What's in a Title?: 'Sheep in Fog' AFSANA KHATOON College

The first thing that springs in my mind while reading Sylvia Plath's Sheep in Fog is the complex and strange relation of its title to the content of the poem where the speaker-traveler witnesses a herd of sheep in a foggy winter, as mentioned by the poetess, in her introductory speech on the work. But we never get any mention of it again throughout the poem, yet it sets the mood of the poem, for it symbolizes the metaphorical reunion of all the living beings with the natural phenomenon and its subsequent disappearance.

The sheep in the title have disappeared (both literally from the poem and metaphorically from the scenery) into the vastness of nature but they left a realization in the witness, who perhaps anticipates a similar fate. Here the speaker is riding down '[t]he hills [that] step off into whiteness'. with each of her steps she herself is approaching this self-same 'whiteness', which symbolizes death. The hills leave behind the color of life (fields-green) to be dissolved into the foggy air. By yielding up to the thick clouds they become active, for they were passive for ages, bearing the assaults of weather. But now they attempt to act on their behalf, they wish to assert their presence yet this very act leads to a...