"Death & Co" is a poem by Sylvia Plath, dated 19 April 1962, and first appearing in the collection Ariel published by Faber & Faber in 1965, and by Harper & Row in 1966.Barnard, 1978 pp. 121-128: Selected bibliographyPlath, 1981 p. 254-255
Background The incident that informed the poem was a visit by two entrepreneurs who offered Ted Hughes, Plath's spouse and fellow poet, a lucrative opportunity to work abroad—a proposition that she resented.Plath, 1981 p. 294: Ted Hughes: "a visit by two well-meaning men" who invited Hughes "to live abroad at a tempting salary" and whom Plath "resented."
Sylvia Plath, in a BBC reading of "Death & Co.", introduced her work as follows:
Theme Biographer and literary critic Caroline King Barnard reports that the imagery of death takes various forms in "Death & Co.", one of which is "glitter"—"Bastard/Masturbating a glitter"—as it does in Plath's poems "Berck-Plage," where "things are glittering" as "As an old man is vanishing,' and in "Gigolo," where the narrator "glitter[s] like Fontainebleau."Barnard, 1972 p. 80
Barnard includes "Death & Co." among a number of Plath's "baby" poems where infants appear as part of "an imagery of disintegration and death."Barnard, 1972 p. 86-87 The chiming of "The dead bell/The dead bell" commemorates the refrigerated corpses of stillborn babies in a maternity ward.:Barnard, 1972 p. 87, p. 102: "...the dead bell's companion in "Death & Co."... He tells me how sweet The babies look in their hospital Icebox, a simple
Frill at the neck, Then the fluting of their Ionian Death-gowns, Then two little feet.
Footnotes
Sources Barnard, Caroline King. 1978. Sylvia Plath. Twayne Publishers, G. K. Hall & Co., Boston, Massachusetts. Plath, Sylvia. 1981. Sylvia Plath: The Collected Poems. Editor, Ted Hughes. Harper & Row Publishers, New York.