On the Life-and-Death Cycles at the Heart of Sylvia Plath’s Work

In 1971, eight years after Sylvia Plath died, a dispute over the backstory of her death broke out between her husband Ted Hughes and the poet and critic Al Alvarez. Alvarez, a friend of Plath, published a book which, in part, claimed that Plath “did not intend to die” with her suicide—that it was rather “a cry for help that fatally misfired.” In response, Hughes published a letter in The Times Literary Supplement in which he asked for the section about Plath from Alvarez’s book to be removed. Weidenfeld and Nicholson, the book’s publishers, refused.

Whether or not Plath intended to die with her final suicide attempt is still an unresolved question among scholars. What might a study of her poetry and prose add to this debate? Recently available work—some of which remains unpublished, some of which has only recently come to light, via new archives at Yale’s Beinecke Library—sheds light on Plath’s complicated stance on death, one that she maintained from her early teenage years until she died. Over and over, in her juvenilia, in her short fiction, in her poetry, and in her novel, Plath frames death as an opportunity for rebirth.

Beyond the archives, it has been a big year for Plath. In September, Variety reported that Billie Eilish will make her acting debut as Esther in The Bell Jar; in June; three unseen drawings by Plath went on sale at the New York International Antiquarian Book Fair for $250,000; and a new collection of Plath’s poetry that is nearly double the length of the original was published by Faber in May.

Plath had to confront death at an early age, and her work shows her desperately searching for meaning in it. Her father had been dead for five years when, at 13, Plath wrote a poem about the death of another adult in her life, her beloved teacher, Miss Cox. Her mother Aurelia typed up the poem, noting that Sylvia “slipped [it] under my napkin on the dinner table”; Aurelia’s note, along with a draft of the poem, is one archive of many stored in the Plath family papers at Beinecke. Later, the poem appeared in Plath’s school newspaper, as an elegy for the teacher.

Even though the poem remains unpublished, I was able to read “To Miss Cox” on a trip to Yale. The elegiac poem finds meaning in the teacher’s death by analogizing it with the cycles of nature: each of its four stanzas corresponds with a season, starting with the spring and ending in the winter. The first two lines in each stanza are about the promise of the season, before giving way to its end, showing the necessity of what came before in order for the next season to begin. Like “the joy of childhood,” spring “too quickly passes by,” while “painted memories of fall” are “gathered by the harvester / When the purple day is done.” Each season is short-lived but essential for the cycle to continue. What all of the seasons have in common is their impermanence, the beauty of each contingent on its ephemerality.

The Bell Jar is composed of these looping death-and-rebirth scenes, framing death as merely a stopgap in a continuing life.

As Plath grew as a writer, she brought this structure into her prose. Plath’s short story, “Mary Ventura and the Ninth Kingdom,” was written mere months before Plath’s first documented suicide attempt, and it follows Mary, its protagonist, on a train ride to hell. At the end, however, Mary escapes the train and is given a second chance to live. The last line comes as she is greeted by a maternal figure who says, “I have been waiting for you, dear.” Like a birth canal, Mary travels down a tunnel; at the end, she meets her mother and is reborn.

Once Plath finished “Mary Ventura,” in her early twenties, she sent it to Mademoiselle magazine, which had just awarded her an internship for the coming summer based on her writing. It was rejected. Two years later, she revised the story, curtailing it to such an extent that it appeared “half-finished,” according to HarperCollins’ introduction to the story, which was published in 2019. HarperCollins’ version is her original story: the piece rejected by Mademoiselle, with Plath’s spelling and grammar intact. Recent revelations like “Mary Ventura” show Plath’s original intent, illuminating a tendency to frame death as a false end.

The publication of “Mary Ventura” also gives insight into her only published novel: like her short story, The Bell Jar also paints death as rebirth. After taking sleeping pills in the basement of her family home, Esther travels down a tunnel before emerging into a hospital room filled with people: “A cool wind rushed by,” Plath writes. “I was being transported at enormous speed down a tunnel into the earth. Then the wind stopped.” As though she is emerging into a delivery room, “There was a rumbling, as of many voices, protesting and disagreeing in the distance.” Esther next wakes up in a hospital room, where she greets her mother, who looks like she has just given birth, exhausted but pleased in a hospital gown: she “came smiling round the foot of the bed. She was wearing a dress with purple cartwheels on it and she looked awful.” Like Mary Ventura, Esther travels down a tunnel before greeting her mother at its end. In the course of the scene, Esther has moved from the deathly space of the cellar where she took sleeping pills into a hospital, where she is reborn. The Bell Jar is composed of these looping death-and-rebirth scenes, framing death as merely a stopgap in a continuing life.

Finally, Plath’s final work echoes her earliest. The structure of Ariel—the collection she left on her desk, unpublished, when she died—not only takes up the cyclical structure of “Mary Ventura” and The Bell Jar, but it also imbues the human lifecycle with weather patterns, just as in “To Miss Cox”—the poem she had written for her teacher as an adolescent. “Morning Song,” the first poem in Ariel, is addressed to a newborn: “The midwife slapped your footsoles, and your bald cry / Took its place among the elements.” In its first stanza, the poem takes on a seasonal quality reminiscent of “To Miss Cox”: new life, in its position among the elements, is seasonal. “I’m no more your mother,” the narrator continues, than a “cloud” in the wind.

Her message was almost obscured. When Hughes, the executor of Plath’s estate, went to publish Ariel, he rearranged the poems so that the collection no longer ended with “Wintering.”

If Plath’s final collection begins with birth, it ends with death—almost. Plath, echoing “To Miss Cox,” structures “Wintering,” her final poem in Ariel, as merely a step in an ongoing cycle. “Wintering” opens in the dark winter: “There is nothing doing,” for the honey in the home’s wine cellar is “Wintering in a dark without window.” The term “cellar,” a gesture toward the cellar where Esther attempted suicide in The Bell Jar, hints at death: the “rancid jam” left by the last tenant sits deep in the house.

By the end, however, death turns into something else, for the bees, “carry their dead” into “the warm days,” with the narrator asking, “Will the hive survive, will the gladiolas / Succeed in banking their fires to enter another year?” At the end, the question is answered, for “The bees are flying. They taste the spring.” “Wintering” starts in a dead place, with the narrator pondering what will come from left-behind rancidness, and such imagery repeats itself with the bees who carry their dead. But the poem ends in the light, with spring breaking through, the hive surviving and new life emerging—a cyclical gesture back to “Morning Song.” That the final note of Plath’s oeuvre framed death as leading to rebirth is indisputable.

However, her message was almost obscured. When Hughes, the executor of Plath’s estate, went to publish Ariel, he rearranged the poems so that the collection no longer ended with “Wintering.” Instead, in Hughes’s rendering, the final poem was “Words,” a poem that does not contain the seasonal cyclicality of “Wintering” and “To Miss Cox.” Just like “To Miss Cox,” “Wintering,” after taking us through a chilly winter, ends with the word “spring.” The final word of “Words” is “life,” not “spring,” and while Hughes’s rearrangement suggests that Plath lives on through her poetry—a message that, while hopeful, rings a bit hollow—it deflates Plath’s structure, breaking the cycle that she took great care to assert, over and over, throughout her lifetime. Plath did not even include “Words” in the Ariel collection. Like “Mary Ventura,” Plath’s collection was eventually returned to what she intended, with the 2004 publication of Ariel: The Restored Edition.

A cycle filled with pauses, Plath’s structure is the message: death is merely a false end. While the sophistication of Plath’s message evolved over the course of her life, the message itself really didn’t. We will never know whether she intended to die with her second and final suicide attempt. But the stance her work takes on the issue is clear: That Plath left this collection—structured this way—on her desk just before her suicide suggests a firm belief that death is merely a precursor to rebirth, to an inevitable spring. From “To Miss Cox” all the way to her final collection of poetry, Plath wanted her readers to get this message.

If the structure of Plath’s life reflects the structure of her work, both Hughes and Alvarez were right: Yes, Plath intended to die, but she also intended to wake back up, reborn. The only note she left? “Please call Dr. Horder.”