Sylvia Plath is a very well-known American/English poet who used her depression to share with the world what it felt like to struggle with mental illness. Critics often praised her work for its fine craft and depicting darker themes such as death, nature, and self. At the time, mental illness was not discussed enough through literature or even society in general. She is known for bringing awareness and discussion to these difficult struggles.
Plath’s work leaves such an impact on those who read it because she sadly lost her long and dark battle with depression and committed suicide on February 11th, 1963. Her marriage had recently ended and she felt overwhelmed by the pressure to raise her children as well as fight her mental struggles alone. In her poem, “Elm,” Plath describes her being “terrified by the dark thing that sleeps in [her]” and explains it as “murderous” (Plath). This poem was written on April 19th, 1962, which was less than a year before her suicide. “Elm” depicts her feelings in the form of another physical creature that is swooping down to harm her and eventually kill her. She could be giving her depression a tangible, outside description and image so that others will truly hear her cries and understand what she has been going through for several years.
Another one of Plath’s poems that depict her journey with mental illness is “Tulips”. Through her work in this poem, she explains her mental state while recovering in the hospital. She explains how cold and silent it is and how the “tulips eat [her] oxygen” (Plath). During this time spent recovering from an operation, she feels like her depression (which is described as the tulips) is waiting outside and desperately trying to reach her. A passage from “Tulips” says,
“The tulips are too red in the first place, they hurt me.
Even through the gift paper I could hear them breathe
Lightly, through their white swaddlings, like an awful baby.
Their redness talks to my wound, it corresponds.
They are subtle : they seem to float, though they weigh me down,
Upsetting me with their sudden tongues and their color,
A dozen red lead sinkers round my neck” (Plath).
Plath felt as if her depression and difficult life problems were looming over and
anxiously waiting for her to leave the hospital so that they could finally reach her once again. In the hospital, she was focused on recovery and had people tending to her. This made her feel distracted and cared for. However, she knew this break would end once she exited the hospital doors.
Deeply inside, Plath was struggling severely and her depression ran deeper than anyone could have imagined. In her poem, “The Moon and The Yew Tree,” she not only explains to her readers what it feels like inside of her mind, but she also puts clear images of it into words. Plath explains,
“This is the light of the mind, cold and planetary.
The trees of the mind are black. Their irregular branches,
like broken arms backlit from MRI dye, offset by yearning.
They take form in ways only experts can decipher.
The light is blue. The observation of the alien doctor
flickers in his iris, furnace gaslight burning like a pagan memorial.
The grasses unload their griefs on my feet as if I were God,
I pity their need for idolatry. It bares itself only to the void of me,
Prickling my ankles and murmuring of their humility.
I am unable to convince them otherwise” (Plath).
This incredibly vivid imagery almost makes the reader feel like they are present in the scene.
The way she describes her mind is cold, dark, and painful. Someone who was facing normal
day-to-day problems or an issue that has an easy solution would not feel this much pain inside
their own head. Going on like this for many years could easily take a toll on one’s sanity.
However, Sylvia did not always struggle with the sadness that eventually took her life. In her poem, “Face Lift,” she describes how one day, she was a child and felt like she was “going into surgery” and when she fell under the anesthesia, she has not seen the light since. She explains,
“Tapped like a cask, years draining into my pillow.
Even my best friend thinks I’m in the country.
Skin doesn’t have roots, it peels away easy as paper.
When I grin, the stitches tauten. I grow backward” (Plath).
Plath feels as though when she was younger, at some point, she started to feel the darkness that she felt for the rest of her life. The remainder of her childhood was taken from her due to her battle with mental illness. Because of this, she feels she is being reborn into a new person once she becomes an adult. She describes herself as “Pink and smooth as a baby”(Plath). This could have been a period of rebirth and newfound knowledge for her. However, she acknowledges through this poem that she is sadly unable to get her younger self back.
Sylvia Plath sparked a conversation about mental illness in women for her time period. This was an issue that was not taken seriously enough or talked about often. Plath was brave enough to share her feelings and struggles with an unaccepting world to get people thinking about and discussing this issue. Overall, her mental illness was frequently present in her writing and made some of her readers, at the time, feel like they were not alone any longer.