Sunday Plath: The Fragment

This is why I feel that I must occasionally try to bring attention to the poetry of Sylvia Plath; not the entire poem Lady Lazarus, but only a few lines from it:

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.
I guess you could say I've a call.

Written in the third week of October 1962. Not a great time in her life; marriage collapsing, alone with young children in need, uncertain recognition as an author (her famous novel The Bell Jar had been published under a pseudonym and most people were unaware of this,) and of course her dangerous emotional deterioration.

So all that showed in her poetry sometimes.

Just sometimes.

The Bee poems, her poems about her babies, and the poems inspired by the landscapes around Devon, for example, all seem relatively neglected compared to the sensation that has accrued around those six lines above. And I just don't think that's fair.



It's a great poem, by the way.