Sylvia Plath Poems

1. ‘Lady Lazarus’.

Lazarus is the man in the New Testament who is raised from the dead by Jesus.
Plath gives the name a twist in this poem, one of Plath’s finest poems, by linking it
to her numerous suicide attempts. ‘Lady Lazarus’ contains the famous line ‘dying
is an art’, among many other haunting and memorable lines and images.

Plath wrote ‘Lady Lazarus’ in October 1962, only a few months before her suicide.
(Plath would kill herself in February 1963, in a London apartment she had decided
to rent because W. B. Yeats had once lived there. As she suggests in ‘Lady
Lazarus’, she had attempted suicide previously at roughly ten-year intervals.)

The poem is 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 never far away from us with a Plath
poem. Another important aspect of ‘Lady Lazarus’ – which is alluded to in Plath’s
reference to the ‘peanut-crunching crowd’ – is the idea of suffering as spectacle, a
theatre of cruelty to which people might pay to see: what the novelist J. G. Ballard,
less than a decade later, would call the ‘atrocity exhibition’.

and critics.

2. ‘Morning Song’.

Although we haven’t arranged this selection of Sylvia Plath’s best poems in any
kind of chronological (much less preferential) order, it seems fitting to follow
‘You’re’, a poem about pregnancy, with ‘Morning Song’, a poem about a mother
tending to her new-born child. ‘Morning Song’ is about a mother waking in the
night to tend to her crying baby, and so doesn’t celebrate the beauty of the sunrise
or an aesthetically pleasing landscape as seen at dawn, like some of the poems on
this list.

Instead, we have Plath’s speaker (based on Plath, herself a mother to a small child
when she penned this poem) stumbling out of bed ‘cow-heavy and floral’ in her
Victorian nightgown.
3. ‘Ariel’.

One of Sylvia Plath’s most widely discussed poems, ‘Ariel’ describes an early
morning horse-ride towards the sun, using imagery that is loaded with
significance and suggestiveness.

As Plath rides Ariel through the dawn light, it is as if she is shedding her past self
and become reborn as something else: the experience of riding the horse is almost
transcendent. ‘I unpeel’, she tells us, likening herself to Lady Godiva, the eleventh-
century Saxon noblewoman who defied her husband’s harsh taxation of the people
of Coventry and rode naked through the streets of the town, according to legend.

Written in October 1962 (on her thirtieth birthday), just four months before Plath
committed suicide, ‘Ariel’ became the title poem in Plath’s posthumous 1965
volume, publication of which was overseen (controversially) by Plath’s widower,
Ted Hughes. (We’ve picked some of Ted Hughes’s best poems here.)

4. The Bee Meeting” | Poem by Sylvia

To start critical analysis, first note that “The Bee Meeting” is one of the “Bee
Poems” of Sylvia Plath. Like them, it also deals with the theme of power,
uncertainty and insecurity. There are a lot of questions in the mind of poet,
which require answers. These questions, create confusion in her mind. Her
attitude, in this poem is too puzzling. She knows nothing about herself nor
about the people, who are with her. Thus, this poem is also about finding true
identity in society. However, it mainly focuses on sense of weakness and
physical nakedness. These two are critical insecurities and the poet’s mind
make analysis of them in the poem “The Bee Meeting”. This analysis makes
the upcoming self-created psychological threats vulnerable. Like this poem, in
much of her other poems too, Plath sought out self discovery. Imaginative
power of the poet gives her confidence for a rebellious expressiveness but most
of the time she fails to expresses a rebellion attitude due to her inner fears.
Her worries and uncertainties, either they are minor or major, overpower the
same and ultimately she gives up.
5. The Arrival of the Bee Box”
“The Arrival of the Bee Box” is a poem by Sylvia Plath, one of the most
prominent American poets of the 20th century. It was published in her
bestselling collection Ariel, and forms parts of a sequence of poems that
involve bees in some shape or form. In the poem, the first-person speaker
receives the bee box that she “ordered.” She contemplates her power over
the box and the bees, variously feeling like does and doesn’t want it. By the
end, she resolves to set the bees free—but will only do so “tomorrow,”
ensuring the poem ends on a note of irresolution.

 Read the full text of “The Arrival of the Bee Box”

 “The Arrival of the Bee Box” Summary

o The wooden bee box that I ordered has arrived. It’s square and
really heavy, and kind of reminds me of a small coffin for a little
person or a square-shaped baby. Well, it would if there weren't so
much noise inside of it.

Because the box is locked and unsafe, I’ll have to keep it with me all
through the night and always stay by its side. It’s hard to see what is
inside as there are no windows, just a small eye-hatch. Nothing can
get out.
I look inside through that small eye-hatch. It’s so dark in there. It
seems like it's full of the hands of African slaves on a slave ship,
made tiny for export, angrily pushing against each other and fighting
for space.
How could I possibly set them free? The noise is the thing that
frightens me most, sounding as it does like some nonsense
language. It sounds like an angry crowd in ancient Rome—harmless
individually, but in a group—yikes!
I listen closer to the noise that's like angry Latin. I could never be a
leader like Caesar. The truth is, I've bought a box full of total
crazies. Maybe I’ll return them. If I don’t feed them, they will die—it’s
up to me.
Are they hungry? If I set them free, would they forget about
me? What if I simply let them loose and then just faded into the
background like a tree? Perhaps like a laburnum with its yellow
flowers, with cherry trees nearby.
They'd probably just ignore me while I was dressed in my protective
bee-keeping suit with its funeral-veil-like head covering. I can’t help
them make honey, so what use am I? Tomorrow I promise to be a
good master and let them go.
Anyway, the box won’t last forever.