The Detective by Sylvia Plath
What was she doing when it blew in Over the seven hills, the red furrow, the blue mountain? Was she arranging cups? It is important. Was she at the window, listening? In that valley the train shrieks echo like souls on hooks. That is the valley of death, though the cows thrive. In her garden […]
The Death Of Myth-Making by Sylvia Plath
Two virtues ride, by stallion, by nag, To grind our knives and scissors: Lantern-jawed Reason, squat Common Sense, One courting doctors of all sorts, One, housewives and shopkeepers. The trees are lopped, the poodles trim, The laborer’s nails pared level Since those two civil servants set Their whetstone to the blunted edge And minced the […]
The Dead by Sylvia Plath
Revolving in oval loops of solar speed, Couched in cauls of clay as in holy robes, Dead men render love and war no heed, Lulled in the ample womb of the full-tilt globe. No spiritual Caesars are these dead; They want no proud paternal kingdom come; And when at last they blunder into bed World-wrecked, […]
The Couriers by Sylvia Plath
The word of a snail on the plate of a leaf? It is not mine. Do not accept it. Acetic acid in a sealed tin? Do not accept it. It is not genuine. A ring of gold with the sun in it? Lies. Lies and a grief. Frost on a leaf, the immaculate Cauldron, talking […]
The Courage Of Shutting-Up by Sylvia Plath
The courage of the shut mouth, in spite of artillery! The line pink and quiet, a worm, basking. There are black disks behind it, the disks of outrage, And the outrage of a sky, the lined brain of it. The disks revolve, they ask to be heard- Loaded, as they are, with accounts of bastardies. […]
The Companionable Ills by Sylvia Plath
The nose-end that twitches, the old imperfections– Tolerable now as moles on the face Put up with until chagrin gives place To a wry complaisance– Dug in first as God’s spurs To start the spirit out of the mud It stabled in; long-used, became well-loved Bedfellows of the spirit’s debauch, fond masters. ————— The End […]
The Colossus by Sylvia Plath
I shall never get you put together entirely, Pieced, glued, and properly jointed. Mule-bray, pig-grunt and bawdy cackles Proceed from your great lips. It’s worse than a barnyard. Perhaps you consider yourself an oracle, Mouthpiece of the dead, or of some god or other. Thirty years now I have labored To dredge the silt from […]
The Burnt-Out Spa by Sylvia Plath
An old beast ended in this place: A monster of wood and rusty teeth. Fire smelted his eyes to lumps Of pale blue vitreous stuff, opaque As resin drops oozed from pine bark. The rafters and struts of his body wear Their char of karakul still. I can’t tell How long his carcass had foundered […]
The Bull Of Bendylaw by Sylvia Plath
The black bull bellowed before the sea. The sea, till that day orderly, Hove up against Bendylaw. The queen in the mulberry arbor stared Stiff as a queen on a playing card. The king fingered his beard. A blue sea, four horny bull-feet, A bull-snouted sea that wouldn’t stay put, Bucked at the garden gate. […]
The Beggars by Sylvia Plath
Nightfall, cold eye-neither disheartens These goatish tragedians who Hawk misfortune like figs and chickens And, plaintiff against each day, decry Nature’s partial, haphazard thumb. Under white wall and Moorish window Grief’s honest grimace, debased by time, Caricatures itself and thrives On the coins of pity. At random A beggar stops among eggs and loaves, Props […]
The Beekeeper’s Daughter by Sylvia Plath
A garden of mouthings. Purple, scarlet-speckled, black The great corollas dilate, peeling back their silks. Their musk encroaches, circle after circle, A well of scents almost too dense to breathe in. Hieratical in your frock coat, maestro of the bees, You move among the many-breasted hives, My heart under your foot, sister of a stone. […]
The Bee Meeting by Sylvia Plath
Who are these people at the bridge to meet me? They are the villagers– The rector, the midwife, the sexton, the agent for bees. In my sleeveless summery dress I have no protection, And they are all gloved and covered, why did nobody tell me? They are smiling and taking out veils tacked to ancient […]
The Beast by Sylvia Plath
He was the bullman earlierm King of the dish, my lucky animal. Breathing was easy in his airy holding. The sun sat in his armpit. Nothing went moldy. The little invisibles Waited on him hand and foot. The blue sisters sent me to another school. Monkey lived under the dunce cap. He kept blowing me […]
The Babysitters by Sylvia Plath
It is ten years, now, since we rowed to Children’s Island. The sun flamed straight down that noon on the water off Marblehead. That summer we wore black glasses to hide our eyes. We were always crying, in our spare rooms, little put-upon sisters, In the two, huge, white, handsome houses in Swampscott. When the […]
The Arrival Of The Bee Box by Sylvia Plath
I ordered this, clean wood box Square as a chair and almost too heavy to lift. I would say it was the coffin of a midget Or a square baby Were there not such a din in it. The box is locked, it is dangerous. I have to live with it overnight And I can’t […]
The Applicant by Sylvia Plath
First, are you our sort of a person? Do you wear A glass eye, false teeth or a crutch, A brace or a hook, Rubber breasts or a rubber crotch, Stitches to show something’s missing? No, no? Then How can we give you a thing? Stop crying. Open your hand. Empty? Empty. Here is a […]
Temper Of Time by Sylvia Plath
An ill wind is stalking While evil stars whir And all the gold apples Go bad to the core. Black birds of omen Now prowl on the bough; With a hiss of disaster Sibyl’s leaves blow. Through closets of copses Tall skeletons walk; Nightshade and nettles Tangle the track. In the ramshackle meadow Where Kilroy […]
Tale Of A Tub by Sylvia Plath
The photographic chamber of the eye records bare painted walls, while an electric light lays the chromium nerves of plumbing raw; such poverty assaults the ego; caught naked in the merely actual room, the stranger in the lavatory mirror puts on a public grin, repeats our name but scrupulously reflects the usual terror. Just how […]
Suicide Off Egg Rock by Sylvia Plath
Behind him the hotdogs split and drizzled On the public grills, and the ochreous salt flats, Gas tanks, factory stacks- that landscape Of imperfections his bowels were part of- Rippled and pulsed in the glassy updraught. Sun struck the water like a damnation. No pit of shadow to crawl into, And his blood beating the […]
Stars Over The Dordogne by Sylvia Plath
Stars are dropping thick as stones into the twiggy Picket of trees whose silhouette is darker Than the dark of the sky because it is quite starless. The woods are a well. The stars drop silently. They seem large, yet they drop, and no gap is visible. Nor do they send up fires where they […]
A Sorcerer Bids Farewell To Seem by Sylvia Plath
I’m through with this grand looking-glass hotel where adjectives play croquet with flamingo nouns; methinks I shall absent me for a while from rhetoric of these rococo queens. Item : chuck out royal rigmarole of props and auction off each rare white-rabbit verb; send my muse Alice packing with gaudy scraps of mushroom simile and […]
Sonnet: To Time by Sylvia Plath
Today we move in jade and cease with garnet Amid the ticking jeweled clocks that mark Our years. Death comes in a casual steel car, yet We vaunt our days in neon and scorn the dark. But outside the diabolic steel of this Most plastic-windowed city, I can hear The lone wind raving in the […]
Sonnet To Satan by Sylvia Plath
In darkroom of your eye the moonly mind somersaults to counterfeit eclipse; bright angels black out over logic’s land under shutter of their handicaps. Commanding that corkscrew comet jet forth ink to pitch the white world down in swivelling flood, you overcast all order’s noonday rank and turn god’s radiant photograph to shade. Steepling snake […]
Sonnet : To Eva by Sylvia Plath
All right, let’s say you could take a skull and break it The way you’d crack a clock; you’d crush the bone Between steel palms of inclination, take it, Observing the wreck of metal and rare stone. This was a woman : her loves and stratagems Betrayed in mute geometry of broken Cogs and disks, […]
Song For A Summer’s Day by Sylvia Plath
Through fen and farmland walking With my own country love I saw slow flocked cows move White hulks on their day’s cruising; Sweet grass sprang for their grazing. The air was bright for looking: Most far in blue, aloft, Clouds steered a burnished drift; Larks’ nip and tuck arising Came in for my love’s praising. […]
Song For A Revolutionary Love by Sylvia Plath
O throw it away, throw it all away on the wind: first let the heavenly foliage go, and page by pride the good books blow; scatter smug angels with your hand. Undo the doings of the fathering age: chuck the broken acropolis out, fling the seven wonders after that with struts and props of the […]
Soliloquy Of The Solipsist by Sylvia Plath
I? I walk alone; The midnight street Spins itself from under my feet; When my eyes shut These dreaming houses all snuff out; Through a whim of mine Over gables the moon’s celestial onion Hangs high. I Make houses shrink And trees diminish By going far; my look’s leash Dangles the puppet-people Who, unaware how […]
Sleep In The Mojave Desert by Sylvia Plath
Out here there are no hearthstones, Hot grains, simply. It is dry, dry. And the air dangerous. Noonday acts queerly On the mind’s eye erecting a line Of poplars in the middle distance, the only Object beside the mad, straight road One can remember men and houses by. A cool wind should inhabit these leaves […]
Sheep In Fog by Sylvia Plath
The hills step off into whiteness. People or stars Regard me sadly, I disappoint them. The train leaves a line of breath. O slow Horse the colour of rust, Hooves, dolorous bells – All morning the Morning has been blackening, A flower left out. My bones hold a stillness, the far Fields melt my heart. […]
Prologue To Spring by Sylvia Plath
The winter landscape hangs in balance now, Transfixed by glare of blue from gorgon’s eye; The skaters freese within a stone tableau. Air alters into glass and the whole sky Grows brittle as a tilted china bowl; Hill and valley stiffen row on row. Each fallen leaf is trapped by spell of steel, Crimped like […]
Poppies In October by Sylvia Plath
Even the sun-clouds this morning cannot manage such skirts. Nor the woman in the ambulance Whose red heart blooms through her coat so astoundingly – A gift, a love gift Utterly unasked for By a sky Palely and flamily Igniting its carbon monoxides, by eyes Dulled to a halt under bowlers. O my God, what […]
Poppies In July by Sylvia Plath
Little poppies, little hell flames, Do you do no harm? You flicker. I cannot touch you. I put my hands among the flames. Nothing burns And it exhausts me to watch you Flickering like that, wrinkly and clear red, like the skin of a mouth. A mouth just bloodied. Little bloody skirts! There are fumes […]
Polly’s Tree by Sylvia Plath
A dream tree, Polly’s tree: a thicket of sticks, each speckled twig ending in a thin-paned leaf unlike any other on it or in a ghost flower flat as paper and of a color vaporish as frost-breath, more finical than any silk fan the Chinese ladies use to stir robin’s egg air. The silver – […]
On The Plethora Of Dryads by Sylvia Plath
Hearing a white saint rave About a quintessential beauty Visible only to the paragon heart, I tried my sight on an apple-tree That for eccentric knob and wart Had all my love. Without meat or drink I sat Starving my fantasy down To discover that metaphysical Tree which hid From my worldling look its brilliant […]
On The Difficulty Of Conjuring Up A Dryad by Sylvia Plath
Ravening through the persistent bric-à-brac Of blunt pencils, rose-sprigged coffee cup, Postage stamps, stacked books’ clamor and yawp, Neighborhood cockcrow-all nature’s prodigal backtalk, The vaunting mind Snubs impromptu spiels of wind And wrestles to impose Its own order on what is. ‘With my fantasy alone,’ brags the importunate head, Arrogant among rook-tongued spaces, Sheep greens, […]
On The Decline Of Oracles by Sylvia Plath
My father kept a vaulted conch By two bronze bookends of ships in sail, And as I listened its cold teeth seethed With voices of that ambiguous sea Old Böcklin missed, who held a shell To hear the sea he could not hear. What the seashell spoke to his inner ear He knew, but no […]
On Looking Into The Eyes Of A Demon Lover by Sylvia Plath
Here are two pupils whose moons of black transform to cripples all who look: each lovely lady who peers inside take on the body of a toad. Within these mirrors the world inverts: the fond admirer’s burning darts turn back to injure the thrusting hand and inflame to danger the scarlet wound. I sought my […]
On Deck by Sylvia Plath
Midnight in the mid-Atlantic. On deck. Wrapped up in themselves as in thick veiling And mute as mannequins in a dress shop, Some few passangers keep track Of the old star-map on the ceiling. Tiny and far, a single ship Lit like a two-tiered wedding cake Carries its candles slowly off. Now there is nothing […]
Old Ladies’ Home by Sylvia Plath
Sharded in black, like beetles, Frail as antique earthenwear One breath might shiver to bits, The old women creep out here To sun on the rocks or prop Themselves up against the wall Whose stones keep a little heat. Needles knit in a bird-beaked Counterpoint to their voices: Sons, daughters, daughters and sons, Distant and […]
Ode For Ted by Sylvia Plath
From under the crunch of my man’s boot green oat-sprouts jut; he names a lapwing, starts rabbits in a rout legging it most nimble to sprigged hedge of bramble, stalks red fox, shrewd stoat. Loam-humps, he says, moles shunt up from delved worm-haunt; blue fur, moles have; hefting chalk-hulled flint he with rock splits open […]