Sylvia Plath

            After reading Ariel the entire day, I had a taste of her wrath, of her sad frustrations in life.
             She tried to commit suicide when she was 21. Because she wanted to be united with her father, as she said I her poem Daddy: .
             At twenty I tried to die .
             And get back, back, back to you. .
             I thought even the bones would do. .
             But they pulled me out of the sack, .
             And they stuck me together with glue. .
             And then I knew what to do. .
             I made a model of you, .
             A man in black with a Meinkampf look. .
             She drank a bottle of sleeping pills and hid in a crawl space in their basement. After three days her brother found her and rushed her to the hospital. .
             She then goes back to describing her father and husband, using the color black, perhaps representing the void within her, like a black hole. The hole that her father left when he died, the hole that her husband made when he left her for another woman. .
             She even believed she could die exceptionally well: .
             Dying .
             Is an art, like everything else. .
             I do it exceptionally well. .
             Actually, she's already killed herself in a figurative sense. This "virtual- death was all the more real to her; it was, paradoxically, the only thing she could do to make herself feel truly alive. .
             In the end, she had great peace and resignation, as seen in the last poem she wrote before she died: .
             The woman is perfected. .
             Her dead .
             Body wears the smile of accomplishment .
             It was as if she had already accepted the logic of the life she had been leading and had come to terms with its terrible necessities. .
             She wrote tellingly about her pattern: .
             I have done it again. .
             One year in every ten .
             I manage it " .
             A sort of walking miracle. .
             She attempted suicide when she was 21 (as I said earlier, with the bottle of pills), when she was 30 (drove her car off the road) and succeeded when she reached 31. She set out milk and cookies for her two sleeping children, carefully protecting them by sealing off their room with towels and tape and opening their window.