I have done it again. / One year in every ten / I manage it.
-- Speaker (Lines 1 – 3)

Importance: This tercet initiates the poem, establishing both its rhythmic quality and its pattern of truncated verses. The rather blasé tone towards what the speaker has “done again” establishes the ordinariness with which she views the experience of dying. This very ordinariness, combined with the fact that the reader doesn’t yet know to what “it” refers, sets up the shock that follows the interruption at the end of the tercet, when she will begin to describe gruesome images of death.

A sort of walking miracle, my skin / Bright as a Nazi lampshade
-- Speaker (Lines 4 – 5)

Importance: These two lines from the beginning of the second tercet, are some of the most controversial in the poem, and in Plath’s oeuvre in general, because of their invocation of atrocities committed by the Nazi party in the first half of the twentieth century...