Explore Plath's treatment of death, ageing, birth and rebirth.

It appears that Plath has a morbid fascination and an obsessed attraction to death in most of her poems. Statements such as “I only wanted to lie with my hands turned up and be utterly empty” in Tulips and “they will invite me to whiten my bones among them” in Wuthering Heights, show a longing to die and reveal a tendency toward suicide. Furthermore, Plath describes deathly images such as the “old beast”, “stars letting …

…parenthesis is ludicrous, “They’ve trapped her in some laboratory jar” and as a result, we mock the false rebirth that this woman believes will bring her eternal youth like “Cleopatra”. Another occasion where Plath is cynical about rebirth is in The Burnt-Out Spa, where she uses the irony of a spa (a place of physical and mental curing and thus, rebirth) that “neither nourishes nor heals” anymore as it has been destroyed. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ **Bibliography**