Sylvia Plath wrote her last two poems on this day in 1963, a week before her death. In “Balloons,” a mother observes her two children happily playing with their two “traveling / Globes of thin air, red, green,” in “a world clear as water.” In “Edge,” everyone is dead:
"The woman is perfected.
Her dead
Body wears the smile of accomplishment,
The illusion of a Greek necessity
Flows in the scrolls of her toga,
Her bare
Feet seem to be saying:
We have come so far, it is over.
Each dead child coiled, a white serpent,
One at each little
Pitcher of milk, now empty…"
Her dead
Body wears the smile of accomplishment,
The illusion of a Greek necessity
Flows in the scrolls of her toga,
Her bare
Feet seem to be saying:
We have come so far, it is over.
Each dead child coiled, a white serpent,
One at each little
Pitcher of milk, now empty…"
