[I think] that the so called "religious" motifs of [Plath's] "Mystic" have nothing to do with religion or religious spirituality or the supernatural as commonly conceived, but rather with the only variety of religious experience she knew and perhaps believed she ever would know: the "mystical union" of her "great love" and the creative mania that seized her up in the wake of its rupture and left her with a sense of something worse than "total neutrality," a sense of utter annihilation.

             This is a case without a body.
           The body does not come into it at all.
 
           It is a case of vaporization.

—as "The Detective" wittily puts it. Clearly, the only gods Plath worshipped were poetry and her husband, and from the moment she fell in love we see that husband and poetry were one. (pp. 239-40)

A word about the "religious" motif in "Medusa" as compared with that in "Mystic." The two are quite different poems, of course, but it seems to me that the "remedies" interrogated in the later poem suggest a connection. The "Communion wafer" of "Medusa" had also appeared as "Communion tablet" in "Tulips," where it was associated with a kind of death that was not unwelcome. The religious allusions in both "Medusa" and "Mystic," however, evoke something repellent, something dreaded, scorned, and refused; and though in the later poem the refusal seems muted by an Eliotic presence (echoes of "Ash Wednesday" and "Marina" haunt the first eight lines, for example, and the first "remedy," patently suggestive of Eliot's conversion, is followed by "Memory?"—a key word in Four Quartets); the voice that "would like to believe in tenderness" cannot. What the ecclesiastical language in both poems connotes is a crippled, imprisoned, parasitic existence that inevitably implicates the mother and, just as inevitably, the daughter's fear of that "total negation of self" she thought she'd faced the worst of. (pp. 245-46)

"Mystic" is Plath's to-be-or-not-to-be poem, whose final lines suggest that, like Hamlet, she defers felicity a while in favor of a readiness for the hope of day-to-day living…. (pp. 246-47)

To call ["Mystic"] "confessional" would be misleading, so ingeniously does it evade confession, and if the letters help reveal what its pressure of disguise comes out of, they don't elucidate the process of its art. Paradoxically, its obscurities are vivid and sharp, obliterating distinctions with an acid edge; the images its images beget seem to move live a multiple-exposure film sequence, fluent, surreal, seashifting, like a liquid translucent palimpsest. "Medusa," one could say to suggest what troubled her bond with her mother, is a palimpsestuous poem…. Composed under duress of contending emotions, it suffers from the conditions of its own brilliance. Plath's strenuous hand here renders the aegis of Athena a trophy too cloudy to ensure steady and lucid reflections, as if to fix the features of the Gorgon too closely were to run the risk of fixing one's own. How is a reader to apprehend what so clearly doesn't want to be apprehended clearly? It is hard to approach such heavily guarded self-exposure. (p. 248)

A poem like "Daddy" has to be read for what it is on its surface before it can take root in imaginations that sense in it something else. What it is on that level has proved to be so much for so many of its readers, however, that one begins to look for cultural explanations of the sort George Steiner gave when over a decade ago he remarked that the late poems are "representative of our present tone of emotional life" [see excerpt above]. By the time she wrote "Daddy" and "Lady Lazarus," Plath's personal situation had pushed her to psychic extremes one can readily associate with the last half of the Sixties; but the continued popularity of those poems among the young suggests something more, and other, than a tribute to her achievement. One assumes that the twin themes of parricide and suicide have connections and significances as profound and enduring for our culture as ever they did for the Greeks and Romans, and as they've no doubt always had in some form or other for every culture. Yes, but what form, one wants to ask, and why? Our forms in particular seem formless—anesthetic and hysterical in emotional tone, cerebral and mindless, dehumanized by their own vitality. Even some of Plath's best poems seem to me tainted with a dram of these evils, notwithstanding their intensities of feeling, style, and apprehension. Their obscurities, moreover, vivid and suggestive as they are, tend to turn them into jeux de qui and jeux de quoi. Her themes may be timeless and her methods uniquely personal, but there is something in what she does and does not convey that continues to make her the most misunderstood and controversial of American poets. Cultists, New Feminists, necrophiliac reviewers, and in some ways even the "dissenters" among her audience might be the mere fringe of the cultural anarchy her poetry flourishes in. I suppose even some of her most intelligent and appreciative readers would admit, as I do, to split feelings about her that tend to interfere with efforts to understand what she means. Perhaps that has something to do with why Hardwick said of her poems that "there is no question of coming to terms with them"—and one reason why some of us keep having to try. (pp. 258-59)