The silence drew off, baring the pebbles and shells and all the tatty wreckage of my life. Then, at the rim of vision, it gathered itself, and in one sweeping tide, rushed me to sleep.

In this image-rich sentence, “silence” behaves like the sea: it withdraws to expose what lies on the inner shore—“pebbles and shells” alongside the “tatty wreckage” of the speaker’s life—suggesting that quiet can force an inventory of memory, damage, and residue. Yet the same silence returns as a “sweeping tide” that carries the speaker into sleep, implying both relief and erasure. The motion from exposure to engulfment captures a cycle common in Plath’s writing: lucidity that reveals psychic debris, followed by a desire for obliteration or respite. Sleep here reads as temporary escape, but the tidal metaphor hints at inevitability and recurrence.