Sheep In Fog

Sylvia Plath’s “Sheep in Fog,” a 15-line poem, was first written on December 2, 1962. Its original title was “Fog Sheep.” Plath revised the poem the following January, shortly before her death by suicide on February 11, 1963. The poem was written shortly after the completion of the manuscript of Ariel, her second collection, posthumously published in 1965. Like many of Plath’s poems, it uses objects, in this case “sheep,” in the title, which are not further described in the poem, serving instead as metaphor for the emotional feeling of behaving like a sheep or feeling lost and sheperdless. This coincides with Plath’s widely documented feelings of depression. The poem employs Plath’s signature imagistic style and confessional mode, coming from the first-person perspective. After Plath’s death, her estranged husband, the poet Ted Hughes, reworked the order of her collection Ariel, putting “Sheep in Fog” as the third poem. The poem was also included in The Collected Poems (1981). In 2004, the collection was published with Plath’s original table of contents, which did not include the poem. When the collector Roy Davids sold his lots of manuscripts at auction in 2013, he sold Plath’s handwritten original, along with the revisions she made. (See: Further Reading & Resources).

Content Warning: This guide addresses suicide ideation, suicide, and clinical depression. Reader discretion is advised.

Poet Biography

Sylvia Plath was born on October 27, 1932, in Boston, Massachusetts to Otto Plath—a German immigrant and college professor, who was an entomologist—and Aurelia Shober Plath. Her brother was born three years later. Plath began writing and painting at an early age; the Boston Herald published a poem of hers in its children section in 1940 when she was eight.

That same year, Otto died of complications from diabetes. Plath was deeply affected by this event as well as her ambivalent relationship with her father, whom she wrote of often through her adult life. Aurelia moved the family to Wellesley, Massachusetts two years later so that she could teach secretarial skills at Boston University. A gifted student, Plath graduated from high school in 1950, as valedictorian, just after receiving her first national publication in The Christian Science Monitor.

Plath often felt torn between traditional societal expectations regarding feminine roles heralded by her mother and her own views of creative success. In the fall of 1950, Plath began attending Smith College, majoring in English. She won major academic and creative writing awards and was the editor of The Smith Review. As a junior, she won a guest editor position with Mademoiselle magazine in New York City. This experience, which would later be creatively depicted in her only novel, The Bell Jar (1963), was traumatic for her, and along with her rejection to a Harvard writing seminar, led to a bout of depression. She received treatment with electroconvulsive therapy, a process in which a medical seizure is induced electrically to regulate some mental health conditions. Afterwards, Plath attempted suicide after stealing her mother’s sleeping pills. Hospitalized, she spent six months under a psychoanalyst’s care, but she made a recovery and returned to Smith to continue her academic success.

After graduating in 1955, Plath received a Fulbright to study at Newnham College, a women-only college, at the University of Cambridge. Continuing to write creatively, Plath traveled around Europe when not studying. In February of 1956, she met and began a romance with the English poet Ted Hughes. After a short courtship, the couple married on June 16. After a honeymoon in Paris, Plath and Hughes returned to Cambridge, where she returned to Newnham to study.

In 1957, the couple moved back to Massachusetts and Plath taught at her alma mater. Finding the intensity of grading too much, Plath left the position and the couple moved to Boston, where Plath worked as a receptionist and began taking writing seminars from American poet Robert Lowell. Poet Anne Sexton was a classmate. Lowell and Sexton encouraged Plath to write about her personal experience. Plath continued to publish poetry in major venues such as Harper’s, The Times Literary Supplement, and The New Yorker. In 1959, the couple returned to England and, in 1960, their daughter Frieda was born there. That October, Plath published her first collection of poetry, The Colossus, which received wide praise in the United Kingdom. She was hailed by critics as a key new American voice.

In February 1961, Plath miscarried, and her relationship with Hughes was turbulent, but by August, she’d finished the manuscript of The Bell Jar. The family moved to Devon, where Plath’s second child, Nicholas, was born in January of 1962. In May, The Colossus was published in the United States, where it was viewed more harshly as derivative of more established male poets. That June, Plath described a car accident she had as a suicide attempt. A month later, Plath discovered that Hughes was having an affair with Assia Wevill, who, along with her husband poet David Wevill, rented a flat from the Hugheses. Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath separated in September of 1962 due to his relationship with Wevill.

Plath was prolific in October 1962, writing many of the poems for what would be her second collection, Ariel. In December she and the children took up residence in London, in a flat that had once been lived in by the great English poet William Butler Yeats. Plath seemed hopeful, but that winter was brutally cold, breaking records first set in 1947. Although The Bell Jar was published in January 1963, under the pen name Victoria Lucas, Plath’s depression returned.

The flat did not have a telephone, so late in the month, Plath asked a friend who was a physician to prescribe medication to help her with her insomnia. The doctor was concerned, prescribed an anti-depressant, made frequent house visits, and hired a nurse to help her with the children. On February 11, 1963, the nurse arrived to find Plath dead, her head in the gas oven. She had sealed the children in another room to prevent their deaths and prepared their breakfast.

Hughes, who was reportedly devastated, interred Sylvia in a tomb in West Yorkshire. Finding the manuscript to Ariel on her desk, he edited and reworked the order, publishing the volume in 1965, with an introduction by Robert Lowell. Ariel, received as part relic and part masterpiece when it was released in 1965, was enormously popular and solidified Plath’s reputation as one of the best-known female poets in the United States, heightening her influence on future generations. The Bell Jar, republished in 1967 under Plath’s name, went on to be a best seller, and The Collected Poems of Sylvia Plath won the Pulitzer Prize in 1982. In 2004, a restored edition of Plath’s version of Ariel was published with an introduction by her daughter Frieda Hughes.

Poem Text

Plath, Sylvia. “Sheep in Fog.” 1963. All Poetry.

Summary

In an interview she prepared for the BBC, Plath offered this summation: “In this poem, the speaker’s horse is proceeding at a slow, cold walk down a hill of macadam to the stable at the bottom. It is December. It is foggy. In the fog there are sheep” (in Collected Poems of Sylvia Plath, edited by Ted Hughes, 1981). The speaker, Plath in a confessional mode, notices that the fog eclipses her vision of where the hills go. This serves as a metaphor for her belief that she fails at what others expect of her, even letting down celestial beings. After observing a “train” (Line 4) moving away, she notes how her “horse” (Line 6) trods without speed. She registers the sad sound its feet make as it walks, and she reflects on how both her inner and outer landscape have been growing darker. She compares this to a decaying bloom and also notes the stasis deep inside her body. She fears an afterlife in which the darkness does not lift. She worries she won’t be offered a guide, or peace, just endless “dark water” (Line 15).