The Applicant By Sylvia Plath—National Poetry Month 2024

Sylvia Plath looking happier than tortured iconography that flourished after her death.

Sylvia Plath was beautiful, brilliant, and deeply troubled.  The daughter of a Unitarian minister and teenage wunderkind, her poetry and novel The Bell Jar became touchstones and inspirations for second wave feminists and emo girls.  Chronically depressed and perhaps schizophrenia it was difficult to distinguish autobiography from paranoid delusions.  After many failed or feigned attempts she ended her life with her head in a gas oven in London at just 30 years old.

Today, we share a piece that is among her most clear-eyed and lucid.

An early paperback edition of of Plath's Collected Poems edited by her British poet husband, Ted Hughes.  Although he spent much of the rest of his life honoring and preserving her legacy, he was demonized by many feminists as a sexist brute and cause of Sylvia's suicide.

The Applicant

First, are you our sort of a person?  

Do you wear

A glass eye, false teeth or a crutch,

A brace or a hook,

Rubber breasts or a rubber crotch,

 

Stitches to show something’s missing?  No, no? Then

How can we give you a thing?

Stop crying.

Open your hand.

Empty? Empty. Here is a hand

 

To fill it and willing

To bring teacups and roll away headaches

And do whatever you tell it.

Will you marry it?

It is guaranteed

 

To thumb shut your eyes at the end

And dissolve of sorrow.

We make new stock from the salt.

I notice you are stark naked.

How about this suit——

 

Black and stiff, but not a bad fit.

Will you marry it?

It is waterproof, shatterproof, proof

Against fire and bombs through the roof.

Believe me, they’ll bury you in it.

 

Now your head, excuse me, is empty.

I have the ticket for that.

Come here, sweetie, out of the closet.

Well, what do you think of that?

Naked as paper to start

 

But in twenty-five years she’ll be silver,

In fifty, gold.

A living doll, everywhere you look.

It can sew, it can cook,

It can talk, talk, talk.

 

It works, there is nothing wrong with it.

You have a hole, it’s a poultice.

You have an eye, it’s an image.

My boy, it’s your last resort.

Will you marry it, marry it, marry it.

 

—Sylvia Plath

 

From The Collected Poems. Copyright © 2008 by Sylvia Plath.