Nitya Gopinath

Death and misery is an apparent image in Sylvia Plath’s poems. As a child, Sylvia had gone through many tragic experiences like her father’s death and shock treatments to “cure her” of depression. Sylvia only got along with her father and never with her mother and after her father died she felt like she had no point of living or anyone to talk to. In writing her poems, Sylvia usually chooses to talk about her dead father or about her suicide attempts. In “Stillborn” and “Lady Lazarus”, images of death bring out her inner feelings as well as a reflection of her life.
The poem “Stillborn” talks about a stillborn baby and Sylvia’s dead poems. She says “These poems do not live: it’s a sad diagnosis” (Stillborn 1). This is the only line where she talks about her poem in a literal way and then writes about a stillborn baby which alludes to her poem’s death. All throughout the poem, Sylvia writes about the mother’s sadness of carrying the baby for nine months and after she goes through labor the baby is dead. She says “But they are dead, and their mother near dead with distraction” (Stillborn 14). This can be interpreted as the baby being her poems and the mother as Sylvia Plath, poet. The mother/poet is distracted by her depression and other events in her life like her father’s death. She is also confused of what is happening in her life; “They sit so nicely in the pickling fluid! / They smile and smile and smile at me. / And still the lungs won’t fill and the heart won’t start.” She’s wondering why her poems are not great like it used to be and now she is having a difficult time trying to start her magnificent writing but it just won’t start. The first two stanzas are about the mother’s / poet’s sadness and how confused they are but the last stanza is about the mother getting mad and blaming the baby/poem for its death.
In “Lady Lazarus”, Sylvia PLath chooses to talk about her suicide attempts. Lazarus is a biblical illusion to a man named Lazarus, also known as Lazarus of Bethany and one day his sister, Mary and Martha, went to Jesus and told Him that their brother was ill. By the time Jesus could arrive, Lazarus had been in his tomb for four days. Jesus assured Martha that “he that believeth in me, though he were shall never die.” In the presence of a Jewish crowd, Jesus had the stone rolled away from the tomb and bade Lazarus to come out of his tomb. From this point on Lazarus became known as the “man of rebirth” since he came back from the dead. Sylvia Plath uses this biblical allusion to signify her “rebirth” from her suicide attempts. Her first suicide attempt was when she locked herself in the basement of her house, leaving a note saying that she was out with her friend, and swallowed her mother’s pills. She does this after her father died because she did not know how to deal with it. However, her mother hears a noise coming from the basement and finds her daughter lying on the floor and calls the doctor right away saving Sylvia’s life. This is an example of rebirth since she was unconscious at first and then became conscious again.
Sylvia Plath viewed her life unworthy, depressing, and expressed her feelings through her poems. She talks to her dad in some poems trying to come up with a solution of how to deal with her father’s death. This is the only way she could communicate to someone. Due to her depression, images of death are prominent in every one of her poems. Many people view poetry as just another type of art but truly poetry is the only art form in which you can express your feelings through imagery and comparisons.