In "Three Women," the final poem of Winter Trees (1971), Sylvia Plath speaks through the voice of a woman in a maternity ward, whose words provide a fitting statement for the poet's singular fixation with annihilation:

A power is growing on me an old tenacity.
I am breaking apart like the world.
There is this blackness,
This ram of blackness. I fold my hands on a mountain.
The air is thick. It is thick with this working.
I am used. I am drummed into use.
My eyes are squeezed by this blackness.
I see nothing.

Composed during the last year of Plath's life, "Three Women" foreshadows the poet's self-asphyxiation in February 1963. In all of the poems written during the two-year period immediately preceding her suicide, including those in Ariel (1965) and Crossing the Water (1971), Plath expresses her anguish with her experiences as a writer, a wife, and a mother. She...