Circus In Three Rings by Sylvia Plath
In the circus tent of a hurricane designed by a drunken god my extravagant heart blows up again in a rampage of champagne-colored rain and the fragments whir like a weather vane while the angels all applaud. Daring as death and debonair I invade my lion’s den; a rose of jeopardy flames in my hair […]
Child’s Park Stones by Sylvia Plath
In sunless air, under pines Green to the point of blackness, some Founding father set these lobed, warped stones To loom in the leaf-filtered gloom Black as the charred knuckle-bones Of a giant or extinct Animal, come from another Age, another planet surely. Flanked By the orange and fuchsia bonfire Of azaleas, sacrosanct These stones […]
“Célibataire” by Sylvia Plath
Or, cette jeune fille pointilleuse Lors d’une cérémonieuse promenade en avril Avec son dernier soupirant Fut soudain frappée, intolérablement, Par le brouhaha irrégulier des oiseaux Et par le désordre des feuilles Affligée par ce tumulte, elle Vit les gestes de son amoureux déséquilibrer l’air Sa démarche s’égarer, inégale A travers une rangée de fougères et […]
By Candlelight by Sylvia Plath
This is winter, this is night, small love – A sort of black horsehair, A rough, dumb country stuff Steeled with the sheen Of what green stars can make it to our gate. I hold you on my arm. It is very late. The dull bells tongue the hour. The mirror floats us at one […]
Burning The Letters by Sylvia Plath
I made a fire; being tired Of the white fists of old Letters and their death rattle When I came too close to the wastebasket What did they know that I didn’t? Grain by grain, they unrolled Sands where a dream of clear water Grinned like a getaway car. I am not subtle Love, love, […]
Bluebeard by Sylvia Plath
I am sending back the key that let me into bluebeard’s study; because he would make love to me I am sending back the key; in his eye’s darkroom I can see my X-rayed heart, dissected body : I am sending back the key that let me into bluebeard’s study. ————— The End […]
Blackberrying by Sylvia Plath
Nobody in the lane, and nothing, nothing but blackberries, Blackberries on either side, though on the right mainly, A blackberry alley, going down in hooks, and a sea Somewhere at the end of it, heaving. Blackberries Big as the ball of my thumb, and dumb as eyes Ebon in the hedges, fat With blue-red juices. […]
Black Rook In Rainy Weather by Sylvia Plath
On the stiff twig up there Hunches a wet black rook Arranging and rearranging its feathers in the rain- I do not expect a miracle Or an accident To set the sight on fire In my eye, nor seek Any more in the desultory weather some design, But let spotted leaves fall as they fall […]
Black Pine Tree In An Orange Light by Sylvia Plath
Tell me what you see in it : The pine tree like a Rorschach-blot black against the orange light : Plant an orange pumpkin patch which at twelve will quaintly hatch nine black mice with ebon coach, or walk into the orange and make a devil’s cataract of black obscure god’s eye with corkscrew fleck; […]
Battle-Scene From the Comic Operatic Fantasy The Seafarer by Sylvia Plath
It beguiles- This little Odyssey In pink and lavender Over a surface of gently- Graded turquoise tiles That represent a sea With chequered waves and gaily Bear up the seafarer, Gaily, gaily, In his pink plume and armor. A lantern-frail Gondola of paper Ferries the fishpond Sindbad Who poises his pastel spear Toward three pinky-purple […]
Balloons by Sylvia Plath
Since Christmas they have lived with us, Guileless and clear, Oval soul-animals, Taking up half the space, Moving and rubbing on the silk Invisible air drifts, Giving a shriek and pop When attacked, then scooting to rest, barely trembling. Yellow cathead, blue fish—- Such queer moons we live with Instead of dead furniture! Straw mats, […]
Ariel by Sylvia Plath
Stasis in darkness. Then the substanceless blue Pour of tor and distances. God’s lioness, How one we grow, Pivot of heels and knees! –The furrow Splits and passes, sister to The brown arc Of the neck I cannot catch, Nigger-eye Berries cast dark Hooks — Black sweet blood mouthfuls, Shadows. Something else Hauls me through […]
Apprehensions by Sylvia Plath
There is this white wall, above which the sky creates itself- Infinite, green, utterly untouchable. Angels swim in it, and the stars, in indifference also. They are my medium. The sun dissolves on this wall, bleeding its lights. A grey wall now, clawed and bloody. Is there no way out of the mind? Steps at […]
An Appearance by Sylvia Plath
The smile of iceboxes annihilates me. Such blue currents in the veins of my loved one! I hear her great heart purr. From her lips ampersands and percent signs Exit like kisses. It is Monday in her mind: morals Launder and present themselves. What am I to make of these contradictions? I wear white cuffs, […]
Amnesiac by Sylvia Plath
No use, no use, now, begging Recognize! There is nothing to do with such a beautiful blank but smooth it. Name, house, car keys, The little toy wife- Erased, sigh, sigh. Four babies and a cocker! Nurses the size of worms and a minute doctor Tuck him in. Old happenings Peel from his skin. Down […]
All The Dead Dears by Sylvia Plath
Rigged poker -stiff on her back With a granite grin This antique museum-cased lady Lies, companioned by the gimcrack Relics of a mouse and a shrew That battened for a day on her ankle-bone. These three, unmasked now, bear Dry witness To the gross eating game We’d wink at if we didn’t hear Stars grinding, […]
Aftermath by Sylvia Plath
Compelled by calamity’s magnet They loiter and stare as if the house Burnt-out were theirs, or as if they thought Some scandal might any minute ooze From a smoke-choked closet into light; No deaths, no prodigious injuries Glut these hunters after an old meat, Blood-spoor of the austere tragedies. Mother Medea in a green smock […]
Admonition by Sylvia Plath
If you dissect a bird To diagram the tongue You’ll cut the chord Articulating song. If you flay a beast To marvel at the mane You’ll wreck the rest From which the fur began. If you pluck out the heart To find what makes it move, You’ll halt the clock That syncopates our love. ————— […]
Above The Oxbow by Sylvia Plath
Here in this valley of discrete academies We have not mountains, but mounts, truncated hillocks To the Adirondacks, to northern Monadnock, Themselves mere rocky hillocks to an Everest. Still, they’re out best mustering of height: by Comparison with the sunnken silver-grizzled Back of the Connecticut, the river-level Flats of Hadley farms, they’re lofty enough Elevations […]
A Winter Ship by Sylvia Plath
At this wharf there are no grand landings to speak of. Red and orange barges list and blister Shackled to the dock, outmoded, gaudy, And apparently indestructible. The sea pulses under a skin of oil. A gull holds his pose on a shanty ridgepole, Riding the tide of the wind, steady As wood and formal, […]
A Secret by Sylvia Plath
A secret! A secret! How superior. You are blue and huge, a traffic policeman, Holding up one palm- A difference between us? I have one eye, you have two. The secret is stamped on you, Faint, undulant watermark. Will it show in the black detector? Will it come out Wavery, indelible, true Through the African […]
Years by Sylvia Plath
They enter as animals from the outer Space of holly where spikes Are not thoughts I turn on, like a Yogi, But greenness, darkness so pure They freeze and are. O God, I am not like you In your vacuous black, Stars stuck all over, bright stupid confetti. Eternity bores me, I never wanted it. […]
Wuthering Heights by Sylvia Plath
The horizons ring me like faggots, Tilted and disparate, and always unstable. Touched by a match, they might warm me, And their fine lines singe The air to orange Before the distances they pin evaporate, Weighting the pale sky with a soldier color. But they only dissolve and dissolve Like a series of promises, as […]
Words by Sylvia Plath
Axes After whose stroke the wood rings, And the echoes! Echoes traveling Off from the center like horses. The sap Wells like tears, like the Water striving To re-establish its mirror Over the rock That drops and turns, A white skull, Eaten by weedy greens. Years later I Encounter them on the road- Words dry […]
Witch Burning by Sylvia Plath
In the marketplace they are piling the dry sticks. A thicket of shadows is a poor coat. I inhabit The wax image of myself, a doll’s body. Sickness begins here: I am the dartboard for witches. Only the devil can eat the devil out. In the month of red leaves I climb to a bed […]
Wintering by Sylvia Plath
This is the easy time, there is nothing doing. I have whirled the midwife’s extractor, I have my honey, Six jars of it, Six cat’s eyes in the wine cellar, Wintering in a dark without window At the heart of the house Next to the last tenant’s rancid jam and the bottles of empty glitters […]
Winter Trees by Sylvia Plath
The wet dawn inks are doing their blue dissolve. On their blotter of fog the trees Seem a botanical drawing. Memories growing, ring on ring, A series of weddings. Knowing neither abortions nor bitchery, Truer than women, They seed so effortlessly! Tasting the winds, that are footless, Waist-deep in history. Full of wings, otherworldliness. In […]
Widow by Sylvia Plath
Widow. The word consumes itself — Body, a sheet of newsprint on the fire Levitating a numb minute in the updraft Over the scalding, red topography That will put her heart out like an only eye. Widow. The dead syllable, with its shadow Of an echo, exposes the panel in the wall Behind which the […]
Who by Sylvia Plath
The month of flowering’s finished. The fruit’s in, Eaten or rotten. I am all mouth. October’s the month for storage. Thie shed’s fusty as a mummy’s stomach: Old tools, handles and rusty tusks. I am at home here among the dead heads. Let me sit in a flowerpot, The spiders won’t notice. My heart is […]
Whitsun by Sylvia Plath
This is not what I meant: Stucco arches, the banked rocks sunning in rows, Bald eyes or petrified eggs, Grownups coffined in stockings and jackets, Lard-pale, sipping the thin Air like a medicine. The stopped horse on his chromium pole Stares through us; his hooves chew the breeze. Your shirt of crisp linen Bloats like […]
Whiteness I Remember by Sylvia Plath
Whiteness being what I remember About Sam: whiteness and the great run He gave me. I’ve gone nowhere since but Going’s been tame deviation. White, Not of heraldic stallions: off-white Of the stable horse whose history’s Humdrum, unexceptionable, his Tried sobriety hiring him out To novices and to the timid. Yet the dapple toning his […]
Verbal Calisthenics by Sylvia Plath
My love for you is more athletic than a verb, Agile as a star The tents of sun absorb. Treading circus tight ropes Of each syllable, The brazen jackanapes Would fracture if he fell. Acrobat of space The daring adjective Plunges for a phrase Describing arcs of love. Nimble as a noun, He catabpults in […]
Vanity Fair by Sylvia Plath
Through frost-thick weather This witch sidles, fingers crooked, as if Caught in a hazardous medium that might Merely by its continuing Attach her to heaven. At eye’s envious corner Crow’s-feet copy veining on a stained leaf; Cold squint steals sky’s color; while bruit Of bells calls holy ones, her tongue Backtalks at the raven Claeving […]
Tulips by Sylvia Plath
The tulips are too excitable, it is winter here. Look how white everything is, how quiet, how snowed-in I am learning peacefulness, lying by myself quietly As the light lies on these white walls, this bed, these hands. I am nobody; I have nothing to do with explosions. I have given my name and my […]
Touch-And-Go by Sylvia Plath
Sing praise for statuary: For those anchored attitudes And staunch stone eyes that stare Through lichen-lid and passing bird-foot At some steadfast mark Beyond the inconstant green Gallop and flick of light In this precarious park Where vivid children twirl Like colored tops through time Nor stop to understand How all their play is touch-and-go: […]
Totem by Sylvia Plath
The engine is killing the track, the track is silver, It stretches into the distance. It will be eaten nevertheless. Its running is useless. At nightfall there is the beauty of drowned fields, Dawn gilds the farmers like pigs, Swaying slightly in their thick suits, White towers of Smithfield ahead, Fat haunches and blood on […]
Three Women by Sylvia Plath
A Poem for Three Voices Setting: A Maternity Ward and round about FIRST VOICE: I am slow as the world. I am very patient, Turning through my time, the suns and stars Regarding me with attention. The moon’s concern is more personal: She passes and repasses, luminous as a nurse. Is she sorry for what […]
Thalidomide by Sylvia Plath
O half moon– Half-brain, luminosity– Negro, masked like a white, Your dark Amputations crawl and appall– Spidery, unsafe. What glove What leatheriness Has protected Me from that shadow– The indelible buds. Knuckles at shoulder-blades, the Faces that Shove into being, dragging The lopped Blood-caul of absences. All night I carpenter A space for the thing […]
Terminal by Sylvia Plath
Riding home from credulous blue domes, the dreamer reins his waking appetite in panic at the crop of catacombs sprung up like plague of toadstools overnight: refectories where he reveled have become the holstery of worms, rapacious blades who weave within the skeleton’s white womb a caviare decay of rich brocades. Turning the tables of […]
Strumpet Song by Sylvia Plath
With white frost gone And all green dreams not worth much, After a lean day’s work Time comes round for that foul slut: Mere bruit of her takes our street Until every man, Red, pale or dark, Veers to her slouch. Mark, I cry, that mouth Made to do violence on, That seamed face Askew […]