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“Once water lilies floated on this pool. Now they are gone, only their phantoms sigh,”

"He had not said 'I love you'; but he held her hand. Happiness is this, is this, he thought."

It is immediately clear that Sylvia Plath had a 'divided self'. Throughout her work there are images of selves which are petrified, cracked, automaton, patched up, and divided against themselves. Perhaps one of the most characteristic is the double self in In Plaster in which the real body-self inside the plaster cast is the 'tenant', and without whom the outer self would 'perish with emptiness'. [. . .] The tenant in her dividual self at times seems only to bloom 'out of her as a rose/Blooms out of a vase of not very valuable porcelain...'—and this theme of inner worthlessness is often struck, as she searches within herself for substantiality, sometimes finding only the vacuum at the heart of a tornado.