I wish Sylvia Plath didn’t kill herself. Really out of context, right?

For as long as I’ve been able to read, I’ve always had a fascination with poetry. Poetry has always spoken to me, even if it isn’t actually spoken-word. At age 5, my first internal connection to poetry was a Shel Silverstein poem from Where The Sidewalk Ends, titled “For Sale”. For those unfamiliar with this poem, it is about a girl who is trying to sell her younger sister (anyone with a little sibling knows the feeling). The line that I was drawn to in the poem was “One crying and spying young sister for sale!” I never had a steady positive relationship with my stepsiblings, so I related to the poem heavily. My stepsiblings never read anything for leisure and I was always puzzled to why they never enjoyed it the way I did. In my childhood house, we had shelves upon shelves of books, most of which were children’s fairytales like Pete’s Dragon, or self-help books like Furiously Happy (which I wasn’t allowed to read because they had swear words in them). So I was stuck reading lame Jack and Jill stories like all of the other kids, whom of which had no interest in stanzas or rhymes.

The one kind of book that stuck out to me in our colorful bookshelves of kids novels was, ironically, the only gray covered book. Where The Sidewalk Ends was where the sidewalk started for me. To me, most of the poems seemed childish. So I yearned for more. I read Dr. Suess, to Roald Dahl, to Edgar Allen Poe, all the way to Geoffrey Chaucer. All of these authors had poems that I could somewhat relate to or simply enjoy, but none of them really spoke to me. It wasn’t until recently, when I discovered the works of the late Sylvia Plath, that I could see the reflection of my face in the glass shards of her poems.

During Winter of 1963, the great poet sealed up the doors and windows to her kitchen and put her head inside of her gas oven. During Fall of 2021, I took three times my prescribed dose of Lexapro. Plath struggled with depression for most of her life, which seeps into her poems. I have struggled with major depression disorder for all of my life. For these reasons, I sook out a complete collection of her poems, specifically for the purpose of seeing myself in their reflections. To me, it seems almost cliche to write about mental health struggles, but everyone gets through it differently. It just took poetry for me to finally learn how to cope in a healthy way. 

In one of her first collected poems, Tale of a Tub, Plath writes, “Can our dreams ever blur the intransigent lines which draw the shape that shuts us in?” In another, Conversation Among The Ruins, “Of your stormy eye, magic takes flight Like a daunted witch, quitting castle when real days break”. Her words whispered to me, a message meant for only me to hear. To understand. When I first read her poem Vanity Fair, on October 14, 2023, I was annotating, and I underlined every. Single. Line. The syntax and the metaphors that she uses infiltrates my own writing and I only wish, for one day, that she was still breathing so I can give her my thanks and utmost gratitude. In college, I am going to continue to write and read poetry, if only to cope, to feel the warm embrace of serenity for as long as possible. Thank you, Sylvia Plath.

College is a frightening thought

Consuming my every inch

Stretching my limbs taut

But I know that in a pinch

There is light

She whispers to me softly

“I am always with you”

And I am filled with the might 

Of the great poet inside me.