| Death & Co. | |
|---|---|
| by Sylvia Plath | |
| Publisher | Faber & Faber |
| Publication date | 1965 |
| Media type | Print (hardback) |
| Lines | 31 (six stanzas) |
| OCLC | 671307485 |
"Death & Co" is a poem by Sylvia Plath, dated 19 April 1962, and first appearing in the collection Ariel published by Faber & Faber in 1965, and by Harper & Row in 1966. [1] [2]
The incident that informed the poem was a visit by two entrepreneurs who offered Ted Hughes, Plath's spouse and fellow poet, a lucrative opportunity to work abroad—a proposition that she resented. [3]
Sylvia Plath, in a BBC reading of "Death & Co.", introduced her work as follows:
The poem is about the double or schizophrenia nature of death—marmoreal of Blake's death mask, say, hand in glove with the fearful softness of worms, water, and other katabolists. I imagine these two aspects of death as two men, two business friends, who have come to call. [4]
Biographer and literary critic Caroline King Barnard reports that the imagery of death takes various forms in "Death & Co.", one of which is "glitter"—"Bastard/Masturbating a glitter"—as it does in Plath's poems "Berck-Plage," where "things are glittering" as "As an old man is vanishing,' and in "Gigolo," where the narrator "glitter[s] like Fontainebleau." [5]
Barnard includes "Death & Co." among a number of Plath's "baby" poems where infants appear as part of "an imagery of disintegration and death." [6] The chiming of "The dead bell/The dead bell" commemorates the refrigerated corpses of stillborn babies in a maternity ward.: [7]