Sylvia Plath's Mental Illnesses

Sylvia Plath was a troubled poet that wrote many poems and prose. All of her poetry was from her own personal experiences and she let her readers in on her personal life more than most poets do. Plath suffered from mental illnesses and wrote many poems to let her feelings out. Unfortunately, Sylvia Plath’s poetry and mental illnesses cannot be separated, when readers think of Sylvia Plath the tragic end of her life is also remembered.

Sylvia Plath was born on October 27, 1932, in Jamaica Plain, Massachusetts (Source #5.) Her father died when she was eight years old due to diabetes complications (source #3.) After her father’s death, Plath’s mother moved herself and her children to Wellesley, Massachusetts where she accepted a teaching position at the University of Boston (source #5.)

Plath was such an excellent academic performer and had an excellent skill for writing that it rewarded her with a scholarship to Smith College in 1950 and a Fulbright scholarship to Cambridge (source #5.) In her junior year she got offered a position as the guest editor of a magazine in New York City called “Mademosielle.”

THis poem is alnaguage of ware and is designed to express feelings of persecution, betrayal, and destruction. While this poem portrays all of those emotions, it also executes the emotion of a defiant hope. In the poem, there is a family that is cooking a lamb when suddently it catches on fire and soon catches the whole oven and house on fire. The victims of the fire do not die, however, she is left to live with their ashes. This is related to Christianity and the holocaust. Although the victims do not die when they were “burned” it somehow purified them. This relates to the holocaust because the fire and having to live with the ashes is like life in Plath’s eyes, just an endless cycle of destruction. Overall it symbolizes Plath’s outlook on the world, bleak, realistic, and pessimitic. (Source