Joe Benson

Sylvia Plath’s short life was surrounded by death; her father’s, her child’s, and a few of her own attempts, to name a few. Ironically, in her poetry she does not seem to take it seriously. Instead she uses the image of death to add dark humor to her poems.
Plath sees the death of her father as a suicide because he could have gotten treatment for his illness but chose not to until it was too late for him to be saved. She sees his death as his exit off the stage of her life, but instead of letting go and moving on, she feels compelled to follow him into his death. She was eight years old when her father died and that was the same year she first attempted to take her own life. In her poem “Daddy” she says, “At twenty I tried to die and get back back back to you.” She is referencing how again at age twenty she tried to take her own life to escape to her father. Plath fails to see that after death there is nothing and that killing herself would be fruitless, but she romanticizes the concept to enhance the themes of death in her writings.
In addition to her overly romantic view of death, she jokes about it as well. In “Lady Lazarus” she writes, “I have done it again. One year in every ten I manage it.” She humors herself by pointing out how every decade she tries to take her own life. Ironically, in “Lady Lazarus” she wrote, “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.” The irony is that she has attempted suicide twice already and she has not been able to kill herself but she says that she does it exceptionally well. She fails to see the gravity of death and that once she takes one too many pills or lays next to the oven for just one more minute, it will all be over.
Overall Sylvia Plath does not take death seriously. Again in “Lady Lazarus” she says, “I am only 30. And like the cat I have nine times to die.” She thinks she is invincible and that she can attempt suicide seven more time and then die. Unfortunately, Sylvia died on her third attempt when she was only 31. If only she saw that death was not a joke, but truly an end to all things. Maybe then she would still be among the living today.