I'm never, never, never coming home.

Sometimes Plath's reading gives these poems a meaning that appears to be unintentional. During the climactic lines of "Lady Lazarus," a poem about the poet's repeated suicide attempts, her usually well-modulated voice seems to shake involuntarily.

Dying

Is an art, like everything else.

I do it exceptionally well.

I do it so it feels like hell.

I do it so it feels real.

I guess you could say I've a call.

Anyone hearing these lines now cannot help being reminded that three months after recording them, their author put her head in a gas oven. But as Elizabeth Hardwick has written, it is a mistake to view Plath's poems in the light of her suicide; like all good poetry, they stand on their own.

The poems on this record were all written to be read aloud, as Plath says in the interview, but there are two in particular--"The Applicant" and "Daddy"--that are so obviously meant to be heard, it's almost impossible to read them without at least whispering them to yourself. And the reading that Plath gives them here leaves them with an indelible echo, so that they are never the same again. Both poems are essentially chants, with hard, driving rhythms, and recurring sound patterns. In "The Applicant" the repetition is clipped:

A living doll, everywhere you look.

It can sew, it can cook,

It can talk, talk, talk.

But the brooding, steady music of "Daddy" spirals deftly around the sound "oo."

Every woman adores a Fascist,