Sylvia Plath’s well-documented mental health struggles are alluded to in her 1959 poem “Witch Burning.” On its surface, it is about a witch who is being put to death on a pyre, but it can also be read as a metaphor for being consumed by the flames of depression: “My ankles brighten. Brightness ascends my thighs. / I am lost, I am lost, in the robes of all this light.”
