Sylvia Plath Saddest Poems

Sylvia Plath is an influential poet in America with her phenomenal works that are closely related to her personal life. She is the confessional poet. She met a man who later became her husband, but her life was ruined when she separated from her husband. She persisted, tried to become a strong woman, and finally decided to commit suicide.

In human life, there must be happiness and sadness. The surrounding environment is also very influential for the process of mental formation and human emotions. Therefore, many poems are written based on the feelings, circumstances, emotions, and real life of a poet. Poetry like this is what we later know as confessional poetry.

I don't know much about Sylvia Plath and her poems, except that she is known as a tormented and tragic female poet. This is no more because Sylvia Plath is one of the poets who produces works based on her experiences and life. Therefore, she is considered a pioneer of the confessional poetry style. For that, I will invite you to explore some of Plath's poems.

Daddy

   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 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.

This poem was one of the poems she wrote before she committed suicide in 1963, along with many other poems that ended in his book Ariel, which was published after her death. This poem consists of sixteen stanzas and five lines, which is a brutal and contained generally understood poem about his late father, Otto Plath. She admits that her father died before she actually killed him (You died before I had time). But here, Plath claims that she didn't kill just one person. (If I've killed one man, I've killed two). I am guessing that in the first she confessed to killing her father, and since the only other person in this poem is her father's model (I made a model of you), I am guessing it was the second. 

Since her father's death, Plath has become very obsessive about death. She put this in the stanza of her poem entitled The Lady Lazarus.

Lady Lazarus

   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

Plath made several attempts to commit suicide, but was never successful. She wrote about her suicide attempt in her first novel, The Bell Jar. Plath relates that she took a bottle of sleeping pills one by one in the basement. But she survived and was given intensive care for six months.

The style of writing her poems always add emotions that describe her condition. Anger, sadness, and frustration are things that are often felt when reading Sylvia Plath's poems. As in his poem Mad Girl's Love Song, Plath describes feelings of broken love and frustration and madness.

Mad Girl’s Love Song

    I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead;
    I lift my lids and all is born again.
   (I think I made you up inside my head.)

The stars go waltzing out in blue and red,
And arbitrary blackness gallops in:
I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead.

I fancied you’d return the way you said,
But I grow old and I forget your name.
(I think I made you up inside my head.)

I should have loved a thunderbird instead;
At least when spring comes they roar back again.
I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead.
(I think I made you up inside my head.)

Sylvia repeated the phrase I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead, I assumed that Plath was trying to escape from her depression. This is reinforced by her words that darkness took over her life arbitrarily, and arbitrary blackness gallops in. Then in the next stanza, Plath describes the love and life she gave to a man who left her. She said that she thought the man would come back as he said. And Plath also kept imagining the man she loved in her mind.

Another poem by her is “Edge” where she tells us about a woman who committed suicide after killing her children herself. Plath also commit suicide she did by sticking her head on oven. However, she save her children by sealing the room with wet towel and tape. In this poem, she informs the reader about the condition of women who struggles in this society for her existence.  

Edge

    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.

If we return to the characteristics and criteria of confessional poetry, these pieces of poetry are sufficient to meet the criteria; based on real experiences, deeply personal, and alludes to taboo subjects such as sex, depression, mental illness, and even suicide. Sylvia Plath's life was short and tragic. However, her honest and cruel poetry reflects her strong emotions, so that it continues to touch and hold the attention of generations of readers even today.