Death&Co

DEATH&CO by Sylvia Plath


“Death & Co.” is a short poem in free verse, its thirty-one lines divided into seven stanzas. The title suggests the name of a business or corporation; its function is to establish the mood of the poem, which is ironic and mocking. Death is often viewed with ambivalence, something that not only takes away life but also (sometimes mistakenly) offers comfort to those who are in pain or who believe in an afterlife; death can seem cold and officious, but also, perhaps, ironic in the form it finally takes. The poem is written in the first person in the form of a confession monologue in which the speaker mockingly describes a terrifying—and coldly businesslike—scene unfolding before her eyes. While it is often the case that poets use a persona to distinguish themselves from the poem’s speaker, no such distinction is implied in this poem. The poet Sylvia Plath, like the speaker, conceives a monologue wherein one person speaks alone. Although Plath is considered by many to be a “confessional” poet, this poem seems less like a confession to someone, explicitly or implicitly, and more like a monologue to the self.


“Death & Co.” begins with the idea of a duality, a form common to many of the subjects in Plath’s poetry. In this case, the speaker, while being visited by two mordant and menacing figures, becomes aware that death is not singular but has two faces. It is a realization that does not surprise her (“It seems perfectly natural now”), but it terrifies her nonetheless. She graphically describes first the one face and then the other, beginning with “the one who never looks up.” He is cold and distant, and his eyes are lidded to avoid contact with the speaker. He reminds her of a marble statue, a death mask “like Blake’s.” In the second stanza, the poet continues the litany of characteristics that distinguish the first face of death. He publicly exhibits the trademark signs of the memento mori, reminding the speaker how accomplished he is by the appearance of his many birthmarks. By the end of this stanza, the poet realizes that she is his next victim. Her statement “I am red meat” mocks the serious nature of her realization while revealing her inevitable fear of the moment. She steps aside as he tries to grab her: “I am not his yet.” Still overtly threatening, he begins to play a psychological game with her by undermining those things in her physical world she feels are safe: her physical attractiveness and her children. The speaker of the poem notes his overarching self-confidence.


While he is a perfectionist, a kind of artist bragging about his accomplishments, his partner is oily, sociable, and fawning. The first wants to be respected and admired, the second “wants to be loved.” Yet they operate together: “The frost makes a flower,/ The dew makes a star.” Hoping to be noticed by neither figure, the speaker retreats into stasis. However, the lure and inevitability of the business the two contradictory figures have come for is pronounced, in the speaker’s mind, by the inevitable ringing of the bells. By the last line of the poem she knows her time is up, but her sarcasm remains: “Somebody’s done for.”


Forms and Devices


Early criticism of Plath’s poetry tended to see it as confessional in nature, an autobiography of the poet’s personal neuroses. Following that line of thinking, readers who examine the imagery closely will time and again be referred back to the poet’s own desperate life, which was filled with shame and psychic fragility. The early critics viewed her work as successful not because it was strictly confessional but because the self placed at the center of the poem makes “vulnerability and shame” representative of a wider civilization. The private events are universalized through the speaking voice. However, later literary critics began to focus more on her developing poetic and the achievement of her voice and tone, while admitting that much of her content was in fact drawn from her own life. Perhaps the strongest reason to believe that Plath’s clever crafting of her poetry places her outside the strictly confessional school of poetry (a school that includes the poets John Berryman, Theodore Roethke, and Anne Sexton) is that she avoids sounding confessional; she lacks self-pity and an overreaction to what might seem appropriately terrifying. In other words, she constructs in her later poems dramatically staged performances that pose a tension through the face-off between life, movement, and energy on one hand and death, inertia, and passivity on the other.


This juxtaposition between life force and death force may be said to be at the heart of “Death & Co.,” which reads like a bizarre juxtaposition of things public and private. Characteristic of this poem as well as several other of Plath’s later poems are the self-reflexive quality of her experience, a rhythmic energy, clearly ambiguous images, and the colloquialisms of the speaking voice. All of this suggests that the poem is staged as a process of change and discovery narrated by a speaker who is both mocking and vengeful. For instance, “Death & Co.” opens with a juxtaposition of the two figures of death that appear before the speaker. As the poet’s discovery of their business unfolds, she carefully controls her response to their visit with a form of self-parody that helps keep in mind the exchange between the audience’s reception and her own feelings. She imposes limits of rhyme and rhythm so she can measure changes within her personal situation. The rhythmical energy of the speaking voice, in fact, is a reminder of how sporting, playful, vengeful, or mocking she can be. The first two stanzas, for example, include the repetition of numbers (“Two, of course there are two”), colors (“nude/ Verdigris” and “red meat”), alliteration (“balled, like Blake’s”), and slant rhyme (“birthmarks that are his trademark”). Sentence patterns are repeated again and again with interesting developments: “He tells me how badly I photograph./ He tells me how sweet.” The rhymes are widely separated (“sweet” in the third stanza rhymes with “feet” in the fourth stanza). However, the self-conscious, performing, and poetic self of the speaker puts her in touch with moment-to-moment changes and forces the audience to sit rapt, to accept the form as expression and artifact. It is characteristic of Plath to end her poetry with the same ironic awareness held by the speaker throughout the poem. In the final stanza and last line of “Death & Co.,” her ear for music and vernacular is right on the mark. She is still recording her speaker’s shifting sensibility even to the point that the speaker, feeling personally diminished, still maintains her voice of manic buffoonery.


Themes and Meanings


“Death & Co.” is a poem about life and death. How does a woman with a troubled relationship to both life and death envision the moment when death comes to visit her? How does her poetic vision of this complicated scene get articulated? References to death abound in Plath’s poems (she attempted suicide three times, the last successfully), yet her differing figures of death reveal a fascination more with how the living view death itself than with what they imagine death to be like after life. One may wonder if this is a kind of madness. In her many poems that address the theme of death (especially her last poems, collected in Ariel), the images are frightening and surreal. Still, the poetry out of which “Death & Co.” comes is not without a kind of history. Emily Dickinson wrote harrowing poems on madness and dying, while Theodore Roethke, Anne Sexton, Robert Lowell, and Hayden Carruth all have explored similar subject matter.


The common theme among Plath’s “death poems” is, interestingly, the ambivalent attitude toward death they reveal. In “Death & Co.,” the ambivalence takes the form of a speaker who seems part of a dramatically staged performance of being in wait for death while revealing an assertiveness, wit, ingenuity, and sheer life force in attempting to outwit death. She performs even though she is faced with the suffering and pain of personal failure (how badly she photographs and her dead babies) as well as inherited cultural myths. The speaker avoids confessional or self-pitying overreactions. In fact, the performing self suggests underlying feelings of comedy.


“Death & Co.” is also about poetry as a process of discovery and reaction. As the poet reveals the speaker’s fantasy (or her madness) about death as a slowly savored, dramatic show of loss, pain, and personal diminishment, readers see that the shifting sensibility offers a close-up scrutiny of just how one is shaped by and impelled to shape her material. In her occasional narrative asides (“I am red meat,” “I am not his yet,” “I do not stir”) it is not clear whether she speaks to an audience or to herself. What is important is not to whom she addresses her monologue but that she experiences this performance as an emotionally charged process of discovery and reaction. The self-conscious performance, then, becomes a substitute for a fixed identity, suggesting that for Plath any attempted literary shaping or definition of self is inadequate and unfinished.