“Last Words” by Sylvia Plath

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Sylvia Plath was both haunted and mesmerized by death. Suffering from depression at an early age, Plath’s poetry deeply encapsulates how she felt about dying. Her depression often evaporated her fear of death, which gave her a novel perspective on the subject.

Rather than focusing on the doom and gloom of dying, her poem “Last Words” imagines death as a grand and gorgeous event. From her opening line, “I do not want a plain box, I want a sarcophagus,” she sets the tone for the entire piece as one of celebration. Not only is she unafraid of her death, she welcomes it warmly.

Plath’s “Last Words” contains sickly sweet language using all of the senses. At one point, she says:

I should sugar and preserve my days like fruit!
My mirror is clouding over —
A few more breaths, and it will reflect nothing at all.

Readers taste the sticky fruit of Plath’s poem, imagining a life that was once plump and ripe, but has now been sucked dry and sweetened over time. The line connects to her allusion to ancient Egypt, hearkening back to a time when pharaohs were buried with jars of preserved fruit.

She describes the fragility of life in the line, “I do not trust the spirit. It escapes like steam.” Try as she might to hold that steam in her hands, it slips right through. It seeps through every orifice and every pore of her body. She contrasts it to physical objects, saying, “They stay, their little particular lusters. Warmed by much handling. They almost purr.” This line explains why she wants to be buried with beautiful objects nestled around her body. These objects have a permanence that she will never have.

She gives reason against the cold logic that a body is merely a cadaver once someone has died.

On one hand, Plath’s poem justifies the comfort that tradition provides in death and burial. Her body becomes a shrine of itself, as she is wrapped in bandages with her heart placed in a parcel beneath her. She gives reason against the cold logic that a body is merely a cadaver once someone has died. In her poem, her body has become like a beloved object. She wants it to be cared for tenderly, with the same warm respect given to finely-crafted pottery or art.

While many poets focus on the spirit as the primary driving force after death, Plath ignores the spirit in favor of the body. Even after we die, our bodies remain in one form or another as relics of who we were. In this way, she breathes life into an ancient and outdated tradition.

Sylvia Plath took her own life in 1963, but she is still remembered as one of the most revered poets of all time.

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