After the setting is established, Plath incorporates a meeting with God. This may seem like a joyous and uplifting experience. However, Plath describes her experience as being seized up, swallowed, and confined. In third stanza she adds to this image by saying "without a part leftover - not a toe, not a finger, and used". Both the meeting with God and the summer setting are anticipated as positive aspects, but in actuality are seen as burdens and disturbances by Path. She compares these aspects ad the pain they bring to the "Sun's conflagration", the sun is seen as warm, glowing, and inviting. However, the sun is also fiery and destructive like hell. .
The poem begins to focus more clearly on religion in the third and fourth stanzas. In the end of the third stanza, Plath mentions the church describing "The stains - that lengthen from ancient cathedrals". Knowing that Plath was not a religious woman, these descriptions may be symbols of what she believes is the destruction of the church and her view of the people that follow it She also compares the Communion Tablet to a pill. Pills are significant to Plath's life because at the age of twenty-one she attempted to kill herself by overdosing.
The lowest point of the poem Mystic is seen within the last lines of the fourth stanza when Plaths speaks of "Christ in the faces of rodents". Darkness and despair is portrayed here. From this point, Mystic seems to jump on the positive side. In the following stanza, the rodents are revealed as symbols of people who are happy and satisfied with their lives and show hopes are so low they are comfortable. The humpback man is satisfied with his small cottage. However, Plath could not find any satisfaction in any situation as her depression engulfed her. Plath uses this poem to fight herself and find hope with herself. .
In the fifth stanza, Plath asks "Is there no great love, only tenderness?" The question of tenderness is one of the many that Sylvia Plath was tormented wit throughout her life.
