Edge of Depression - Sneha Joseph

"The woman is perfected.  

Her dead

Body wears the smile of accomplishment,  

The illusion of a Greek necessity

Flows in the scrolls of her toga,  

Her bare

Feet seem to be saying:

We have come so far, it is over."

Even though debatable, these are the lines from the last poem, 'Edge' of the great American poet Sylvia Plath. The poem is about a dead woman who is perfected in her death and ironically just after 6 days of writing this poem, Sylvia Plath committed suicide. She is a poet who never wrote for her readers. Rather all her poems were her mind, her voice that echoed in her pen. Being a patient of chronic depression, all her works carried the sorrows and emotions she was fighting with. Plath's last poem too heated with her thick feelings bears the pain of her crying inner self.

A poet who marked lines for her own, she was not much celebrated in her lifetime. Rather, through death, she was raised in the wings of her depressed poems to become the uncrowned queen of American literature. A bright student and teenager, she was the daughter of a German immigrant college professor Otto Plath and his student Aurelia Schober. Plath's famous poem ‘Daddy’ is about her authoritarian father and her troubled relationship with him. We can read that he was the starting point of her unstable mind, and his death when she was at the age of 10 made her cut her own neck. The last line of that poem "Daddy, daddy, you bastard, I’m through" ends with merging the vampire figure to her father. The poem also reveals her thirst to kill her father since he abandoned her through death.

It was during her college days she met Ted Hughes, a fellow poet, and married him. It was in these same college days she had the first signs of her depression. Both reasons are related to each other in her death. It's their separation that led to her depressed stage, pulling her to the edge of death and it's evident from her last letters written to her friend and former psychiatrist, Ruth Beuscher. In the nineteen-seventies, fourteen letters, which cover in detail Plath’s estrangement from her husband were passed from Beuscher to Harriet Rosenstein, a feminist scholar who was working on a biography of Plath. Stymied by the Plath estate, Rosenstein never published the book, and the letters, unknown to the public, remained in her files. In 2017, they were put up for sale by an American book dealer. These letters make clear that she was so down by the separation from Hughes. And she suicided by putting her on the kitchen over and inhaling the gas in it.

'Edge' is the poem which carried her last emotions. It is an abstruse one without clear boundaries. Even if it's so, we can read out the painting of a woman who is going to get suicided or is suicided. The lines of her poems also compare the children to white serpents and shares the idea of killing them. This also points to Plath's intention to kill her own children, even though it never happened. The line also extends to the allusions of Medea ("the allusion of a Greek necessity") who in Greek myths avenge her husband's betrayal by killing their two children. The allusion also gives the hint to her suicidal feelings, when considering the Greeks did not believe suicide was unequivocally bad; in fact, in many cases, it’s regarded as honorable.

She smiles in the poem, because her feet have nowhere else to carry her. And she hardly took any effort to polish her poem, because "it is over". The poem is her last cry. The drawing of a depressed mind which used the art of writing to express the fighting feeling. The art is blended with her chronic bipolar personality, stating art is someone's special method to talk to the world about their upgraded mindset of thoughts. Sylvia Plath incorporated her depression with her lines, blended them, making it look like a depressing poem or in other words POEM OF DEPRESSION.

"Dying is an art, like everything else. I do it exceptionally well. I do it so it feels like hell. I do it so it feels real"

-        SYLVIA PLATH