The speaker begins a walk across the Yorkshire moors as the sun sets on the horizon.

The horizon rings the speaker like bundles of sticks, appearing tilted and unstable rather than open.

The speaker imagines the horizon catching fire like kindling and offering warmth.

The horizon's fine lines briefly singe the air orange before distances evaporate without warmth.

The horizons dissolve like a series of broken promises, offering the speaker no lasting comfort.

The speaker steps forward into the open moors despite the disappointing, dissolving horizons.

The speaker observes that no life exists higher than the flat grasstops or the hearts of sheep.

A fierce wind pours across the moors like destiny, bending everything in one direction.

The wind tries to funnel the speaker's body heat away, and the speaker bends double against it.

Staring at the heather roots, the speaker feels invited to lie dead and bleach among them.

The speaker encounters sheep who are entirely sure of their place in the landscape, unlike the speaker.

The sheep's slotted dark pupils study the speaker, making them feel mailed like a thin message into empty space.

The sheep stand in grandmotherly disguise with wig-like curls, yellow teeth, and hard, marbly baas.

The speaker discovers ancient wheel ruts filled with limpid water that flows through their hands.

Abandoned lintels and sills moan with the repeated phrase 'Black stone, black stone' in the ghostly air.

A solitary speaker sets out on a walk across the Yorkshire moors at sunset, immediately feeling encircled and confined by the horizon rather than freed by it. Moving into the open moorland, the speaker is assailed by a ferocious wind that bends everything in one direction and tries to strip away their body heat. The sheep the speaker encounters feel at home in the landscape in a way the speaker does not, their dark pupils making the speaker feel dismissed and mailed into oblivion. Further along the walk, the speaker discovers ancient wheel ruts filled with clear water, a fleeting comfort that slips away like solitude. Abandoned ruins speak to the speaker in ghostly echoes, the air moaning a phrase that sounds like a tombstone inscription. By the poem's end the speaker stands as the lone upright figure in a flattened world, watching distant house lights offer only the meanest glimmer of hope.

The speaker's walk through the Yorkshire moors, stanza by stanza.

Sylvia Plath is born in Boston, Massachusetts, to Otto Plath, a bee expert, and Aurelia Plath.

Plath's father Otto dies, profoundly shaping her emotional and creative life from a young age.

Plath wins a coveted prize as guest editor of Mademoiselle magazine while attending Smith College.

Plath experiences severe depression and attempts suicide as a college student.

Plath undergoes electroconvulsive therapy as part of her treatment, leaving a trauma that scars her deeply.

Plath recovers and returns to Smith College, graduating with honors before receiving a Fulbright fellowship to Cambridge.

Plath meets poet Ted Hughes at Cambridge and the two marry just four months after their first meeting.

Plath and Hughes move back to the United States so Plath can teach at her alma mater, Smith College.

Plath's first poetry collection, The Colossus, is published, the same year her first child Frieda is born.

Plath and Hughes move to Court Green, an old manor in the English countryside of Devon.

The marriage between Plath and Hughes deteriorates over the summer and Hughes moves out of Court Green.

Plath moves to London with her two young children, hoping to forge a new independent identity.

The Bell Jar is published under the pseudonym Victoria Lucas and receives a tepid critical response.

Plath dies by suicide in her London flat in February 1963.

Hughes publishes Plath's Ariel manuscript posthumously and the collection meets with extraordinary success.

Sylvia Plath showed extraordinary literary promise from childhood, publishing her first poem at eight and earning prizes at Smith College, but her college years were also marked by a devastating suicide attempt and electroconvulsive therapy. A Fulbright fellowship brought her to Cambridge, where she met and quickly married fellow poet Ted Hughes, beginning an intense creative partnership and a complicated life in England. Plath published her first poetry collection and gave birth to her first child in the same year, but the pressures of marriage, motherhood, and depression began to compound. The marriage to Hughes collapsed, and Plath entered a fierce creative period even as her personal circumstances worsened. Her novel The Bell Jar, published under a pseudonym, received a tepid response and deepened her depression. Plath died by suicide in 1963, but the posthumous publication of Ariel brought her worldwide recognition, and her Collected Poems eventually won the Pulitzer Prize.

The major milestones of Sylvia Plath's life from birth to posthumous legacy.

Aurelia Plath relocates the family from Boston to Wellesley after Otto's death, reshaping Plath's early life.

Plath publishes her first poem at age eight, signaling an extraordinary and precocious literary gift.

Plath audits Robert Lowell's poetry seminar at Boston University alongside Anne Sexton and George Starbuck.

Plath and Hughes find lucrative work recording poems and radio programs for the BBC.

Hughes wins the Hawthornden Prize for his poems, cementing his rising literary reputation.

Plath's son Nicholas is born at Court Green in Devon.

Plath begins writing The Bell Jar, drawing directly from her suicide attempt as a college student.

Plath writes 'Wuthering Heights' during or after a stay with her in-laws in Yorkshire.

The poem's speaker watches the delicate grass beat its head distractedly, too fragile for the dark company around it.

The sky leans crushingly on the speaker, revealed as the lone upright figure among all horizontals.

House lights gleam in narrow, dark valleys like small change in purses, offering only meager and ambiguous hope.

Plath writes the celebrated poems 'Daddy' and 'Lady Lazarus' during a fierce creative streak after her separation.

Plath takes a lease on a London flat where poet W.B. Yeats once lived, hoping to build a new identity.

Plath writes what is believed to be her last poem, 'Edge,' in the first days of February.

Plath's Collected Poems, compiled by Hughes, wins the Pulitzer Prize, confirming her place in literary history.

After her father's early death reshaped her childhood, Plath's life was defined by a series of pivotal decisions and discoveries that fed directly into her writing. A formative encounter with Robert Lowell's poetry seminar placed her among the leading confessional voices of her generation, and work at the BBC expanded both her and Hughes's literary reach. The composition of 'Wuthering Heights' during a Yorkshire visit crystallized her complex relationship with the English landscape, and the poems she wrote amid the collapse of her marriage—'Daddy' and 'Lady Lazarus'—marked her as a major poet in her own right. The poem's final stanza delivers its most devastating revelations: the speaker is the single upright figure left in a prostrate world, and the lights of distant houses offer comfort as meager as small change. Plath's posthumous reputation, sealed by the Pulitzer Prize awarded to her Collected Poems, confirmed the lasting power of work born from personal anguish.