Sheep In Fog

Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1963

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Summary

Background

Poem Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Literary Devices

Background

Literary Context

Sylvia Plath’s contribution to American poetry was immense, even though she only published one poetry collection, The Colossus, during her lifetime. Through the success of Ariel after her death, she helped to shape the Confessional mode of poetry many poets have embraced afterwards. After studying with the poet Robert Lowell and being influenced by Anne Sexton (two major Confessional poets) and Plath’s own husband Ted Hughes, Plath wrote a number of what are considered to be searing and honest poems, full of unflinching subjects that were not considered common or ladylike at the time. She did not shy away from rage or dark humor, and references to abuse and rage were put center stage in many of her works. The poems in Ariel also maintain a sense of transformation and hope as Plath confronted mental health. Plath was willing to write about her struggle with traditional expectations regarding femininity, as well as emotional suffering and suicidal tendencies. Aware of the political complexities of World War II, as well as social and cultural change in the late 1950s and early 1960s, Plath worked real-world references into her personal metaphors. While her life and mental health often dominate discussions of her as a poet, some critics urge us to also remember she was also a superb craftsperson. In a 1962 interview with Peter Orr, Plath suggested, “one should be able to control and manipulate experiences, even the most terrific, like madness, being tortured, this sort of experience, and one should be able to manipulate these experiences with an informed and an intelligent mind” (See: Further Reading & Resources). Her embrace of sound techniques, especially assonance and internal rhyme, which created a musical quality, was lauded and subsequently mimicked by younger poets.

Artistic Context/Textual Variation

The changes Plath made to “Sheep in Fog” were documented by her former husband Ted Hughes in his 1988 essay “The Evolution of ‘Sheep in Fog,’” collected in Winter Pollen in 1994 (See: Further Reading & Resources). The title was, at first, “Fog Sheep” rather than “Sheep in Fog.” The change advocated for the sheep as corporeal rather than illusory and placed them “in Fog,” symbolically lost in a confusing world. In the initial manuscript, Plath declares her hair is the color of “rust” and she is “one color” with the “horse,” notations she crossed out. She excised the image that suggested the world “rusts around us” and that she is a “scrapped chariot.” The “flower left out” (Line 10) was revised from a “dead man left out.” The sheep originally have “faces like babies” and the “stars” (Line 2) are “patriarchs” who late in the poem decide Plath is “not the one, [which] disgruntles them.” In the first typescript, which employed several revisions, Plath changed the title and crossed out the last tercet: “Patriarchs till now immobile / In heavenly wools / [R]ow off as stones or clouds with the faces of babies.” Plath then rewrites the last tercet, ending with “Starless and fatherless, a dark water” (Line 15). Hughes writes that this poem, when contrasted with the earlier and more hopeful “Ariel,” discusses “the dangerous extreme polarity, the precarious dynamics, of Plath’s inspiration, and achievement, and fate” (Hughes, 199). Plath’s changes do, as Hughes suggests, make the poem less hopeful, as the remaining sharpened images are more forcefully stark. However, Hughes’s interpretation of this poem as it ties to the Greek myth of Phaeton has been widely debated since his estranged wife’s edits remove references to the myth from the poem. The variants of the poem are oft referred to in this poem’s discussion and give the reader insight into how Plath’s process of shaping what was important for her finalized vision.