A Close Analysis of Sylvia Plath’s ‘Sheep in Fog’

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)

‘Sheep in Fog’ is a poem by Sylvia Plath (1932-63), which was published in her posthumous second collection Ariel in 1965. For my money, it’s one of Plath’s finest poems, if not the finest. But it’s also a poem which conveys much by using very few words: unlike the transitional poems she wrote in 1961 – ‘The Moon and the Yew Tree’ springs to mind – ‘Sheep in Fog’ reflects a more pared-back, controlled, and focused style.

The poem comprises five stanzas, each one made up of three lines. Plath likes using an odd number of lines in her stanzas: she cut her teeth on, among various other verse forms, the villanelle, a strict form wherein every stanza apart from the last is a tercet (that is, a three-line stanza). Her sequence of ‘bee’ poems sees her using the five-line stanza, and arguably her most famous poem, ‘Daddy’, is written in stanzas of five lines. ‘Lady Lazarus’ – perhaps her other most famous and widely discussed poem – is in tercets.

Three-line stanzas impart an air of incompleteness, of something being unfinished or unfinishable. And although the three middle stanzas of ‘Sheep in Fog’ are linked by syntax, with only the first and final stanzas, which bookend the poem, ending in a full stop, there’s a sense of being teased with something which the speaker herself can only partially glimpse, in brief flashes and images, which the three-line stanza helps to capture. Quatrains suggest a rounding-off; couplets imply pairing and consummation. Tercets, though, hint at something that has not been and perhaps cannot be completed.

This incompleteness is also suggested – though it’s a suggestion we can only make retrospectively, having finished reading the poem that follows – by the poem’s title: ‘Sheep in Fog’, though these fog-swathed sheep make no appearance in the poem itself.

Plath’s rural Devon home with her husband Ted Hughes – whom she separated from in autumn 1962, when she wrote the first draft of the poem – may have suggested the misty scene to her, but as with many of Plath’s best poems observing a rural scene or the natural world, those ‘sheep in fog’ also take on a symbolic force: associations of innocence (lambs), being a lost sheep, being unable to see one’s way through a ‘fog’ of depression, and so on.

‘Sheep’, of course, is an oddity in the English language. Does the poem’s title suggest a flock of sheep, or a single animal? Is ‘sheep’ singular or plural here? We may assume the latter, but given how quickly and suddenly the poem swerves from the external landscape to the inner turmoil of Plath’s depression in the poem’s third line, it’s possible she is seeing herself reflected in a (single) lost sheep in the fog, unable to see its way ahead.

‘People or stars’ regard the speaker sadly, and she feels she has let them down. The comma splice in that third line is everything: think how differently the line would hit if Plath had used a (more correct) colon in place of the comma, to show how the people/stars regard her sadly because she disappoints them. There’s a shaggy disjointedness to the line with the comma rupturing while also awkwardly joining these two statements.

And why ‘People or stars’? Does she not know who or what is disappointed in her? Or is it both, and the distinction does not matter because she does not care? (‘Stars’, of course, suggest fate: if Plath believed she was fated to be a poet, then the disappointment may partly be a result of feeling that she has failed to live up to her literary promise.)

The poem moves from the hills in the fog’s whiteness to the white ‘breath’ of the steam coming out of the passing train. We then move to a horse and hear the sound of bells (nearby church bells from the neighbouring churchyard, like the ones that Plath imagines bonging out the Resurrection in ‘The Moon and the Yew Tree’?). The bells sound plaintive, mournful, sorrowful: ‘dolorous’.

The remarkable movement of ‘morning … morning … blackening’ in this third stanza is a simple masterstroke: ‘morning’ itself moves from a straightforward temporal marker to a vivid thing, a thing which can become black (after that initial whiteness: this is still a monochrome scene, with the colour washed out, as in a severe depression). The ‘far fields’ melt her heart because they are so beautiful, but also so distant from her: one wonders if Plath intended a faint suggestion of the Elysian fields of the afterlife.

Here, the landscape the speaker views threatens to let her through to a ‘heaven’, as the final stanza has it. Is this a literal afterlife the speaker is imagining, so she is worried that the bleak, overwhelming landscape is going to inspire suicidal thoughts? There’s a paradox lurking in the idea of being ‘threatened’ with being welcomed somewhere.

The ‘dark water’ of the final line, in suggesting drowning and death, suggests that the heaven the penultimate line mentions may well be a literal heaven, and certainly it’s difficult to read many of Plath’s final poems without recalling her suicide shortly after she wrote them.

One reading of the end of the poem, then, is that the speaker – who is, at least on one level, indistinguishable from Plath herself – is tempted by suicidal thoughts and worried about being ushered towards such a fate: ‘fatherless’ takes us not only to Otto Plath, who died when his daughter Sylvia was just eight, but also to God the Father, suggesting this ‘heaven’ is, in fact, just the oblivion of death: a ‘dark water’ without hope of baptismal resurrection. At the same time (and recalling that first stanza), it is a heaven that could be free of fathers or stars to disappoint: another reason this heaven may be longed for.

Of all Sylvia Plath’s poems, ‘Sheep in Fog’ is the one Plath’s husband Ted Hughes wrote about most extensively, charting the evolution of the poem between autumn 1962 (when she drafted the first version) and early 1963, when she completed a reworked, pared-down version. The ending of the final version is far bleaker than the original ending, which concluded the poem on a note of potential hope (the original poem ended with the image of ‘the faces of babies’).