Sylvia Plath, Still Singing
Art, mental illness, the ache of perception
By: The Lace Ledger Staff
Photo Credit: The New Yorker
Some poetry doesn’t age because it never belonged to its moment of conception.
Sylvia Plath wrote from a place that continues to feel familiar to anyone who has lived inside their own mind for too long.
Her work sits at the intersection of brilliance and fragility, without ever asking the reader to choose between them.
In one of her most iconic works, “Mad Girl’s Love Song,” Plath captures the emotional vertigo of love, loss and self-doubt with unsettling clarity, punctuated by a refrain that reads like a mind arguing with itself in a search for certainty while drowning in fear.
The poem moves between devotion and disbelief without resolving either. Love becomes something imagined, then remembered, then doubted entirely.
The language remains formal while the emotion collapses underneath it. This stark contrast mirrors the lived experience of high-functioning distress. Everything looks fine … until it isn’t.
Mad Girl's Love Song by Sylvia Plath
I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead;
I lift my lids and all is born again.
(I think I made you up inside my head.)
The stars go waltzing out in blue and red,
And arbitrary blackness gallops in:
I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead.
I dreamed that you bewitched me into bed
And sung me moon-struck, kissed me quite insane.
(I think I made you up inside my head.)
God topples from the sky, hell's fires fade:
Exit seraphim and Satan's men:
I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead.
I fancied you'd return the way you said,
But I grow old and I forget your name.
(I think I made you up inside my head.)
I should have loved a thunderbird instead;
At least when spring comes they roar back again.
I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead.
(I think I made you up inside my head.)
Plath’s legacy is, unfortunately, often flattened into tragedy given her lifelong battle with mental health leading to her untimely death. While her mental health challenges certainly influenced her artistic approach, this framing overlooks the genius and tactical execution that defines her work.
She was not writing as confessional, but to be precise in stormy weather. Her poems read like someone trying to stay oriented while the world frays at the edges.
Mental illness appears in Plath’s writing not as spectacle, but as atmosphere.
It is present in the way perception bends, existing in the hushed panic of not trusting one’s own thoughts. This interior tension is what gives her work its enduring gravity.
Plath’s work reminds us that mental illness does not always appear chaotic. Sometimes it looks articulate, composed and deeply self-aware. Her writing resists the romanticization of suffering by showing how exhausting it is to doubt your own reality so granularly.
There is no glamour in the uncertainty she describes.
There is only persistence.
Her work survives because the voice does.
This is why Plath remains essential. She offers language to those who feel too much but refuse to dramatize it.
She validates pain without aestheticizing collapse.
We live in a culture that’s fluent in shallow oversharing but uncomfortable with certain depths.
Plath’s work asks for patience rather than reaction. She does not explain herself, rather, instead documents the experience and trusts the reader to recognize it.
For artists navigating mental health today, her work offers permission to be exact instead of loud. It suggests that clarity can coexist with vulnerability.
Sylvia Plath did not write to be understood easily. She wrote to be honest with herself.
“Mad Girl’s Love Song” remains a reminder that art can hold pain without resolving it.
What is your favourite Plath poem? Tell us in the comments and subscribe to receive our free monthly digital issue.
