Yet it is one filled with great irony, for if her deaths were ones that came every decade as she said, she ought to have lived till ninety, which she did not. We are informed of the total number of times that death has befallen her, although it is unclear what Number One had been, Number Two was obviously the suicide attempt in 1953 and "Number Three" was the car accident in which Plath was involved in summer 1962. The most we can gather on her first account of near-death would be one that happened when she "was ten and it was an accident". Her second time she had meant it and she had "rocked shut as a seashell", showing a clear attempt to shut herself off from this world, as the image of a seashell under the water gives off the impression of isolation, surrounded by nothing but water.
Plath acknowledges the voyeuristic nature of the public that demands as performance as much as she needs to bare their soul. They are a "peanut-crunching crowd" shoving in to see her "big strip tease", referring to the baring of her soul through her poems. Plath seems to express her thoughts that although she has been reborn, her "self" is still trapped within a closed cycle, as she is nevertheless, "the same, identical woman". Her continual struggle to be reborn into some new present causes the perceiving consciousness, so that when it opens its eyes, it discovers that it has instead made a "theatrical/Comeback in broad day/To the same place, the same face, the same brute". Plath states that "self" can change and develop, transform and be reborn, only if the world in which it exists does the same, or else the possibilities of the self are intimately and inextricably bound up with those of the world. .
"Dying/Is an art, like everything else./I do it exceptionally well.", here Plath comes across as having a "death wish" and conjectures about it, ponders over it and even wishes for it, this fantasy she desires of self-destruction was Plath's supreme self-definition.