‘Mirror’: not the most famous of Sylvia Plath’s poem titles, perhaps, but a fine example of her ability to inhabit some other person, character, or – as here – object, and imbue it with a clear, commanding voice which reveals things about us, and what it is to be human. […]
‘Dying is an art, like everything else’: ‘Lady Lazarus’, as the poem’s title implies, is a poem about resurrection – but implicit within its title, and Sylvia Plath’s reference to the man whom Jesus brought back from the dead, is the idea of annihilation or extinction, a theme that is […]
Written in October 1961 as she was beginning to find her own distinctive poetic voice, ‘The Moon and the Yew Tree’ is one of the most widely discussed and analysed of Sylvia Plath’s poems. This is perhaps inevitable, in a poem which is so loaded with symbols; our instinct as […]