The relationship between life and death has been an important part of literature for just about all of human history. One of the earliest recorded pieces of literature is the Mesopotamian Epic of Gilgamesh, which centers around Gilgamesh’s desire to bring his friend Enkidu back from the dead. Different writers have had different perspectives on death, of course, and while the writer of Gilgamesh’s tale might have seen death as something inevitable, death seemed almost welcome to Plath. The fact that her father died while she was young left her without much of a sense of security, and the repeated infidelities that her husband, fellow poet Ted Hughes, visited upon her took her psyche and shredded it even further. As a result, several of her poems show that she spent a great deal of time thinking about death and developed specific perspectives about it.
In 1959, Plath wrote the poem “Two Views of a Cadaver,” showing a pessimistic outlook on death. The poem describes Plath’s experiences dating a medical student; one day, she followed him and some of his colleagues into an operating room. Inside was a corpse that the students were dissecting. Both the clinical and emotional views of death appear in the poem; the clinical part appears when she describes the vision of “four men laid out, black as burnt turkey, / Already half unstrung (1.2-3). The comparison of the cadavers to burnt turkey implies a detachment from the death itself. The figure of Death is nothing more (and nothing less) than a dissecting researcher, but instead Death marches off with the soul, rather than the intestines. When the surgeon removes the heart, “he hands her the cut-out heart like a cracked heirloom” (1.11). Here the image is slightly less mechanical, at the word heirloom at least suggests some emotional attachment. However, the heart is still a machine. Also, the fact that the surgeon is a man, and he passes death over to a woman, shows that, in Plath’s view, death is just another form of the violence that men visit upon women.
In the second part of the poem, Plath transitions to a couple in a painting by the Dutch Renaissance master Brueghel. The lovers have death all around them, but they are “blind to the carrion army” (2.2). Instead of ruing the coming destruction, he sings to her, while she bends over him; even though Death is playing a parody of their tune on his fiddle, they cannot hear it. The implication is that ignoring the reality of death is a naïve prospect; if one wants to get rid of the awareness of mortality, the only way to do so is to let go of life itself.
In her poem “Sheep in Fog,” written in 1963, Plath appears to see death as a sort of dissolution. She writes that “[t]hey threaten / To let me through to a heaven / Starless and fatherless, a dark water” (13-15). The process of death is a slow one, as “All morning the / Morning has been blackening” (8-9). The fact that “dolorous bells” (7) have been a part of the day so far suggests that the word “morning” here may actually be a play on the word “mourning.” The speaker is clearly losing perspective, as the “hills step off into whiteness” (1). The dark water at the end represents a possible allusion to the dark waters over which God hovered at the very beginning of time, even before establishing a firmament on which the earth would stand. The fact that this might be all that is out there shows that the dissolution Plath envisions is similar to the “fade to black” device that filmmakers use.
Plath’s 1962 poem “A Birthday Present” is a dramatic monologue populated with death and terror. The speaker wants to know what is inside the package, imagining to be such things as bones, a tusk or a button made of pearl. All of those things can be white, and all of them used to be part of something living – which means that they all point toward death. The speaker also mentions the veils that surround the present and insists that the practice of hiding death from view should end. At the poem’s end, she insists on death as the present: “If it were death / I would admire the deep gravity of itThere would be a nobility then, there would be a birthday” (52-53, 55). The birthday, then, is turned on its head and transformed into the day of her death.
For Plath, death became more and more of an obsession; suicide attempts that went awry only pointed her further toward her goal, which was to end her own life. Eventually, of course, she got what she wanted, which was a separation from reality, leaving her readers only with perspectives on the end of life to read in her wake.
Works Cited
Plath, Sylvia. “A Birthday Present.” http://genius.com/Sylvia-plath-a-birthday-present-
annotated
Plath, Sylvia. “Sheep in Fog.” http://www.neuroticpoets.com/plath/poem/sheep/
Plath, Sylvia. “Two Views of a Cadaver Room.”
http://www.bl.uk/learning/langlit/poetryperformance/plath/poem2/plath2.html
