As one of the most admired poets of the twentieth century, Sylvia Plath managed to win readers’ hearts even in her short 30 years of life. Through her writing, she shared her feelings of despair, anger, and even her obsession with death.
Perhaps it is these struggles with mental anguish, coupled with her vulnerability, that make her poems easy for many to relate to.
Sadly, Plath took her life in 1963, a painful conclusion to the clinical depression that her psychiatrist had previously diagnosed her with.
Best Sylvia Plath Poems
Here is a collection of some of her best-known works:
1. Ariel
Published in 1960 in Collected Poems, “Ariel” is one of her poems with shorter, but nevertheless powerful, lines.
Stasis in darkness.
Then the substanceless blue
Pour of tor and distances.
God’s lioness,
How one we grow,
Pivot of heels and knees!—The furrow
Splits and passes, sister to
The brown arc
Of the neck I cannot catch
Read the full poem here.
2. Daddy
In this poem, we get a glimpse of the troubled relationship that Plath had with her authoritative father.
You do not do, you do not do
Any more, black shoe
In which I have lived like a foot
For thirty years, poor and white,
Barely daring to breathe or Achoo.
Daddy, I have had to kill you.
You died before I had time——
Marble-heavy, a bag full of God,
Ghastly statue with one gray toe
Big as a Frisco seal
And a head in the freakish Atlantic
Where it pours bean green over blue
In the waters off beautiful Nauset.
I used to pray to recover you.
Ach, du.
In the German tongue, in the Polish town
Scraped flat by the roller
Of wars, wars, wars.
But the name of the town is common.
My Polack friend
Says there are a dozen or two.
So I never could tell where you
Put your foot, your root,
I never could talk to you.
The tongue stuck in my jaw.
It stuck in a barb wire snare.
Ich, ich, ich, ich,
I could hardly speak.
I thought every German was you.
And the language obscene
Read the full poem here.
3. The Colossus
In this poem, we see her gift of choosing the best words to describe an idea, such as her using the sounds of different animals in the first stanza, as seen in the following excerpt:
I shall never get you put together entirely,
Pieced, glued, and properly jointed.
Mule-bray, pig-grunt and bawdy cackles
Proceed from your great lips.
It’s worse than a barnyard.
Perhaps you consider yourself an oracle,
Mouthpiece of the dead, or of some god or other.
Thirty years now I have labored
To dredge the silt from your throat.
I am none the wiser.
Scaling little ladders with glue pots and pails of lysol
I crawl like an ant in mourning
Over the weedy acres of your brow
To mend the immense skull plates and clear
The bald, white tumuli of your eyes.
A blue sky out of the Oresteia
Arches above us. O father, all by yourself
You are pithy and historical as the Roman Forum.
I open my lunch on a hill of black cypress.
Your fluted bones and acanthine hair are littered
Read the full poem here.
4. Dream with Clam-Diggers
This poem reflects a bit of a whimsical feel as Plath describes a scene from a seaside. You can read the excerpt below:
This dream budded bright with leaves around the edges,
Its clear air winnowed by angels; she was come
Back to her early sea-town home
Scathed, stained after tedious pilgrimages.
Barefoot, she stood, in shock of that returning,
Beside a neighbor’s house
With shingles burnished as glass,
Blinds lowered on that hot morning.
No change met her: garden terrace, all summer
Tanged by melting tar,
Sloped seaward to plunge in blue; fed by white fire,
The whole scene flared welcome to this roamer.
High against heaven, gulls went wheeling soundless
Over tidal-flats where three children played
Silent and shining on a green rock bedded in mud,
Their fabulous heyday endless.
Read the full poem here.
5. Tulips
Originally entitled “Sickroom Tulips in Hospital,” Plath shortened the title of this poem, which describes an experience in a hospital after she got an appendectomy. You can read an excerpt below:
The tulips are too excitable, it is winter here.
Look how white everything is, how quiet, how snowed-in.
I am learning peacefulness, lying by myself quietly
As the light lies on these white walls, this bed, these hands.
I am nobody; I have nothing to do with explosions.
I have given my name and my day-clothes up to the nurses
And my history to the anesthetist and my body to surgeons.
They have propped my head between the pillow and the sheet-cuff
Like an eye between two white lids that will not shut.
Stupid pupil, it has to take everything in.
The nurses pass and pass, they are no trouble,
They pass the way gulls pass inland in their white caps,
Doing things with their hands, one just the same as another,
So it is impossible to tell how many there are.
My body is a pebble to them, they tend it as water
Tends to the pebbles it must run over, smoothing them gently.
They bring me numbness in their bright needles, they bring me sleep.
Now I have lost myself I am sick of baggage——
My patent leather overnight case like a black pillbox,
My husband and child smiling out of the family photo;
Their smiles catch onto my skin, little smiling hooks.
Read the full poem here.
What Kind of Poetry Did Sylvia Plath Write?
Sylvia Plath was part of the literary movement called confessional poetry. Her most notable works include a novel, The Bell Jar, and her poem “Ariel.” She won several awards, including a Pulitzer Prize for Poetry.
During her childhood, Plath spent several years by the seashore, but when her father died suddenly in 1940, the family moved to Wellesley, Massachusetts. Apparently, she had had a troubled relationship with her late father, as seen in her poems, such as the famous “Daddy.”
Reading Sylvia Plath Poems
If you like reading heart wrenching poems, Sylvia Plath is one poet you may enjoy. You can learn from her honesty in expressing the extremes of pain and suffering, and practice it in your own writing.
But if you also struggle with similar mental anguish, we recommend you consult a professional, as no book of any sort can be an adequate substitute to proper mental care.
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Yen Cabag is the Blog Writer of TCK Publishing. She is also a homeschooling mom, family coach, and speaker for the Charlotte Mason method, an educational philosophy that places great emphasis on classic literature and the masterpieces in art and music. She has also written several books, both fiction and nonfiction. Her passion is to see the next generation of children become lovers of reading and learning in the midst of short attention spans.
