SOURCE: Murphy, Jacqueline Shea. “‘This Holocaust I Walk In:’ Consuming Violence in Sylvia Plath's Poetry.” Bucknell Review 39, no. 1 (1995): 104-17.

In the following essay, Murphy attempts to locate sources for the imagery of violence and destruction in Plath's poetry.

Bodies melt, voices shriek; hooks pierce; human flesh is chopped, like meat, wrapped and unwrapped. People eat and get eaten:

My night sweats grease his breakfast plate .....My ribs show. What have I eaten? 

(“The Jailer,” 185)¹

People wait to be eaten:

I am red meat. His beak Claps sidewise: I am not his yet. 

(“Death & Co.,” 205)

Mothers beg for their babies to be saved from becoming food for others' cravings:

And my baby a nail Driven, driven in. He shrieks in his grease 

O You who eat 

People like light rays, leave This one Mirror safe, unredeemed. … 

(“Brasilia,” 210)

But these mothers plea in vain to exempt their children from the...