SUICIDE IN SYLVIA PLATH’S
POETRY
First of all I would like to talk about Sylvia
Plath's life:
Sylvia Plath was born on 27th of October of 1932
in Boston. She has always demonstrated that she had talent for poetry and
at the early age of five she started writing her first poems. “About what
I see and hear on hot summer nights” was her first poem published in the
children’s section in the Boston Herald at the age of eight. She continued
publishing her poems and drawings in junior high in the school newspaper.
In her senior year, she saw her first national publication “And summer
will not come again” which appeared in a magazine. Sylvia Plath continued
building her writing career gradually by cooperating with magazines and
newspapers. However, she was also going into a terrible depression, insomnia,
strange behaviour and finally towards thoughts of suicide.
On 29th of July of 1953 Plath started her electroshock
therapy after having had discovered some scars on her legs and had confessed
to her mother that she wanted to die. It was the first time she tried
to kill herself. One month later Plath disappeared for two days but finally
was discovered in a semi-comatose state because of ingesting sleeping pills.
This one was the second try. Then she was admitted to hospital and thankfully
she recovered soon enough to start writing poetry again.
Sylvia Plath’s life has been always accompanied
by hopes for the highest success alternating with moods of deep depression
which sometimes led her to thoughts of suicide. At the time she felt stressed
she fell once again into depression. On June of 1956 she got married with
the famous writer Ted Hughes. In this period she had two children and
wrote one of his famous compositions “The Bell Jar” which told the story
of a young American girl in England who fell in love and married.
Finally, Plath realises that her husband is unfaithful
and decides to leave him and moves herself and the children back to London
where she fell into a severe emotional crisis. The January weather was
horrible in London, and it only added to Plath's worsening depression.
Her doctor attempted to find her a bed but all hospitals were full. On 11th
of February of 1963 Plath put some milk and bread in the children’s room,
tapped and stuffed towels into the cracks in the bedroom and in the kitchen
doors, then, she went downstairs and lied with her head on a cloth in the
gas oven and put the gas on. Her body was discovered that morning by a nurse
scheduled to visit.
The last month she produced over twenty-five poems,
most of which would be the best of her career.
Sylvia Plath’s suicide is present in some of the
poems she wrote before she commited it.
Secondly, what I am going to do is analyse three
of these last poems to find out how they prelude her suicidal intention
before she achieved death.
Edge was written on 5th of February of 1963,
a week before her death when Sylvia Plath was in London with a terrible depression,
abandoned by her husband and taking care of her two little children. The
poem centres around the picture of the dead mother and her two dead children.
“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.”
In this poem, Plath uses crude images which impact
the reader very strongly, contrasting the sweetness that a child transmits
with that of death.
Death is presented in the poem as a perfect state.
The woman is smiling, we can imagine her lying on the floor, death, smiling
because she had no fear to die, just the opposite, she is happy because
she has finally gained her purpose, she has arrived to a better stage.
She had lived until the edge of life, as we can observe in the title of
the poem, and now that life is over. However, contrary to what we should
expect in a first moment, the transmitted image is not sad at all although
it has the power to create sadness. On the one hand we have the image of
death but on the other we have a smile of satisfaction for having reached
that end, a wished final for a terrible life of suffering and pain.
“The moon has nothing to be
sad about”. (line 17)
Next to the woman we find her two dead children
and two pitchers of milk now empty. That image represents the innocence.
Both children are folded back into her mother as petals of a rose. They
seem not to have realised that they were going to die, they are just children
so maybe they thought that they were going to sleep as they did every night.
Before “sleeping” they drank some milk. They were not worried about anything
because they did not know that was the end of their lives.
In the poem the protagonist has decided to carry
her children with herself to a better life, not to leave them alone. She
does not want them to suffer as she has been suffering, so decided to commit
suicide with them.
Sylvia Plath also had two children who were living
with her in London when she commited suicide. In my opinion, this poem could
have been autobiographical of Plath’s suicide. It could reflect her first
intention but maybe at the end Plath did not have enough courage to carry
out her first purpose. In any case, there is a coincidence in both the
poem and Sylvia Plath’s suicide: When Sylvia Plath died he left some milk
and bread in the children’s room as the protagonist gave some milk to their
children before her self-annihilation.
Daddy is also one of her last and most famous
poems. This poem is addressed to her father. Plath’s father died when she
was only ten and her loss caused anger, hate, love and grief which affected
her for the rest of her life. In Daddy we can see a comparison between Otto
(Plath’s father) and Ted Hughes (Plath’s husband) and at the same time
these two men compared with the Nazis. The Nazis destroyed a whole race
in the same way Otto and Ted Hughes destroyed Plath’s world, both hurting
her until the day she died. Some of the Plath's admirers accused Ted Hughes
for being the responsible of Plath's suicide.
In this poem, Sylvia Plath is telling his father
what has happened to her, her marriage with Ted Hughes, the hell she went
through and the sad ending.
“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.”
At the end of the poem we can see again the most
tragic part, the awful ending for Plath’s life.
“Daddy, daddy, you bastard, I'm
through.”
Lady Lazarus is the most direct poem about
Plath’s suicidal attempts. She relates her own experience, her relation
with death. As we can see in Daddy, Plath uses the metaphor of the Nazis
and the Jews in the Holocaust to represent the oppression she feels. The
doctors are the oppressors while she is the victim. She wants to die but
the doctors would not let her to do so.
The poem begins with Sylvia Plath having tried to
commit suicide twice. She is going to do it, she believes that she is
invincible, she has nine lifes like cats and seems to be waiting to be
wake up again, but the third time she wasn’t.
“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.
[…]
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.”
Lady Lazarus is absolutely about suicide, written
by a lady suffering mentally, and about to commit her ultimate tragic act.
Plath is not worried about the idea of suicide.
For her “dying is an art, like everything else”. She even is sarcastic
with such a serious issue. She comes on saying that she dies exceptionally
well. She has done it twice, this is number three. Plath also says that
is a trash to annihilate each decade which shows a treatment of death nearly
as a normal habit such as eat or sleep.
Conclusion
If we have a look at all these last poems we could
guess which was the end of Sylvia Plath’s life even not knowing about her
problems, her marriage, her depression, etc.
These three poems clearly refer to Plath’s thoughts
of suicide and about death, such as “Last Words” or “Elm” but there are
many more which apart from these show the difficult situation Sylvia had
to cope with especially in the last years of her life.
Poetry was Sylvia´s way of alienating herself
from the tremendous suffering and madness she continuously experienced,
her poems are the materialisation of her tears and resentment for the terrible
circumstances that surrounded her existence, but in my opinion, this is
not enough to commit suicide. As I told to my teacher, I think her poetry
is very important, but I do not like any of her poems, because, I cannot understand
one person who wrote them as a result of her mind, I mean, although one woman
can be very famous because of her poems, for me it would be very understandable
if she wrote it and that's it, and she must not commit suicide, but she did
it.
BIBLIOGRAPHY:
- http://www.sylviaplath.de/
Sylvia Plath's webpage. 20 May 2007.
- http://www.poemhunter.com/p/m/poem.asp?poet=6642&poem=29362
Edge poem. 19 May 2007.
- http://www.poemhunter.com/p/m/poem.asp?poet=6642&poem=32671
Daddy poem. 19 May 2007.
- http://www.internal.org/view_poem.phtml?poemID=355
Lady Lazarus poem. 19 May 2007.
- http://www.etsu.edu/writing/studentsamlit/plath.htm
About Sylvia Plath: her life and poetry. 20 May
2007.