In 1932, a girl was born who would soon become a twentieth-century poetry pioneer. Best known for her book The Bell Jar and her deeply moving, personal, and gut-wrenching poems and short stories, Sylvia Plath would blaze a trail to beauty and success and, unfortunately, to her demise. Sylvia had begun writing early on, and while working as a waitress and writing as her side gig, she submitted 45 short stories to the magazine Seventeen before they finally published one. The next year, she won a fiction contest, and for a short blip in June of 1953, she was happy. Those around her described her as obsessed with beauty; it was her entire identity, more so than her identity as an author.
Her demise came shortly after she moved back home, and modern-day psychiatrists would call it a nervous breakdown. After an attempt at suicide and spiraling in body and mind, she was found in a crawl space beneath her house. This would mark the beginning of the end. She went back to college and finished, summa cum laude. She went on to write The Bell Jar, which depicted a young college girl’s breakdown into utter despair, parallel to her own life. “I felt very still and empty, the way the eye of a tornado must feel, moving dully along in the middle of the surrounding hullabaloo.”
The Bell Jar, published posthumously, became an instant success in 1971, selling more than three million copies. Unfortunately, Plath never got to see its fame. She took her own life in February 1963. Her last poem, “Edge,” was written on February 5—six days before her death. In it, she wrote of a woman who is “perfected,” whose bare feet seem to be saying: We have come so far, it is over. It reads, in its brevity, like an epitaph she wrote for herself.
Tragically, someone who by all accounts had the dream—two children, a vocation, money, fame, and an intellect that was one of the greats in the twentieth century—collapsed. And she came to it, in her own words, without God. Reflecting on the death of a friend, she once wrote of God that if that was his will, then he is a “very stupid, arbitrary, bloodthirsty” god, one she did not like, believe in, or respect.
What strikes me is not that she was bitter toward God but that she was wounded toward him. The language reads more like a cry than a dismissal. That, if anything, makes the tragedy sharper.
So what sets Sylvia Plath apart from Charles Spurgeon, who was also beset with years of torment of the mind, a depression so deep his wife Susannah would often find him curled up under his desk in tears? The Lord. Only the Lord could sustain a mind bent to the depths, whether it be melancholy, mental illness, depression, or inherited generational trauma.
“The mind can descend far lower than the body, for it, there are bottomless pits. The flesh can bear only a certain number of wounds and no more, but the soul can bleed in ten thousand ways, and die over and over again each hour.” (Spurgeon, Exposition on Psalm 88)
If you have never experienced this, the soul dying over and over, the mind stuck in the pits of hell, I want to tread carefully here. I have not had the grief of losing a child or a parent, or of suffering a terminal illness. But I can say with Spurgeon, and with something of a shared language, that the spiral in which minds can descend is a grave of dry bones I wish upon no one. And sometimes this is the thorn in the flesh.
“I am the subject of depressions of spirit so fearful that I hope none of you ever get to such extremes of wretchedness as I go to.” (Charles Spurgeon)
What kept Spurgeon from Plath’s destiny—lying on the kitchen floor, turning on the gas? This can only be the work of a God who redeems. Between the false fire alarms that killed people in Spurgeon’s presence, his physical ailments, and at times not knowing what he wept for, Spurgeon is one of the greatest examples of battling depression with the King of Kings on your side. Does it make it go away? No, sometimes it doesn’t. Sometimes our minds continue to fail us, spiral us, send us to make our bed in hell. But what does Spurgeon do? He reminds us that if we do make our bed in hell, God will be there.
“I often feel very grateful to God that I have undergone fearful depression. I know the borders of despair and the horrible brink of that gulf of darkness into which my feet have almost gone.” (Charles Spurgeon)
Christians who wear a mask of happiness on this side of the veil have winced at this quote out of ignorance or simply a different disposition. Some are not as prone to the depths, and that is a mercy. But we are wrong to deny that sometimes joy is harder than sorrow, for the mind can hijack and rip apart any joy there is. That is the truth for some of us fighting the good fight.
We can admire the personal ferocity of Plath while mourning a life lost without Christ. We can take examples from the fathers of the faith — Job, David, William Cowper, and Charles Spurgeon. We are not without hope, but we are also not without pain. And the line between life and death becomes blurred. But we have a God who has put on strength as his belt (Psalm 93), a God who said these dry bones can live (Ezekiel 37).
The thorn that afflicts many saints better equips them to walk hand in hand with those suffering, whose minds cross into despair; and when a bruised reed comes to them, they will not break it. And instead of having no words to say, we can say with a heavy heart and an unfailing faith that there is a day coming with no sorrows. A great High Priest who knows more about being forsaken and sorrowful unto death than any of us. The clouds are dark, the waters deep, but we are not without hope. We need not be like Plath on a descent into destruction.
There is not always an easy answer. Be wary of saying that depression is a lack of faith, cured by reading your Bible. But fear not, there is an answer. An answer that the world, fame, and success cannot provide. A cross. With eternity seen through the holes of his hands.
Then Jesus told his disciples, “If anyone would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me. For whoever would save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake will find it. For what will it profit a man if he gains the whole world and forfeits his soul? Or what shall a man give in return for his soul?” (Matthew 16:24–26)
Footnotes
Rivieccio, Genna. “Behind the Lit: The Happy Sylvia Plath.” The Airship, September 11, 2014. http://airshipdaily.com/blog/08262014-sylvia-plath.
Plath, Sylvia. The Bell Jar. Lightyear Press, 1971.
Poetry Foundation. “Edge.” Sylvia Plath, February 5, 1963. https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/49009/edge-56d22ab50bbc1.
Roberts, Tony. “The Grim Disbelief of Sylvia Plath.” Delight in Disorder, August 26, 2024. https://delightindisorder.org/the-grim-disbelief-of-sylvia-plath/.
