Sylvia's Death

"Sylvia’s Death" is a poem by American writer and poet Anne Sexton (1928–1974) written in 1963. "Sylvia's Death" was first seen within Sexton's short memoir “The Barfly Ought to Sing” for TriQuarterly magazine. The poem was also then included in her 1966 Pulitzer Prize winning collection of poems Live or Die. The poem is highly confessional in tone, focusing on the suicide of friend and fellow poet Sylvia Plath in 1963, as well as Sexton's own yearning for death. Due to the fact that Sexton wrote the poem only days after Plath's passing within February 1963, "Sylvia’s Death" is often seen as an elegy for Plath.^[1] The poem is also thought to have underlying themes of female suppression, suffering, and death due to the confines of domesticity subsequent of the patriarchy.^[2]