Sylvia Plath

I read through Sylvia Plath's poetry a second time today. I'm discovering that reading through poetry a couple times helps me process it more fully. "Lady Lazarus" and "Daddy" were really dark. It's evident that she was wrestling with some huge personal demons. She threw a lot of Nazi Germany references into her poetry, which I thought was really interesting. I'm curious as to what her reasoning was. Such references in "Daddy" make her father seem like an awful, evil man. It seems like Plath hated her father, but then she talks about wanting to die to get back to him. I stumbled upon a poem by Anne Sexton called "Sylvia's Death" that could almost be the sequal to "Lady Lazarus". "Sylvia's Death" helped me understand "Lady Lazarus" better because it referenced Plath's struggle with depression/suicide from the eyes of one of her friends. It sounds like Sexton and Plath talked about death a lot and "drank to" it. Sexton sounds really sad and angry and hurt and left behind, which are probably common of those close to a suicide victim. I thought the line "with two children, two meteors wandering loose in the tiny playroom" was really sad. It made me picture two little kids absolutely lost and confused in the wake of their mother's death.