The Full Text of “Edge”
The Full Text of “Edge”
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“Edge” Introduction
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"Edge" is thought to be the final poem Sylvia Plath ever wrote. Dated February 5, 1963, six days before her death, "Edge" has been read by many critics (though not all) as a reflection of her despair and suicidal thoughts. It depicts an eerie scene in which a mother and her two children lie dead beneath a staring, indifferent moon. Though the speaker claims the deaths are "nothing to be sad about"—from the moon's perspective, at least—the poem's hints of exhaustion, depression, and family conflict lend it a disturbing, tragic atmosphere. "Edge" was first collected in Plath's posthumous volume Ariel (1965).
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“Edge” Summary
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The woman has reached a state of perfection (death). Her corpse is smiling as if proud of its achievement.
Her flowing robe makes her look as if she was fated to die, like a character in Greek tragedy.
Her naked feet look as though they're glad their long journey is finished.
Two dead children are curled up like white snakes at her breasts, whose milk has now dried up.
She's absorbed her children back into herself, the way a rose folds up its petals when a garden grows stiff with cold, and lovely scents emerge from deep within the flowers at night.
The moon has no reason to grieve as she looks down like a face covered in bone.
She's seen this kind of event many times. She drags the darkness like a crackling fabric.
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“Edge” Themes
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Death and Suicide
"Edge" is the last known poem written by Sylvia Plath before she took her own life at age 30. It depicts an eerie scene in which a dead woman lies with a dead child at each breast. Though the woman resembles a character from ancient Greek tragedy, the poem portrays her apparent suicide as a choice, a relief, and even (to her) an "accomplishment." At the same time, however, it leaves the children's deaths disturbingly ambiguous and hints at other possible factors in the woman's act, such as exhaustion and the world's indifference. Overall, the poem treats suicide as commonplace and perhaps even natural, but at the same time chillingly mysterious. Outwardly serene but subtly conflicted, it illustrates the kind of dark experiences, impulses, and circumstances that might drive someone over the "Edge."
The poem depicts a scene with three dead bodies, yet initially frames it as a scene of serenity and relief. The speaker claims (or the woman herself believes) that she "is perfected" in the act of dying. She "wears the smile of accomplishment," as if proud to have reached the end. The word "accomplishment" also hints that she may have killed herself and/or her children deliberately. Her "bare / Feet seem to be saying: / We have come so far, it is over," suggesting that what's "over" is a long and difficult journey. This journey might be literal or metaphorical; it could be life itself, or a series of challenges preceding death. Regardless, her body seems physically relieved to be done with its trials.
The poem also frames the children's deaths, to some degree, in serene and gentle terms. The speaker claims that the woman "has folded / Them back into her body as petals / Of a rose close" at night or in cold weather. This language makes the gesture sound protective and natural; if the woman has killed her children, it's implied that she may have done so out of some protective maternal instinct.
The speaker's description takes on increasingly disturbing overtones, however, suggesting that some deep conflict or suffering caused these deaths. The speaker claims that "The illusion of a Greek necessity / Flows in the scrolls of her toga," for example, seemingly linking the woman to ancient Greek tragedies involving death and fate (e.g., deaths caused by the gods). She also describes "Each dead child" as "coiled" like "a white serpent" at its mother's breast. This allusion to Shakespeare's Cleopatra (who kills herself with a venomous snake that bites her breast) hints that the woman may have felt deeply conflicted by motherhood, or even that motherhood may have partly caused her death. The woman's breasts are described as "empty" because she has died, but this image also suggests that she may have had nothing left to give before death. In other words, she might have been ill or exhausted.
The poem's image of a moon coldly looking on further hints that the world's indifference may have partly spurred the woman's suicide. The poem ends with a morbid observation: "[The moon's] blacks crackle and drag." Symbolically, this may suggest that the woman died in a psychological atmosphere of morbid depression. (Note that ancient cultures traditionally associated the moon with "lunacy," or severe mental health issues.)
Thus, while the speaker denies that there is anything "sad about" the scene, the reader is invited to feel differently. What may look commonplace to the moon (nature) seems to be a tragedy from a human standpoint, even if the woman felt some relief or "accomplishment" at the end.
Where this theme appears in the poem:- Lines 1-20
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The Trials of Womanhood and Motherhood
"Edge" claims that the dead woman "is perfected," ironically highlighting the standards of a male-dominated world that finds all living women flawed in some way. The poem also seems to allude to classical and Shakespearean heroines who killed themselves or their children. Indirectly, then, the poem comments on womanhood and motherhood, portraying them as sources of intense pressure and conflict. Even the feminized "moon," or nature, is thoroughly "used to" tragedy. Though the poem gestures toward redeeming aspects such as maternal love, it depicts the basic experience of motherhood and femininity as exhaustingly, if not fatally, difficult.
The description of the "perfected" woman, who seems to have "accomplished" suicide, reflects the extraordinary challenges of being a living woman or mother. The claim that "The woman is perfected" seems to critique the misogynistic idea that the only perfect woman is a dead woman. It might also advance the feminist idea that women are held to impossible, punishing standards—standards that they can literally die trying to fulfill.
The use of "perfected" rather than "perfect" also implicitly compares the woman to a work of art, a beautiful object, or something else acted upon. She may have perfected herself (had some agency) before dying, but she may also have been affected by forces beyond her control. By extension, the poem may be suggesting that women in general struggle to gain agency and are often treated as objects in a society stacked against them.
Indeed, the poem implies that the dead woman experienced an intense personal ordeal. The speaker mentions "The illusion of a Greek necessity," invoking the kind of unavoidable, tragic fate often depicted in ancient Greek myth and drama. Some critics read the poem as specifically alluding to the Greek myth of Medea, a scorned woman who kills her two children as revenge for her husband's unfaithfulness. The Medea allusion would imply that the woman in the poem was angry, hurt, etc.—as Plath famously was when her husband, Ted Hughes, left her and their two kids for another woman. (Some biographers read the poem as implying that Plath contemplated killing her own children, though Plath in fact took pains to ensure their survival.)
The poem also alludes to Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra, whose tragic heroine kills herself by applying a poisonous snake (which she calls "my baby") to her breast. Since Cleopatra commits suicide under duress, it's implied that the woman in Plath's poem was also facing severe pressures, perhaps due to motherhood. (Again, Plath herself faced such pressures as a newly single mother, including major mental health struggles.)
Literary and biographical echoes aside, the poem's basic narrative points to a terrible family crisis. A mother and her two kids have all died together following some ordeal that's finally "over."
The poem closes by suggesting that such tragedies are all too common, especially for women. It compares the mother and her children to a rose (a traditional feminine symbol) folding up when a "garden / Stiffens," presumably due to the cold of night or winter. In other words, it seems to depict female suffering as part of the natural order of things. The poem also portrays the moon—a symbol of femininity and/or nature itself—as a female figure watching the death scene without surprise or emotion. The speaker insists that "The moon has nothing to be sad about," and that "She is used to this sort of thing." From the perspective of feminized nature, or the larger universe, the pain and death of human women is too commonplace to grieve over.
"Edge" has prompted much speculation about its relationship to Plath's own death; some critics have even treated it as a suicide note. However, it's not a literal depiction of her personal actions, and its complex images and references make it a far-reaching depiction of female suffering in a hostile world.
Where this theme appears in the poem:- Lines 1-20
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Line-by-Line Explanation & Analysis of “Edge”
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Lines 1-3
The woman is ...
... smile of accomplishment,"Edge" begins with a simple yet cryptic statement: "The woman is perfected." The next two lines add a little more context: the woman is "dead," and "smil[ing]" as if her death is an "accomplishment." The poem seems to be equating perfection with death, at least in her case. But why? And who or what has "perfected" her—that is, killed her?
Her "smile of accomplishment" hints that she was responsible for her own death: in other words, she died by suicide. (Because "Edge" was the last poem Sylvia Plath wrote before her own suicide, this is the most common interpretation of the line. The woman is often assumed to be a reflection of the poet, although not all critics agree, since she is also a dramatic character, complete with "toga.")
She seems relieved or fulfilled now that she has "accomplish[ed]" death, which she may have seen as a way of "perfect[ing]" herself. It's unclear, however, whether the equation of death and perfection is hers, the speaker's, or both. The line might be loaded with grim irony; for example, it might be critiquing a world that holds women to impossible standards, and so drives some women to eliminate their supposed flaws by destroying themselves. (The poem has often received this kind of feminist reading.)
"Edge" is written in free verse, but this opening couplet contains a light rhyme on "perfected" and "dead," reinforcing the supposed link between death and perfection. The stark enjambment after "dead" not only creates this rhyme but places extra emphasis on the word, as if to stress the finality of death.
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Lines 4-5
The illusion of ...
... of her toga, -
Lines 6-8
Her bare ...
... it is over. -
Lines 9-11
Each dead child ...
... milk, now empty. -
Lines 12-16
She has folded ...
... the night flower. -
Lines 17-20
The moon has ...
... crackle and drag.
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“Edge” Symbols
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The Moon
The moon is a complex symbol in "Edge" and in Sylvia Plath's poetry more generally. It's traditionally a symbol of femininity and motherhood, both of which are important themes in this poem about a mother who's died along with—or killed—her children. It also often appears as a symbol of both fertility (because it follows a monthly cycle, like female fertility) and barrenness or childlessness (because it's a barren rock); Plath used it as a symbol of the latter in her poems "Childless Woman" and "The Munich Mannequins," both written weeks or months before "Edge."
The moon here is also a symbol of nature or the wider universe, which seems to be watching the human tragedy with jaded detachment:
The moon has nothing to be sad about,
Staring from her hood of bone.She is used to this sort of thing.
Her blacks crackle and drag.Notice that the moon is specifically feminized as "She." Her "hood of bone" and "blacks" that "crackle of drag" suggest a caped, Gothic figure—something like a witch dragging the "cape" of the night sky behind her. So this moon also seems associated with darkness, death (skeletal "bone"), and perhaps the psychological "drag" of melancholy or despair.
Similar associations also occur in an earlier Plath poem, "The Moon and the Yew Tree," which "Edge" seems to echo:
The moon is no door. It is a face in its own right,
White as a knuckle and terribly upset.
It drags the sea after it like a dark crime; it is quiet
With the O-gape of complete despair. I live here. [...]The moon is my mother. She is not sweet like Mary.
Her blue garments unloose small bats and owls.
How I would like to believe in tenderness [...]Here, too, the moon is a staring face, "drag[ging]" darkness along with it. It's linked with motherhood; in fact, this speaker claims, "The moon is my mother." Yet it represents a universe, or natural world, that's not traditionally maternal and "tender[]" but instead cold, ominous, and indifferent. The moon in "Edge" is so similar that it may be a deliberately callback to the earlier poem.
Where this symbol appears in the poem:- Lines 17-20: “The moon has nothing to be sad about, / Staring from her hood of bone. / She is used to this sort of thing. / Her blacks crackle and drag.”
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“Edge” Poetic Devices & Figurative Language
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Metaphor
Sylvia Plath was a master of metaphor (in fact, she wrote a well-known poem called "Metaphors"), and "Edge" displays her flair for intense figurative language. Lines 4-5, for example, combine metaphor and allusion in a dense, complex statement:
The illusion of a Greek necessity
Flows in the scrolls of her toga,
The "toga" the woman is wearing appears to be literal (though it could be a fancy description of a more modern type of robe). A toga is a loose, flowing garment that was commonly worn in ancient Greece and Rome. Here, its loops and folds are compared to "scrolls" (rolled or spiral shapes), a word that invokes the old-fashioned parchment scrolls that were once used as writing paper. (If this woman is supposed to be a version of Plath, this word might point toward her vocation as a writer.) The woman's "Flow[ing]" toga makes her look like a tragic heroine from ancient "Greek" drama, in which fate, or "necessity," often dictated characters' deaths.
Lines 9-10 compare the children at the woman's breasts to "serpents," because of the way they're curled up, or "coiled" (and also as an allusion to Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra, whose heroine holds a snake to her breast to kill herself). Her breasts are compared to "little / Pitchers of milk, now empty," meaning that she was nursing her children, but her milk has dried up now that she and they have died.
Notice that these metaphors seem to clash slightly, because snakes aren't mammals and don't nurse! But Plath often squashed unlikely metaphors and images together for the sake of dreamlike intensity. Notice how the image immediately changes again in the simile spanning lines 12-16: suddenly, the "serpent[s]" are petals of a rose, which is closing up in the nighttime.
Two more figurative phrases appear in the final lines, as part of an anthropomorphic description of the moon. The speaker imagines this moon as a woman looking out from beneath a "hood of bone": a metaphorical description of a bone-white lunar crescent. "Her blacks crackle and drag" seems to compare the night sky to a crackling cape, or similar garment, that the moon is dragging in her wake.
Where metaphor appears in the poem:- Lines 2-3: “Her dead / Body wears the smile of accomplishment,”
- Lines 4-5: “The illusion of a Greek necessity / Flows in the scrolls of her toga,”
- Lines 9-11: “Each dead child coiled, a white serpent, / One at each little / Pitcher of milk, now empty.”
- Lines 12-13: “She has folded / Them back into her body”
- Lines 18-20: “Staring from her hood of bone. / She is used to this sort of thing. / Her blacks crackle and drag.”
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Assonance
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Personification
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Enjambment
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Allusion
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"Edge" Vocabulary
Select any word below to get its definition in the context of the poem. The words are listed in the order in which they appear in the poem.
- Perfected
- Greek necessity
- Toga
- Scrolls
- Serpent
- Stiffens
- Her blacks
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(Location in poem: Line 1: “The woman is perfected.”)
Brought to a state of perfection; made free from flaws. (An archaic definition of "perfected" is "completed.")
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Form, Meter, & Rhyme Scheme of “Edge”
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Form
"Edge" consists of 10 non-rhyming couplets. These two-line stanzas vary in their rhythm and syllable count; the poem is written in free verse rather than regular meter.
Most of Plath's final poems (those dated to late 1962 and early 1963) use a similar combination of irregular line lengths and consistent line count per stanza. Some, like "Edge," use couplets (including "The Munich Mannequins" and "Totem," both of which were also written in early 1963). This combination evokes a mixture of freedom and control, or wildness and moderation. Those qualities, in turn, seem to reflect the psychology of Plath and her various poetic personas.
In "Edge" specifically, the question of free will versus fate ("necessity," line 4) hangs over the poem's dramatic situation. Did this woman deliberately kill herself and/or her children? Was she driven to those actions? The tension between free verse and fixed couplets reflects this ambiguity on the formal level.
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Meter
"Edge" is a free verse poem, so it has no meter.
Sylvia Plath gravitated toward free (or freer) verse over the course of her career. This is the last poem she wrote in her life, so it reflects the later style she had adopted.
In this context, the free verse might also mirror the easing of tension that has taken place in death. The language still sounds very controlled (for example, by the enjambment that reins in a number of lines), but it seems to have let go of any consistent scheme or rules, much as "The woman" has let go of the demands of life.
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Rhyme Scheme
As a free verse poem, "Edge" has no rhyme scheme. It flows simply and organically, without the complications of a strict poetic form, making it a good vehicle for the speaker's calm, matter-of-fact tone. However, it uses plenty of assonance, which adds a more subdued musicality to the lines.
The first couplet does contain something close to a rhyme pair: "perfected"/"dead." True, this is a light rhyme (an unstressed syllable rhymed with a stressed one), so it's not as prominent as a normal end rhyme. However, the sound connection draws a subtle, ironic link between death and perfection, as though the two things were one and the same.
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“Edge” Speaker
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The poem is narrated by a third-person speaker. Though seemingly detached and neutral voice, the speaker injects commentary and interpretation. It's unclear how closely the speaker's perspective reflects that of the woman in the poem, or that of Plath herself.
Take the opening claim that "The woman is perfected," for example. Is this the speaker's judgement, the judgement of the dead woman, or both? Does the poet share this view of death? What about the description of death, or suicide, as an "accomplishment"? These questions don't have definitive answers; in that way, they reflect the unanswerable questions surrounding death and suicide themselves. It may be that the woman considered death a kind of "perfect[ion]" that her flawed, living self could never "accomplish[]." If so, Plath may not agree or want the reader to agree; the poet and/or the speaker may intend the statement ironically.
Later, the speaker's description of the moon seems to project human feelings onto that inanimate celestial object:
The moon has nothing to be sad about,
Staring from her hood of bone.She is used to this sort of thing.
Once again, it's not clear whether these jaded feelings belong to the speaker, the poet, the woman who's just died, or some combination of the three. It's also unclear whether the reader is meant to share them. Maybe the speaker (or poet) really believes that there's nothing tragic about these individual deaths in the grand scheme of things. Then again, maybe these lines are a bitterly ironic commentary on the universe's indifference toward human suffering. The ambiguity surrounding these questions is part of what gives the poem its haunting power.
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“Edge” Setting
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"Edge" has no clear setting besides the nighttime. The woman and her children may be outside as the "moon" looks on, but even that is not certain. (The moon could be shining through a window, for example.) The "toga" is a garment associated with ancient Rome, but there's not enough evidence to establish that the setting here is meant to be historical. The flower and garden imagery of lines 12-16 ("She has folded [...] night flower.") is figurative, not part of the woman and children's literal environment.
The ambiguity of the setting adds to the mystery and eeriness of the scene. All the reader knows about this place is that it's moonlit, and that three characters are dead in it. Where those three have "come" from, where they are, and why they've died are equally unknowable—just as death itself is ultimately unknowable. In a sense, the poem seems to take place at the "Edge" between life and death, as implied by the title.
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Literary and Historical Context of “Edge”
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Literary Context
Sylvia Plath (1932-1963) was a leading light of the Confessionalist poetry movement. Famous both for her intense, personal verse and her autobiographical novel The Bell Jar, Plath spoke what had been unspeakable about womanhood in the first half of the 20th century.
Like many of the poems in Plath's famous collection Ariel (1965), "Edge" can be read as at least partly autobiographical. Unvarnished self-revelation was rare in English-language poetry at the time, as was poetry dealing frankly with motherhood and femininity. But as more and more writers adopted this revolutionary stance in their work during the 1950s and '60s, critics found a name for their movement: Confessionalism.
Confessionalist poets wanted to drop the barrier between themselves and "the speaker" of the poem and to examine aspects of life that a conformist post-war society deemed too indelicate to talk about. Robert Lowell's "Skunk Hour," W.D. Snodgrass's "Heart's Needle," and Anne Sexton's "The Double Image" are all good examples of Confessionalist poetry.
"Edge" is thought to be the last poem Plath ever completed. (However, she wrote another poem, "Balloons," on the same day: February 5, 1963. This poem also involves children—more explicitly her children—and a sense of finality and defeat.) Some readers, assuming the dead "woman" in the poem is supposed to be Plath, have interpreted "Edge" as a literary suicide note. However, critical opinions differ sharply on this point. Likewise, some readers have interpreted the poem's "dead child[ren]" as a sign that Plath, in the depths of depression, contemplated infanticide. (The first draft of "Edge" contains the crossed-out line, "She is taking them with her.") Again, however, this reading is controversial. Broadly, the poem reflects a sense of finality and resignation at a time when Plath was suffering a mental health crisis.
Plath took her own life in the early hours of February 11, 1963, after taking steps to ensure the safety of her young children, Frieda and Nicholas. Two years later, "Edge" appeared as the final poem in Ariel—though this ordering was chosen by her estranged husband, poet Ted Hughes.
The "moon" in "Edge"—a feminine symbol variously associated with motherhood or childlessness, fertility or infertility—resembles those in Plath's poems "The Moon and the Yew Tree," "Childless Woman," and "The Munich Mannequins." In fact, nighttime and dawn imagery pervades many of the Ariel poems, as Plath generally wrote them in the early morning, before her children awoke.
Historical Context
Plath had a complicated relationship with motherhood, and her relationship with her own mother was often fraught. All around her, as she grew up, she saw women giving up careers and personal freedoms to become housewives whose lives revolved around their homes and children.
After World War II, this sacrifice was par for the course in American society: while some women were privileged enough to get an education, their male-dominated culture expected them to give up their careers and settle down to raise a family. Plath had dreamed of being a writer from a young age; she had no intention of giving up her own ambitions just to fulfill society's expectations.
But as she got older and fell in love (with fellow poet Ted Hughes), she found herself desiring the very things that represented a lack of freedom to her: marriage and children. Some of her more conflicted poems, like "Morning Song" and "Edge," reflect Plath's ambivalence about traditional motherhood. This emotional complexity caused her work to resonate strongly with second-wave feminists in the 1960s; women during this period saw their own experiences reflected in Plath's honest introspection.
Throughout her adolescence and adulthood, Plath struggled with what is now called bipolar disorder, and she had attempted suicide at least once before taking her life in 1963. The mental health treatments of her era were often crude and dangerous to the patient. Plath's experience with such treatments was so traumatic that she is now believed to have committed suicide in part to avoid commitment to a mental hospital. Her personal ordeal seems to have inspired "Edge," in which a dead woman finds peace after her difficult journey "is over."
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More “Edge” Resources
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External Resources
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The Poem Aloud — Listen to a reading of "Edge."
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Plath's Final Letters — A portrait of Plath's final years as revealed through her letters. (CW: abuse, suicide.)
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Plath's Life and Work — Read a biography of the poet at the Poetry Foundation.
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The Confessional Poets — An introduction to the "Confessonal" movement with which critics have often linked Plath's work.
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An Interview with Plath — Listen to a 1962 interview with the poet.
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LitCharts on Other Poems by Sylvia Plath
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