it so it feels like hell.
I do it so it feels real.
I guess you could say I've a call.

It's easy enough to do it in a cell.
It's easy enough to do it and stay put.
It's the theatrical

Comeback in broad day
To the same place, the same face, the same brute
Amused shout:

'A miracle!'
That knocks me out.
There is a charge

For the eyeing my scars, there is a charge
For the hearing of my heart---
It really goes.

And there is a charge, a very large charge
For a word or a touch
Or a bit of blood

Or a piece of my hair on my clothes.
So, so, Herr Doktor.
So, Herr Enemy.

I am your opus,
I am your valuable,
The pure gold baby

That melts to a shriek.
I turn and burn.
Do not think I underestimate your great concern.

Ash, ash---
You poke and stir.
Flesh, bone, there is nothing there----

A cake of soap,
A wedding ring,
A gold filling.

Herr God, Herr Lucifer
Beware
Beware.

Out of the ash
I rise with my red hair
And I eat men like air.

Old Ladies' Home

Sharded in black, like beetles,
Frail as antique earthenwear
One breath might shiver to bits,
The old women creep out here
To sun on the rocks or prop
Themselves up against the wall
Whose stones keep a little heat.

Needles knit in a bird-beaked
Counterpoint to their voices:
Sons, daughters, daughters and sons,
Distant and cold as photos,
Grandchildren nobody knows.
Age wears the best black fabric
Rust-red or green as lichens.

At owl-call the old ghosts flock
To hustle them off the lawn.
From beds boxed-in like coffins
The bonneted ladies grin.
And Death, that bald-head buzzard,
Stalls in halls where the lamp wick
Shortens with each breath drawn.

Summary: The poem's omniscient speaker describes the inhabitants of an Old Ladies' Home with bleak and dehumanizing detachment. In the first of the three seven-line stanzas, the fragile elderly women appear like beetles who creep out of the institution's buildings for the day. Their habits and relationships are observed in the second stanza: knitting, and children who are distant and cold as photos, with grandchildren nobody knows.

Presaging the arrival of death in the last stanza, the ladies wear black, sharded in it, but even the best black fabric is stained red and green by age. In the evening they are called in by the nurses, ghosts who hustle them off the lawn to their beds, which resemble coffins, and where Death waits.

Commentary: The poem captures the dehumanization of the institutionalized aged. The speaker observes the old ladies with a horror which, while making obvious the sadness of their plight, is predominantly a fearful rejection of the old and everything they stand for. The bonneted ladies grin in their beds, as if already ghoulishly associated with the bald-head buzzard, Death, who lurks in the halls of the home. The poem forms a chilling memento mori as well as a sad reminder of the too-frequent abandonment of the aging by the young.

Source The Collected Poems
Publisher Harper & Row
Edition 1981
Editors Ted Hughes
Place Published New York
Annotated by Belling, Catherine
Date of Entry 09/15/97

Sylvia Plath, Lady Lazarus
http://oldpoetry.com/column/65

In American culture, suicide is considered to be one of the darkest taboos. It has the particular quality of being equally gripping and repulsive. Although suicide is seen as overtly morbid, gruesome and disturbing, it has made many people famous. Sylvia Plath, the illustrious 20th century poetess, is one of them.

Sylvia Plath was born on October 27th, 1932 of two parents in a middleclass household in Boston. At a very young age, she demonstrated great literary talent and a hardworking attitude, publishing her first poem at the age of eight and maintaining a straight A record throughout all of her studies. A few days after she turned eight, her father deceased of diabetes. This event in her life is what most specialists believe to have triggered her depressive tendencies. It has also been known to have caused the poet to hate her father for the pain his death inflicted on her. Twenty-year-old Plath committed her first near-successful suicide attempt after a whole month of not being able to sleep, write or eat properly. She recovered from her nervous breakdown and met her to-be husband, renowned poet Ted Hughes, three years later. However, after having their first child, their relationship started to go stale, and finally adultery on both their parts caused their painful separation. Soon enough, Sylvia returned to her old suicidal habits.

During this feverish period of her life, Lady Lazarus and other poems of that genre were written. Lady Lazarus conveys a message about her own life, obsessions, weaknesses, and feelings. In recording her previous suicide attempts, she makes comparisons that are not always obvious to decipher or to understand without the right background information. The poem serves as a metaphor that retains a morbid sensation through its description of the author's psychological journey. This poem has always fascinated me in terms of the figurative language and the ever-precise vocabulary that is used. In light of her suicidal tendencies, while gathering the information necessary and using a decorticating method, I believe to have been able to make an estimated guess of the message Sylvia Plath intended to render when writing this poem. Take note that the entire Lady Lazarus poem can be found at the end of this essay.

Upon reading the title, a first impression is made. Plath creatively uses biblical allusion to connect the title of her poem, Lady Lazarus, to the book of John's Lazarus of Bethany. As Lazarus was resurrected from the dead, so is Plath, or Lady Lazarus, reincarnated after each suicide attempt. There is also a hint of her feministic side present in lady, a word that projects an image of a powerful woman.

I have done it again.
One year in every ten
I manage it

This first stanza acts as an introduction to the poem. It introduces the idea of suicide and death. The first verse demonstrates this. I have done it again could be translated as I have tried to kill myself again. When Plath declares One year in every ten, I manage it, she refers to the equal repartition of her near-death experiences, one per decade and one being premeditated at this stage. She specifies these later on in the poem.

A sort of walking miracle, my skin
Bright as a Nazi lampshade,
My right foot

A paperweight,
My face a featureless, fine
Jew linen.

For the times when Plath was resurrected from the dead, she refers to herself as A sort of walking miracle, which reflects the meaning of the title; Lady Lazarus is miraculously raised from the dead. She then uses the gritty and powerful comparison Bright as a Nazi lampshade to describe her skin, which designates the suicidal tyrant that lives within her, and ends up contrasting this image with the softer more subdued metaphor, a featureless, fine / Jew linen, to depict her face, which is the victim in a state of deterioration and weakness. These references to the holocaust are her way to demonstrate how she imposes, like the Nazis, her will to commit suicide on her body, which withers beneath her willpower, like the Jews. She is two different personas in this poem: the Nazis and the Jews, the strong and the weak. Between these comparisons, there are the subtle verses, My right foot / A paperweight, which are rather ambiguous. They might mean that she cannot escape these archetypes that live in her given that she feels as if she were nailed to the ground, too heavy to move or act against these. Moreover, I noticed that these objects to which she compares herself may as well be things that were on her desk or within her eyesight when she wrote this: a lampshade, a paperweight, linen clothing.

Peel off the napkin
O my enemy.
Do I terrify?

The nose, the eye pits, the full set of teeth?
The sour breath
Will vanish in a day.

These stanzas mark the beginning of the crude sarcasm the author uses throughout Lady Lazarus. Plath dares her enemy to Peel off the napkin. Although she is speaking to one distinct person in the poem, this is an invitation to everyone who wants to observe her with all the awe and disgust this performance inspires. She does, though, mention later that there is a charge to watch her, as if she were a freak show. To the enemy and to those who are willing to watch, she asks the rhetorical question, Do I terrify? We know as the reader, the audience, that the answer is yes. Most of us are terrified by such a sight, by suicide. She also wants us to look at her face especially, which she had characterized as the victim earlier: The nose, the eye pits, the full set of teeth? The speaker's appearance is infallible evidence to her condition; death emanates from her face and bears a certain walking dead quality. Although her face is now wan and drained, she is not beaten yet. In the last two verses, she reassures us derisively that she can get over that within a day, restoring her original beauty, strength and healthy state of mind.

Soon, soon the flesh
The grave cave ate will be
At home on me

And I a smiling woman.
I am only thirty.
And like the cat I have nine times to die.

This is Number Three.
What a trash
To annihilate each decade.

In this section, the first stanza is a continuation of the idea of the restoration of her original self, a smiling woman. The grave cave signifies death, or Plath may also be referring to the earth-bottomed crevice in the cellar of her house where she attempted suicide at twenty with sleeping pills. Next, she states her age with the pride of someone who has a lifetime ahead of them and makes a witty comparison with the cat and herself, who both have nine times to die. Then, in a boastful tone, she declares that This is Number Three. The capitalization of Number Three is effective in blowing out the proportions of this event, as if the act of committing suicide were a big and exciting occasion, which in fact translates Plath's position on the matter. Then, as quickly as she swelled with pride, her self-disgust manifests itself in What a trash / To annihilate each decade. These verses also confirm the fact that she nearly died at ten in a drowning accident, that she tried to kill herself at twenty with the sleeping pill incident, and that she will be trying again at thirty, all these being at equal intervals, the markers of each decade.

What a million filaments.
The peanut-crunching crowd
Shoves in to see

Them unwrap me hand and foot
The big strip tease.

These million filaments could be a physical representation of her guilt, its invading quality. The verse acts as a continuation of the self-disgust expressed in the previous stanza. The peanut-crunching crowd designates everyone really, including the doctors, Plath's family, and the reader. Her self-aggrandizing gestures invite attention, and yet we, as the readers, are to be ashamed of ourselves if we accept the invitation. The crowd is aggressive as it shoves in to see, and its interest is lascivious as they undress her, unwrap her; it is The big strip tease. This crowd also seeks an illicit source of arousal, if not from her naked body, then from her naked psyche. She offers herself to the crowd like a vulgar piece of meat.

Gentlemen, ladies

These are my hands
My knees.
I may be skin and bone,

Nevertheless, I am the same, identical woman.
The first time it happened I was ten.
It was an accident.

The usage of Gentlemen, ladies here is purely satirical and is meant to mock the audience. We are still, in fact, the same shameful peanut-crunching crowd as before. Plath acts as a guide at this particular point as she demonstrates her features: These are my hands / My knees. She emphasizes the fact that she has been reduced to skin and bone[s], yet she reassures us that she is the same, identical woman in spite of her altered physical appearance; she has not changed. Then, as any good guide would do, she supplies a historical record of past events. She mentions the swimming incident that nearly cost her her life when she was ten. This was the first time she skimmed death. It was purely accidental.

The second time I meant
To last it out and not come back at all.
I rocked shut

As a seashell.
They had to call and call
And pick the worms off me like sticky pearls.

Naturally, Plath doesn't forget to speak of the second time she nearly died, at twenty, when she tried to kill herself with sleeping pills. She had rock shut // As a seashell in the earth-bottomed crevice in the cellar of her house. She was terribly well hidden like the second verse of the second stanza suggests. Her mother and brother found her only three days later, practically dead, with earthworms crawling over her, as mentioned in the last verse.

Dying
Is an art, like everything else,
I do it exceptionally well.

I do it so it feels like hell.
I do it so it feels real.
I guess you could say I've a call.

In the first stanza of this excerpt, Plath considers dying like an exploit of sorts, and brags about the fact that she is talented in doing so as in anything else: Dying / Is an art, like everything else, / I do it exceptionally well. This is where we are shown her perfectionist and masochistic selves surfacing and intertwining as she makes sure that she is real about it: I do it so it feels like hell. / I do it so it feels real. It has become an obsession for her at this point, like a call or something related to fate.

It's easy enough to do it in a cell.
It's easy enough to do it and stay put.
It's the theatrical

Comeback in broad day
To the same place, the same face, the same brute
Amused shout:

In these following stanzas, Plath provides an insight on how easy she finds it is to commit suicide: It's easy enough to do it in a cell. / It's easy enough to do it and stay put. In her case, you could nearly say it accomplishes itself on its own as Plath summons death upon herself so fervently. Next, she describes the disappointment she feels when she realizes she is still in this world, as it is only the theatrical // Comeback in broad day / To the same place, the same face, the same brute / Amused shout. It is another act for the same harassing audience to attend and observe.

'A miracle!'
That knocks me out.
There is a charge

For the eyeing of my scars, there is a charge
For the hearing of my heart
It really goes.

As she is resurrected, the crowd is in awe and entertained but completely indifferent to the fact that she is alive still. They're watching a magic trick being performed: 'A miracle!' They are amused by the fact that death nearly took her from them. She is a martyr, unattainable and expensive as she needs to charge them For the hearing of [her] heart or her naked psyche. This kind of business really goes, says the author. Plath, here, makes a connection to the fact that the holocaust business has become a highly profitable entertainment industry over the years.

And there is a charge, a very large charge
For a word or a touch
Or a bit of blood

Or a piece of my hair or my clothes.
So, so, Herr Doktor.
So, Herr Enemy.

In these stanzas, Plath portrays herself as a parody while the people treat her as if she were a martyr, like Jesus or such personages. This unserious depiction is found in the following sardonic verses: And there is a charge, a very large charge / For a word or a touch / Or a bit of blood // Or a piece of my hair or my clothes. They very crudely ridicule the commercialization of Jesus, religious entities and even the holocaust, as I mentioned. Subsequently, there are other holocaust-related elements, such as the usage of German terms, Herr and Doktor, which mean 'mister' and 'doctor' respectively. She turns away from the audience to address a single person, the 'Nazi Doktor,' which turns out to be the enemy from the beginning of the poem. She taunts and pokes fun at him using mock movie talk. The enemy, thus far unspecified, is either a German male figure of authority, a scholar like Otto Plath, her father, who thinks of the speaker as his pure gold baby or she may simply be referring to doctors in general who keep reviving her after each fruitless attempt.

I am your opus,
I am your valuable,
The pure gold baby

That melts to a shriek.
I turn and burn.
Do not think I underestimate your great concern.

Still addressing herself to the Doktor, she is defining what she represents for him. Otto Plath may be whom she's talking to, as she says she is his valuable, The pure gold baby. Or yet still, the typical doctor may see her as an opportunity to receive gratitude, to become locally famous, or to do a good deed in bringing her back to life. In her ironically pretentious way, the image Plath creates of herself is overblown as usual. Whether she is the daughter or the patient, she is either one's masterpiece, an opus, a pure gold baby, and this exhausts her to a point where she melts to a shriek, turn[s] and burn[s]. Finally, with more diplomacy, she reassures him that she knows he's trying to do what he thinks is best for her: Do not think I underestimate your great concern. However, this polite impression fails when we take into consideration the sarcastic tone behind it. In reality, she does not want anyone to save her or to have pity on her.

Ash, ash
You poke and stir.
Flesh, bone, there is nothing there

A cake of soap,
A wedding ring,
A gold filling.

In this passage, she is growing vengeful as her tone becomes grittier. Plath is revolted by her own dehumanization and she would love to triumph over the enemy after she dies. She has burnt and reduced herself to ashes and nothingness in the first stanza shown here. This may allude to the use of an oven perhaps, as this would hint to the method by which she would try to kill herself in the future. Although nothing much remains of her at this point, she knows the enemy will be profiting from her death. She expresses this as if she were going to be made into merchandise, which once again refers to the Nazis, who manufactured their victims hair, skin, bones, rings and fillings. Historians are not certain that Nazis made cakes of soap with them, but they did, however, make wedding rings and gold fillings.

Herr God, Herr Lucifer
Beware
Beware.

Out of the ash
I rise with my red hair
And I eat men like air.

In an access of anger and grandiosity, she warns the great powers from above and below: Herr God, Herr Lucifer, Beware, Beware. Additionally, she acknowledges no power greater than herself, as Plath accomplishes her own resurrection, unlike the biblical miracle of Lazarus of Bethany. We can clearly see how she grows stronger by the end of the poem as she rises Out of the ash like a phoenix with red hair. Finally, with her concluding and blatantly feministic verse, I eat men like air, she declares that she has defeated all her enemies, all the men in her life: the doctors who kept reviving her, the businessmen who sold her body to the crowd, and perhaps her father. In concluding this poem, Sylvia Plath finally has triumphed as her own puppet and puppet master.

On February 11th, 1963, a few months after having written Lady Lazarus, Sylvia Plath committed suicide successfully by inhaling the gas from her stove. In the process, she immortalized herself and became extremely popular after her death with her collection of poetry Ariel, which was written within the last few months of her life and published two years after her death. The famous poem Lady Lazarus, that had made a valid prediction of her destiny, can be found in this collection. Although she was never truly acclaimed as a writer during her lifetime, her much-anticipated compilation of poetry, Collected Poems, was finally released in 1981 and in 1982 won a rarely posthumously-awarded Pulitzer Prize. In spite of her self-depreciating tendencies, there is no doubt that Sylvia Plath would have been extremely proud.

QUOTES BY SYLVIA PLATH

And by the way, everything in life is writable about if you have the outgoing guts to do it, and the imagination to improvise. The worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt.

Apparently, the most difficult feat for a Cambridge male is to accept a woman not merely as feeling, not merely as thinking, but as managing a complex, vital interweaving of both.

But life is long. And it is the long run that balances the short flare of interest and passion.

Dying is an art, like everything else. I do it exceptionally well. I do it so it feels like hell. I do it so it feels real. I guess you could say I've a call.

How frail the human heart must be - a mirrored pool of thought.

I am too pure for you or anyone.

I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead; I lift my eyes and all is born again.

I talk to God but the sky is empty.

I took a deep breath and listened to the old bray of my heart. I am. I am. I am.

If neurotic is wanting two mutually exclusive things at one and the same time, then I'm neurotic as hell. I'll be flying back and forth between one mutually exclusive thing and another for the rest of my days.

Is there no way out of the mind?

Kiss me and you will see how important I am.

Nothing stinks like a pile of unpublished writing.

Perhaps when we find ourselves wanting everything, it is because we are dangerously close to wanting nothing.

The blood jet is poetry and there is no stopping it.

There must be quite a few things that a hot bath won't cure, but I don't know many of them.

Widow. The word consumes itself.

Sibyllene and I had a brief conversation regarding Plath's repeated attempts at suicide. My thoughts were that all the suicide attempts were cries for help, not a desire to die. She succeeded by inhaling gas which is unusual in itself and I would think not the easiest way to commit suicide. This was a thought from sibyllene.

sibyllene
That might be an interesting question for someone to raise in your upcoming thread - that connection between artists and self-destruction. What is the link?

Wow...this is very interesting!

Sylvia thanks for all this, never knew about this, never heard of her..!

I am truly impressed , and touched.

Wow..you made so much work of it. Much more than I! I will read it all, because it is very interesting. I find it so sad she killed herself *shakes head* such a waste of talent..but I can understand why. Many poets "suffer due to life"as a German romantic writer ( think it was Goethe) said once. It seems we feel the pain of life much deeper, somehow.

I have spent the morning reading more poems by Plath. This one, Daddy, projects many emotions for her father, (died when she was 8). There is love, hate, anger, resentment, loneliness, sadness, coming to terms with his death or at least an attempt to come to terms.

Daddy

You do not do, you do not do
Any more, black shoe
In which I have lived like a foot
For thirty years, poor and white,
Barely daring to breathe or Achoo.

Daddy, I have had to kill you.
You died before I had time---
Marble-heavy, a bag full of God,
Ghastly statue with one gray toe
Big as a Frisco seal

And a head in the freakish Atlantic
Where it pours bean green over blue
In the waters off the beautiful Nauset.
I used to pray to recover you.
Ach, du.

In the German tongue, in the Polish town
Scraped flat by the roller
Of wars, wars, wars.
But the name of the town is common.
My Polack friend

Says there are a dozen or two.
So I never could tell where you
Put your foot, your root,
I never could talk to you.
The tongue stuck in my jaw.

It stuck in a barb wire snare.
Ich, ich, ich, ich,
I could hardly speak.
I thought every German was you.
And the language obscene

An engine, an engine,
Chuffing me off like a Jew.
A Jew to Dachau, Auschwitz, Belsen.
I began to talk like a Jew.
I think I may well be a Jew.

The snows of the Tyrol, the clear beer of Vienna
Are not very pure or true.
With my gypsy ancestress and my weird luck
And my Taroc pack and my Taroc pack
I may be a bit of a Jew.

I have always been sacred of you,
With your Luftwaffe, your gobbledygoo.
And your neat mustache
And your Aryan eye, bright blue.
Panzer-man, panzer-man, O You----

Not God but a swastika
So black no sky could squeak through.
Every woman adores a Fascist,
The boot in the face, the brute
Brute heart of a brute like you.

You stand at the blackboard, daddy,
In the picture I have of you,
A cleft in your chin instead of your foot
But no less a devil for that, no not
Any less the black man who

Bit my pretty red heart in two.
I was ten when they buried you.
At twenty I tried to die
And get back, back, back to you.
I thought even the bones would do.

But they pulled me out of the sack,
And they stuck me together with glue.
And then I knew what to do.
I made a model of you,
A man in black with a Meinkampf look

And a love of the rack and the screw.
And I said I do, I do.
So daddy, I'm finally through.
The black telephone's off at the root,
The voices just can't worm through.

If I've killed one man, I've killed two---
The vampire who said he was you
And drank my blood for a year,
Seven years, if you want to know.
Daddy, you can lie back now.

There's a stake in your fat black heart
And the villagers never liked you.
They are dancing and stamping on you.
They always knew it was you.
Daddy, daddy, you bastard, I'm through.

In this, I feel Plath is expressing some regrets that she has not succeeded in dying. She gives her insight into how death looks, chooses the victim, that death can be sweet or death can be mean and evil.

Death & Co.
Two, of course there are two.
It seems perfectly natural now ---
The one who never looks up, whose eyes are lidded
And balled¸ like Blake's.
Who exhibits

The birthmarks that are his trademark ---
The scald scar of water,
The nude
Verdigris of the condor.
I am red meat. His beak

Claps sidewise: I am not his yet.
He tells me how badly I photograph.
He tells me how sweet
The babies look in their hospital
Icebox, a simple

Frill at the neck
Then the flutings of their Ionian
Death-gowns.
Then two little feet.
He does not smile or smoke.

The other does that
His hair long and plausive
Bastard
Masturbating a glitter
He wants to be loved.

I do not stir.
The frost makes a flower,
The dew makes a star,
The dead bell,
The dead bell.

Somebody's done for.

This is TOO profound..
much pain..much suffering.
Memories..
gosh gosh emotions..!

Sylvia..truly thanks..Anything you add from her work..will be appreciated .

Thank you Nana. This link has a comprehensive listing of her poems.

http://www.stanford.edu/class/engl187/docs/plathpoem.html

Thanks for that !

Sibyllene
That might be an interesting question for someone to raise in your upcoming thread - that connection between artists and self-destruction. What is the link?

This site provides an in depth look at this question.

http://talentdevelop.com/articles/CTAAM.html

Excerpt
The life and suicides of Sylvia Plath and Jackson Pollock exemplify how thin the line can be between destruction and creation. Rothenberg (1990) hypothesizes that this line is crossed, from creativity to madness, when the creative expression is used primarily to control hostility rather than to create.

(Pollock died in an alcohol related one car accident, killing one other and injuring one. It seems that above statement assumes or implies that is was suicide, although I found no other statement to verify or disavow.)

REFLECTIONS ON MIRROR AND METAPHORS

Mirror by Sylvia Plath

I am silver and exact. I have no preconceptions.
Whatever I see, I swallow immediately.
Just as it is, unmisted by love or dislike
I am not cruel, only truthful
The eye of a little god, four-cornered.
Most of the time I meditate on the opposite wall.
It is pink, with speckles. I have looked at it so long
I think it is a part of my heart. But it flickers.
Faces and darkness separate us over and over.

Now I am a lake. A woman bends over me.
Searching my reaches for what she really is.
Then she turns to those liars, the candles or the moon.
I see her back, and reflect it faithfully
She rewards me with tears and an agitation of hands.
I am important to her. She comes and goes.
Each morning it is her face that replaces the darkness.
In me she has drowned a young girl, and in me an old woman
Rises toward her day after day, like a terrible fish.

In Sylvia Plath's poem "Mirror," we are addressed by an inanimate object, which sets out to define itself and its function and does so with the exactitude that is a part of its nature. It has no preconceptions because it is without memory or an ability to reason. It is omnivorous and swallows everything it confronts without making judgments that might blur, mist or distort. It is god-like in its objectivity and its incapability of emotional response. Most of the time it meditates on the opposite wall faithfully reproducing its colors and design until darkness supervenes or faces intrude. and these happenstances recur with regularity.

In stanza two the mirror becomes a perfectly reflecting lake unruffled by any disturbance. A woman bends over the lake like the mythological Narcissus, but no matter how deeply she searches she sees only her actuality or surface truth. Unlike Narcissus, the woman can not fall in love with what she sees. The candles and moon to which the woman turns are liars capable of lending untruthful shadows and romantic highlights, unlike the lake surface/mirror, which renders only faithful images. Unhappy with what she sees, the woman weeps and wrings her hands in agitation. The youth and beauty once reflected during the person's morning visits are now swallowed and drowned in the metaphorical depths of the lake, and what slowly surfaces from those depths is the terrifying fact of aging, so graphically rendered by the simile of a fish.

Metaphors

I'm a riddle in nine syllables,
An elephant, a ponderous house,
A melon strolling on two tendrils.
O red fruit, ivory, fine timbers!
This loaf's big with its yeasty rising.
Money's new-minted in this fat purse.
I'm a means, a stage, a cow in calf.
I've eaten a bag of green apples,
Boarded the train there's no getting off.

In "Metaphors" the poet or speaker of the poem holds up a different sort of mirror to herself--one that allows full-length representation and subsurface penetration. Just as the mirror of the first poem becomes metaphorically a lake, the speaker here becomes a series of objects or creatures that reflect a pregnant woman. The term of a normal pregnancy is repeatedly reflected in the number of lines in the poem and the number of syllables in each line. It is no accident that the poem's title is a nine-letter word as are the words "syllables" that concludes line one and "ponderous" in line two. The riddle is easily solved. Forgive me for stating the obvious. The woman feels elephantine because of her increased weight and girth. She's as big as a cliched house and her body has become an object in which a separate being dwells. Her melon-shaped gravidity makes her legs seem by comparison like slender tendrils. The red fruit is the fetus, the ivory (reminiscent of the earlier elephant) perhaps the child's skin or the child's precious bones which are also compared to fine timbers. The yeasty rising loaf is the commonly referred to bun in the oven. The fat purse is the woman's belly stuffed with the precious cargo of newly minted and still uncirculated money. The woman feels she has lost her own identity in becoming a means for reproduction or a stage on which a dramatic production is about to debut. The bag of green apples she ate have caused abdominal swelling demanding release. The train is a metaphor for her pregnancy--a non-stop journey with a destination bespeaking joy and relief.

Kerry Michael Wood is a retired English teacher and textbook author now devoting his time to free-lance writing. Learn more at [http://www.kerrymwood.com] or contact him at kerrywood@redshift.com.

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I think it's great to have all this information. It's particularly good to see some of her poems, because it seems that, often, her poetry is overshadowed by her tumultuous life and death.

Do you all think it's beneficial to have biographical information on a poet? Or does everything you need to know about them come through their work alone? If Plath had lead a happy, easy life, would that take away from the drama of her poetry? Or, if she had had a happy, easy life, would she have been much of a poet at all?

Thanks for posting this Sylvia....very interesting information....and writer....it was nice to learn more about her.

I agree with Britt....I think the life she led had a lot to do with the emotions and feelings portrayed in her poetry.

Almost every poem I have written has to do with my real life and my feelings at the time....I never picked up a pen to write till my husband died...I needed a way to release all the different feelings that were flooding my mind. It was the best theropy I could have had.

"Do you all think it's beneficial to have biographical information on a poet? Or does everything you need to know about them come through their work alone?"

Poetry should stand alone, irrespective of personal context. That's the challenge to the ages.

If Plath had lead a happy, easy life, would that take away from the drama of her poetry? Or, if she had had a happy, easy life, would she have been much of a poet at all?

I think the merit of a poem depends on the imaginations of both the writer and reader. I tend to keep a poet's life and works separate, although one can augment the experience of the other. Not all poets write sad poems when they're sad or happy poems when they're happy. In my case, I usually want to write when there's nothing wrong at all, in an effort to stop nothingness.