Trio Of Love Songs by Sylvia Plath
(1) Major faults in granite mark a mortal lack, yet individual planet directs all zodiac. Diagram of mountains graphs a fever chart, yet astronomic fountains exit from the heart. Tempo of strict ocean metronomes the blood, yet ordered lunar motion proceeds from private flood. Drama of each season plots doom from above, yet all angelic […]
To Eva Descending The Stair by Sylvia Plath
Clocks cry: stillness is a lie, my dear; The wheels revolve, the universe keeps running. (Proud you halt upon the spiral stair.) The asteroids turn traitor in the air, And planets plot with old elliptic cunning; Clocks cry: stillness is a lie, my dear. Red the unraveled rose sings in your hair: Blood springs eternal […]
To A Jilted Lover by Sylvia Plath
Cold on my narrow cot I lie and in sorrow look through my window-square of black: figured in the midnight sky, a mosaic of stars diagrams the falling years, while from the moon, my lover’s eye chills me to death with radiance of his frozen faith. Once I wounded him with so small a thorn […]
Tinker Jack And The Tidy Wives by Sylvia Plath
‘Come lady, bring that pot Gone black of polish And whatever pan this mending master Should trim back to shape. I’ll correct each mar On silver dish, And shine that kettle of copper At your fireside Bright as blood. ‘Come lady, bring that face Fallen from luster. Time’s soot in bleared eye Can be made […]
The Trial Of A Man by Sylvia Plath
The ordinary milkman brought that dawn Of destiny, delivered to the door In square hermetic bottles, while the sun Ruled decree of doomsday on the floor. The morning paper clocked the headline hour You drank your coffee lke original sin, And at the jet-plane anger of God’s roar Got up to let the suave blue […]
The Tour by Sylvia Plath
O maiden aunt, you have come to call. Do step into the hall! With your bold Gecko, the little flick! All cogs, weird sparkle and every cog solid gold. And I in slippers and housedress with no lipstick! And you want to be shown about! Yes, yes, this is my address. Not a patch on […]
The Times Are Tidy by Sylvia Plath
Unlucky the hero born In this province of the stuck record Where the most watchful cooks go jobless And the mayor’s rôtisserie turns Round of its own accord. There’s no career in the venture Of riding against the lizard, Himself withered these latter-days To leaf-size from lack of action: History’s beaten the hazard. The last […]
The Thin People by Sylvia Plath
They are always with us, the thin people Meager of dimension as the gray people On a movie-screen. They Are unreal, we say: It was only in a movie, it was only In a war making evil headlines when we Were small that they famished and Grew so lean and would not round Out their […]
The Swarm by Sylvia Plath
Somebody is shooting at something in our town – A dull pom, pom in the Sunday street. Jealousy can open the blood, It can make black roses. Who are the shooting at? It is you the knives are out for At Waterloo, Waterloo, Napoleon, The hump of Elba on your short back, And the snow, […]
The Surgeon At 2 A.M. by Sylvia Plath
The white light is artificial, and hygienic as heaven. The microbes cannot survive it. They are departing in their transparent garments, turned aside From the scalpels and the rubber hands. The scalded sheet is a snowfield, frozen and peaceful. The body under it is in my hands. As usual there is no face. A lump […]
The Stones by Sylvia Plath
This is the city where men are mended. I lie on a great anvil. The flat blue sky-circle Flew off like the hat of a doll When I fell out of the light. I entered The stomach of indifference, the wordless cupboard. The mother of pestles diminished me. I became a still pebble. The stones […]
The Snowman on the Moor by Sylvia Plath
Stalemated their armies stood, with tottering banners: She flung from a room Still ringing with bruit of insults and dishonors And in fury left him Glowering at the coal-fire: ‘Come find me’-her last taunt. He did not come But sat on, guarding his grim battlement. By the doorstep Her winter-beheaded daisies, marrowless, gaunt, Warned her […]
The Sleepers by Sylvia Plath
No map traces the street Where those two sleepers are. We have lost track of it. They lie as if under water In a blue, unchanging light, The French window ajar Curtained with yellow lace. Through the narrow crack Odors of wet earth rise. The snail leaves a silver track; Dark thickets hedge the house. […]
The Shrike by Sylvia Plath
When night comes black Such royal dreams beckon this man As lift him apart From his earth-wife’s side To wing, sleep-feathered, The singular air, While she, envious bride, Cannot follow after, but lies With her blank brown eyes starved wide, Twisting curses in the tangled sheet With taloned fingers, Shaking in her skull’s cage The […]
The Rival by Sylvia Plath
If the moon smiled, she would resemble you. You leave the same impression Of something beautiful, but annihilating. Both of you are great light borrowers. Her O-mouth grieves at the world; yours is unaffected, And your first gift is making stone out of everything. I wake to a mausoleum; you are here, Ticking your fingers […]
The Ravaged Face by Sylvia Plath
Outlandish as a circus, the ravaged face Parades the marketplace, lurid and stricken By some unutterable chagrin, Maudlin from leaky eye to swollen nose. Two pinlegs stagger underneath the mass. Grievously purpled, mouth skewered on a groan, Past keeping to the house, past all discretion — Myself, myself! — obscene, lugubrious. Better the flat leer […]
The Rabbit Catcher by Sylvia Plath
It was a place of force- The wind gagging my mouth with my own blown hair, Tearing off my voice, and the sea Blinding me with its lights, the lives of the dead Unreeling in it, spreading like oil. I tasted the malignity of the gorse, Its black spikes, The extreme unction of its yellow […]
The Queen’s Complaint by Sylvia Plath
In ruck and quibble of courtfolk This giant hulked, I tell you, on her scene With hands like derricks, Looks fierce and black as rooks; Why, all the windows broke when he stalked in. Her dainty acres he ramped through And used her gentle doves with manners rude; I do not know What fury urged […]
The Princess And The Goblins by Sylvia Plath
(1) From fabrication springs the spiral stair up which the wakeful princess climbs to find the source of blanching light that conjured her to leave her bed of fever and ascend a visionary ladder toward the moon whose holy blue anoints her injured hand. With finger bandaged where the waspish pin flew from the intricate […]
The Other by Sylvia Plath
You come in late, wiping your lips. What did I leave untouched on the doorstep– White Nike, Streaming between my walls? Smilingly, blue lightning Assumes, like a meathook, the burden of his parts. The police love you, you confess everything. Bright hair, shoe-black, old plastic, Is my life so intriguing? Is it for this you […]
The Other Two by Sylvia Plath
All summer we moved in a villa brimful of echos, Cool as the pearled interior of a conch. Bells, hooves, of the high-stipping black goats woke us. Around our bed the baronial furniture Foundered through levels of light seagreen and strange. Not one leaf wrinkled in the clearing air. We dreamed how we were perfect, […]
The Night Dances by Sylvia Plath
A smile fell in the grass. Irretrievable! And how will your night dances Lose themselves. In mathematics? Such pure leaps and spirals — Surely they travel The world forever, I shall not entirely Sit emptied of beauties, the gift Of your small breath, the drenched grass Smell of your sleeps, lilies, lilies. Their flesh bears […]
The Net-Menders by Sylvia Plath
Halfway up from the little harbor of sardine boats, Halfway down from groves where the thin, bitter almond pips Fatten in green-pocked pods, the three net-menders sit out, Dressed in black, everybody in mourning for someone. They set their stout chairs back to the road and face the dark Dominoes of their doorways. Sun grains […]
The Munich Mannequins by Sylvia Plath
Perfection is terrible, it cannot have children. Cold as snow breath, it tamps the womb Where the yew trees blow like hydras, The tree of life and the tree of life Unloosing their moons, month after month, to no purpose. The blood flood is the flood of love, The absolute sacrifice. It means: no more […]
The Moon And The Yew Tree by Sylvia Plath
“This is the light of the mind, cold and planetary. The trees of the mind are black. The light is blue. The grasses unload their griefs at my feet as if I were God, Prickling my ankles and murmuring of their humility. Fumy spiritious mists inhabit this place Separated from my house by a row […]
The Manor Garden by Sylvia Plath
The fountains are dry and the roses over. Incense of death. Your day approaches. The pears fatten like little buddhas. A blue mist is dragging the lake. You move through the era of fishes, The smug centuries of the pig- Head, toe and finger Come clear of the shadow. History Nourishes these broken flutings, These […]
The Lady And The Earthenware Head by Sylvia Plath
Fired in sanguine clay, the model head Fit nowhere: brickdust-complected, eye under a dense lid, On the long bookshelf it stood Stolidly propping thick volumes of prose: spite-set Ape of her look. Best rid Hearthstone at once of the outrageous head; Still, she felt loath to junk it. No place, it seemed, for the effigy […]
The Jailer by Sylvia Plath
My night sweats grease his breakfast plate. The same placard of blue fog is wheeled into position With the same trees and headstones. Is that all he can come up with, The rattler of keys? I have been drugged and raped. Seven hours knocked out of my right mind Into a black sack Where I […]
The Hermit At Outermost House by Sylvia Plath
Sky and sea, horizon-hinged Tablets of blank blue, couldn’t, Clapped shut, flatten this man out. The great gods, Stone-Head, Claw-Foot Winded by much rock-bumping And claw-threat, realized that. For what, then, had they endured Dourly the long hots and colds, Those old despots, if he sat Laugh-shaken on his doorsill, Backbone unbendable as Timbers of […]
The Hanging Man by Sylvia Plath
By the roots of my hair some god got hold of me. I sizzled in his blue volts like a desert prophet. The nights snapped out of sight like a lizard’s eyelid : A world of bald white days in a shadeless socket. A vulturous boredom pinned me in this tree. If he were I, […]
The Great Carbuncle by Sylvia Plath
We came over the moor-top Through air streaming and green-lit, Stone farms foundering in it, Valleys of grass altering In a light neither dawn Nor nightfall, out hands, faces Lucent as percelain, the earth’s Claim and weight gone out of them. Some such transfiguring moved The eight pilgrims towards its source- Toward the great jewel: […]
The Goring by Sylvia Plath
Arena dust rusted by four bulls’ blood to a dull redness, The afternoon at a bad end under the crowd’s truculence, The ritual death each time botched among dropped capes, ill-judged stabs, The strongest will seemed a will towards ceremony. Obese, dark- Faced in his rich yellows, tassels, pompons, braid, the picador Rode out against […]
The Glutton by Sylvia Plath
He, hunger-strung, hard to slake, So fitted is for my black luck (With heat such as no man could have And yet keep kind) That all merit’s in being meat Seasoned how he’d most approve; Blood’s broth Filched by his hand, Choice wassail makes, cooked hot, Cupped quick to mouth; Though prime parts cram each […]
The Ghost’s Leavetaking by Sylvia Plath
Enter the chilly no-man’s land of about Five o’clock in the morning, the no-color void Where the waking head rubbishes out the draggled lot Of sulfurous dreamscapes and obscure lunar conundrums Which seemed, when dreamed, to mean so profoundly much, Gets ready to face the ready-made creation Of chairs and bureaus and sleep-twisted sheets. This […]
The Fearful by Sylvia Plath
This man makes a pseudonym And crawls behind it like a worm. This woman on the telephone Says she is a man, not a woman. The mask increases, eats the worm, Stripes for mouth and eyes and nose, The voice of the woman hollows– More and more like a dead one, Worms in the glottal […]
The Eye-Mote by Sylvia Plath
Blameless as daylight I stood looking At a field of horses, necks bent, manes blown, Tails streaming against the green Backdrop of sycamores. Sun was striking White chapel pinnacles over the roofs, Holding the horses, the clouds, the leaves Steadily rooted though they were all flowing Away to the left like reeds in a sea […]
The Everlasting Monday by Sylvia Plath
Thou shalt have an everlasting Monday and stand in the moon. The moon’s man stands in his shell, Bent under a bundle Of sticks. The light falls chalk and cold Upon our bedspread. His teeth are chattering among the leprous Peaks and craters of those extinct volcanoes. He also against black frost Would pick sticks, […]
The Dream by Sylvia Plath
‘Last night,’ he said, ‘I slept well except for two uncanny dreams that came before the change of weather when I rose and opened all the shutters to let warm wind feather with wet plumage through my rooms. ‘In the first dream I was driving down the dark in a black hearse with many men […]
The Disquieting Muses by Sylvia Plath
Mother, mother, what ill-bred aunt Or what disfigured and unsightly Cousin did you so unwisely keep Unasked to my christening, that she Sent these ladies in her stead With heads like darning-eggs to nod And nod and nod at foot and head And at the left side of my crib? Mother, who made to order […]
The Dispossessed by Sylvia Plath
The enormous mortgage must be paid somehow, so if you can dream up any saving plan tell me quick, darling, tell me now. An odd disease has hit our holy cow, no milk or honey fills the empty can; the enormous mortgage must be paid somehow. If you’ve a plot to halt the lethal flow […]