Two days later, Plath had completed “Pursuit,” the poem dedicated to Ted Hughes that sets out in one astonishing burst of insight all Plath needed to know about the love of her life. The image in the first line of a stalking panther immediately segues to a startling conclusion: “One day I’ll have my death of him.” If she dreads this denouement, she also seems to welcome it like a gift—or rather, she seems to relish her death as something that she will take from him. The line acknowledges a bond, a mutuality, between predator and victim. In Plath’s own mythology, death by whatever means—even suicide—could be poetic, a kind of aesthetic completion and thus a desirable, if grisly, denouement, as perfectly consummated as in a Poe story. As she confided to her journal, she picked up the poetic identities of characters who died and believed in them “completely for a while. What they say is True.” Already, Hughes, whose poems would so often feature wild animals, appears to be a figure out of Blake’s tyger poem, with fire running through his hot network of veins.

The poem empathizes with the ravenous panther, whose fierce joy in the consummation of appetite becomes aestheticized in lines that revel in the “sweet … singeing fury of his fur.” The panther as lover is a common trope among literary lovers such as H. G. Wells (Jaguar) and Rebecca West (Panther), the latter just coming into her own when she met her older lover. The Wells-West letters also consider ravishment a mutual hunt. In “Pursuit,” the panther “keeps my speed,” the beloved says, as she hurls her heart to “halt his pace.” The poem ends on a note of fear, after the beloved realizes that the panther demands “a total sacrifice.” As he treads the stairs toward her bolted door, the overwhelming mood is one of horror and arousal, the theme of her journal reports that “the worst happened.” The poem’s concluding lines, however, echo another journal entry: “I listen always for footsteps coming up the stairs and hate them if they are not for me.” To quote Edward Butscher, the panther can be read as an “aspect of herself,” and as an example of Plath’s “masochism,” according to Anne Stevenson and Elaine Feinstein. But the panther is “emphatically male, and women are his victims,” Ronald Hayman rejoins. To put it another way: No other man had it in him to excite such a vehement, all-encompassing response, and Plath seems to have intuited the triumph and tragedy of mating with such a man. That Hughes was not physically violent, according to Anne Stevenson, is beside the point. He had a violent imagination, and Plath divined that it was her misfortune to meet such a man even as she dreamed of him as her salvation. As critic Margarot Uroff points out, “It would be several years before Hughes himself would write of an animal as ravenous as her panther.”

After several days of mooning about Ted Hughes—a fantastical figure Plath really believed would not materialize again—she resumed brooding about the real Richard Sassoon, the man who got away. She had earlier written a poem with him in mind that seems as prophetic as “Pursuit.” In “Circus in Three Rings,” included in her Collected Poems, Sassoon emerges as a mocking Mephistopheles, vanishing with “devilish ease” in smoke that sears the speaker’s eyes. In her journal, Plath wrote to him: “Break your image and wrench it from me.” The “demon of doom” in her poem and the Sassoon of her journal seemed to have a magical impact, a Prospero-like power to appear and disappear both in her imagination and in her life. She wanted him, once and for all, to say he was “unavailable” to her—or that he was willing to save her from death. Insistent on his talismanic force, she urged him, “kill your image.” Otherwise, she remained “frozen in the land of the bronze dead.”

Sassoon’s side of this fraught liaison can never be fully explained so long as he remains one of the fugitive figures of Plath biography, eluding her chroniclers just as he evaded her. He sent a letter that gave her no hope, although she confessed in a letter sent to her mother on 9 March that he had rebuffed her because he was not ready to marry—certainly not before he had established himself in a profession and was prepared to create the home and family she craved. Still, she would not relent in her love, even after rehearsing all his faults and weaknesses. Richard’s rejection affronted her pride and sense of prowess, her boast that her love could “melt doors,” as she put it in her journal. She wrote him again, conceding his point that she had demanded something of him that he could not give. But now it was Richard and Richard alone that she would consecrate. She had decided to visit him on her spring break, no matter what he said. She had to face him in France even if he was absent—and just maybe she could get over him, since she had also been in contact with Gordon Lameyer, who was coming over to investigate the prospect of studying in Germany. Gradually, Sylvia reconstituted her queenship, writing in her journal on the night of 6 March after a very long Shakespearean performance, “Come my coach. Goodnight, goodnight.”

In a mythological mood, Sylvia’s next journal entry, on 8 March, mentions a discussion of D. H. Lawrence’s “The Man Who Died” in Dorothea Krook’s lecture. As Krook read passages from the fable, Sylvia felt a chill, as though the “angel had hauled me by the hair in a shiver of gooseflesh: about the temple of Isis bereaved, Isis in search,” she wrote in her journal, quoting the very words of Lawrence’s story. She recalled visiting Venice, where Lawrence died. She had a “mystic vision with Sassoon; I was the woman who died.” In Sassoon’s presence she had been reborn, flaming into life, experiencing the “resolute fury of existence.” She believed she had lived what Lawrence wrote. “It matters,” she declared.

Lawrence brought back to Plath the consequences of her suicide attempt and recovery, which she had earlier attempted to explore in “Tongues of Stone,” but had not fully worked out. In “The Man Who Died,” Christ’s resurrection is presented as a near-death experience, a loss of consciousness that he welcomes: “He had wanted to stay outside, in the place where even memory is stone dead.” Nauseated at his return to consciousness, he yearns for the “nullity of being dead.” Lawrence’s description of Christ in his tomb, enclosed by narrow walls of rock penetrated by chinks of light that he leans toward as he awakens, brings to mind those woozy moments in the crawl space when Plath moved and struck her head against a wall or a rock.

Christ is “filled still with the sickness of unspeakable disillusion.” But of course he is not Christ—not the Christian Christ, for Lawrence never uses his name, preferring instead to call him throughout “the man who died,” which is to say a mortal who chose death, as Sylvia did, because of a sense of disillusionment, a void that nothing in life can supplant. The man rises without desire, experiencing the very same lack of desire that beset Sylvia in the first days of her recovery. So profound is this “desireless resoluteness,” the man prefers it to any form of consciousness.

It may seem odd to say that Plath was elated to read this disturbing story, but apparently it addressed her own psychological problems in ontological terms. The man is weary of existence, not merely of what he has been able to make of it. What brings him back to life is first the light, and then his awareness of the sun, “falling into the hollows of his neck, and his thin, colourless arms utterly inert.” Like the protagonist in “Tongues of Stone,” he experiences no wish to return to the world, and yet the world keeps breaking in on him.

Repeated references to the sun that bathes the man in light call to mind the many references in Plath’s writing to sunbathing, which brought out in her a sheer joy in existence. The man lies in the sun, and it makes him sway as he hears a bird cry out the “triumph of life.” Life seems as resolute as was his wish to die. Lawrence connects this gradual revival in the man to the cry of a cock, which in turn is compared to the “short, sharp wave of life,” the sea of feeling that elated Sylvia even as a child. The cock, like the man, is caught in the “cord of circumstance” (it has been hobbled by a rope), but it continues to crow and rock “in the tide of the swaying ocean of life.”