Sylvia Plath

A phenomenal writer’s work generates a powerful bond between their words and the reader. This is factual of Sylvia Plath’s poetry. It contains universal, timeless themes of depression and death that, in these dejected days, many people can relate to. Sylvia Plath was a confessional poet whose oppressive life led to her relatable story. She wrote many astonishing poems, such as “cut”, “Among the Narcissi”, and “A Birthday Present” that all chronicle and showcase her struggle for a release from the suppressed world she subsisted in, a world that many remain to live in today. Sylvia Plath’s poetry narrates both her distinct, individual story and yet universal tale of a woman who searches for a way out of her depressed state of mind.

Sylvia Plath lived a good, yet depressed life. She was born on October 27th 1932, in Boston Massachusetts to Aurelia and Otto Plath. Sylvia grew up with her brother in an ordinary household, under a strict father. Her childhood was happy, until in 1940, a week and a half after her eighth birthday, her father died due to complications of his untreated diabetes. This led to a loss of faith for a young Sylvia that she would never be able to regain and fueled her desire to write poetry and stories when she was ten. During her adolescence, she won many awards and honors for her writings and at age eighteen she received a scholarship to Smith College. That was when Plath’s symptoms of her severe depression began to emerge. In 1953 she attempted to take her own life, by overdosing on sleeping pills. She was hospitalized and given electro-shock therapy, and she fictionalized her experiences in her novel, The Bell Jar. In 1955 Plath moves to Cambridge England on a scholarship and met Ted Hughes, and English Poet...

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...er inner desperation for happiness that many individuals seek. In the second and third line of the piece, Plath introduces the protagonist, “Percy bows, in his blue peajacket, among the narcissi” and his ailment, “He is recuperating from something on the lung.” She then says how he comes to the field of daffodils to be happy, and in lines seven and eight, why he has come. “There is a dignity to this; there is a formality-/The flowers vivid as bandages, and the man mending.” In this she says that it is respectful to come to the field to die, because there is where he is happy and that the flowers can heal him, as seen in the simile they are “vivid as bandages”. The last stanza ends the story of Percy with, “And the octogenarian loves the little flocks./He is quite blue; the terrible wind tries his breathing./The narcissi look up like children, quickly and whitely.”