Sylvia's Death

The poem is highly confessional in tone, focusing on the suicide of friend and fellow poet Sylvia Plath in 1963, as well as Sexton's own yearning for death.

[1] The poem is also thought to have underlying themes of female suppression, suffering, and death due to the confines of domesticity subsequent of the patriarchy.

[3] Despite growing up in the same town, Wellesley, Massachusetts, Sexton and Plath first met in Robert Lowell’s graduate writing class at Boston University in 1958.

[4] Sexton writes that once Sylvia Plath and George Starbuck heard she was attending the seminar "they kind of followed me in”,[5] marking the beginning of a friendship between the three.

[6] It was their gatherings at The Ritz after their writing seminar that allowed Sexton and Plath to find a mutual bond over their yearning for death, in effect building their friendship.

Following "Sylvia's Death", Sexton wrote the rest of the poems in Live or Die without her usual rhyme scheme and structure (apart from one) and took on a new mode.

[11] At first, Sexton held disdain for her title as a confessional poet, and seemed to invalidate the idea that she used the mode in an effort to heal, quoting “You don’t solve problems in writing.

It is thought that the writing of “Sylvia’s Death” acted as a psychological and emotional outlet for Sexton, assisting in the poet coming to terms with the loss of her friend.

[2] The beginning stanzas discuss female domestic entrapment, with Sexton describing Plath's house as dead, built of stones and full of spoons to feed her meteor-like children, creating lifeless, almost robotic imagery of a household.

Through the description of a jail cell-like home, Sexton highlights her own feelings of disdain and imprisonment due to the weight of domestic chores.

[3] Within this, Sexton again addresses feminine domestic imprisonment and offers that Plath and herself so deeply long for death as it is a window out of the walls of their homes and motherly roles.

The poem was criticised by Galway Kinnell, Howard Moss who rejected the work to be published in The New Yorker, and Robert Lowell who wrote that "Sylvia's Death" had "too much push from the pathos".