SOURCE: Folsom, Jack. “Death and Rebirth in Sylvia Plath's ‘Berck-Plage.’” Journal of Modern Literature 17, no. 4 (Spring, 1991): 521-35.

In the following essay, Folsom examines the personal and professional significance of Plath's poem “Berck-Plage.”

Sylvia Plath's “Berck-Plage,” which contains 126 lines of seemingly unmitigated malaise and funereal gloom, stands in many readers' estimation as one of her heaviest and least appealing works, even considering its autobiographical significance. The occasion for the poem is described by Ted Hughes in a note to the poem written in 1970:

In June, 1961, we had visited Berck-Plage, a long beach and resort on the coast of France north of Rouen. Some sort of hospital or convalescent home for the disabled fronts the beach. It was one of her nightmares stepped into the real world. A year later—almost to the day—our next door neighbour, an old man [Percy Key] died after a short grim illness during...