[I think] that the so called "religious" motifs of [Plath's] "Mystic" have nothing to do with religion or religious spirituality or the supernatural as commonly conceived, but rather with the only variety of religious experience she knew and perhaps believed she ever would know: the "mystical union" of her "great love" and the creative mania that seized her up in the wake of its rupture and left her with a sense of something worse than "total neutrality," a sense of utter annihilation.
This is a case without a body.
The body does not come into it at all.
It is a case of vaporization.
—as "The Detective" wittily puts it. Clearly, the only gods Plath worshipped were poetry and her husband, and from the moment she fell in love we see that husband and poetry were one. (pp. 239-40)
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