Ngoc Nguyen Poet Sonnet

Notes About The Poem

Sylvia Plath was an American poet, novelist, and short-story writer. She is credited with advancing the genre of confessional poetry and is best known for two of her published collections, “The Colossus and Other Poems,” and, “Ariel,” as well as “The Bell Jar,” a semi-autobiographical novel published shortly before her death. Plath was clinically depressed for most of her adult life, and was treated multiple times with electro-convulsive therapy, or ECT. On 11 February 1963 she took her own life at the age of 30 by sticking her head in a gas oven.

Dear Sylvia

Why, in a gas oven, dear Sylvia,
     did you stick your pretty, middle-class head?
Was the life of upper suburbia
     too much for you that you'd rather be dead?

If, like you, we gassed ourselves to death at thirty,
     we'd never forgive ourselves for leaving 
behind our children. We'd feel unworthy,
     and selfish for causing them much grieving.

But, at eight, you witnessed your father's demise;
     and bore for life an emotional scar
(which you never were able to exorcise),    
     a grief which you relived in “The Bell Jar.”

You should not be condemned, dear Sylvia,
for we knew not your melancholia—.

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