Maudlin by Sylvia Plath
Mud-mattressed under the sign of the hag In a clench of blood, the sleep-talking virgin Gibbets with her curse the moon’s man, Faggot-bearing Jack in his crackless egg : Hatched with a claret hogshead to swig He kings it, navel-knit to no groan, But at the price of a pin-stitched skin Fish-tailed girls purchase each […]
Lorelei by Sylvia Plath
It is no night to drown in: A full moon, river lapsing Black beneath bland mirror-sheen, The blue water-mists dropping Scrim after scrim like fishnets Though fishermen are sleeping, The massive castle turrets Doubling themselves in a glass All stillness. Yet these shapes float Up toward me, troubling the face Of quiet. From the nadir […]
Magnolia Shoals by Sylvia Plath
Up here among the gull cries we stroll through a maze of pale red-mottled relics, shells, claws as if it were summer still. That season has turned its back. Through the green sea gardens stall, bow, and recover their look of the imperishable gardens in an antique book or tapestries on a wall, leaves behind […]
Little Fugue by Sylvia Plath
The yew’s black fingers wag: Cold clouds go over. So the deaf and dumb Signal the blind, and are ignored. I like black statements. The featurelessness of that cloud, now! White as an eye all over! The eye of the blind pianist At my table on the ship. He felt for his food. His fingers […]
Magi by Sylvia Plath
The abstracts hover like dull angels: Nothing so vulgar as a nose or an eye Bossing the ethereal blanks of their face-ovals. Their whiteness bears no relation to laundry, Snow, chalk or suchlike. They’re The real thing, all right: the Good, the True . . . Salutary and pure as boiled water, Loveless as the […]
Maenad by Sylvia Plath
Once I was ordinary: Sat by my father’s bean tree Eating the fingers of wisdom. The birds made milk. When it thundered I hid under a flat stone. The mother of mouths didn’t love me. The old man shrank to a doll. O I am too big to go backward: Birdmilk is feathers, The bean […]
Lyonnesse by Sylvia Plath
No use whistling for Lyonnesse! Sea-cold, sea-cold it certainly is. Take a look at the white, high berg on his forehead- There’s where it sunk. The blue, green, Gray, indeterminate gilt Sea of his eyes washing over it And a round bubble Popping upward from the mouths of bells People and cows. The Lyonians had […]
Lorelei by Sylvia Plath
It is no night to drown in: A full moon, river lapsing Black beneath bland mirror-sheen, The blue water-mists dropping Scrim after scrim like fishnets Though fishermen are sleeping, The massive castle turrets Doubling themselves in a glass All stillness. Yet these shapes float Up toward me, troubling the face Of quiet. From the nadir […]
Little Fugue by Sylvia Plath
The yew’s black fingers wag: Cold clouds go over. So the deaf and dumb Signal the blind, and are ignored. I like black statements. The featurelessness of that cloud, now! White as an eye all over! The eye of the blind pianist At my table on the ship. He felt for his food. His fingers […]
Lesbos by Sylvia Plath
Viciousness in the kitchen! The potatoes hiss. It is all Hollywood, windowless, The fluorescent light wincing on and off like a terrible migraine, Coy paper strips for doors – Stage curtains, a widow’s frizz. And I, love, am a pathological liar, And my child – look at her, face down on the floor, Little unstrung […]
Leaving Early by Sylvia Plath
Lady, your room is lousy with flowers. When you kick me out, that’s what I’ll remember, Me, sitting here bored as a loepard In your jungle of wine-bottle lamps, Velvet pillows the color of blood pudding And the white china flying fish from Italy. I forget you, hearing the cut flowers Sipping their liquids from […]
Landowners by Sylvia Plath
From my rented attic with no earth To call my own except the air-motes, I malign the leaden perspective Of identical gray brick houses, Orange roof-tiles, orange chimney pots, And see that first house, as if between Mirrors, engendering a spectral Corridor of inane replicas, Flimsily peopled. But landowners Own thier cabbage roots, a space […]
Lament by Sylvia Plath
The sting of bees took away my father who walked in a swarming shroud of wings and scorned the tick of the falling weather. Lightning licked in a yellow lather but missed the mark with snaking fangs: the sting of bees took away my father. Trouncing the sea like a ragin bather, he rode the […]
Lady Lazarus by Sylvia Plath
I have done it again. One year in every ten I manage it– A sort of walking miracle, my skin Bright as a Nazi lampshade, My right foot A paperweight, My face a featureless, fine Jew linen. Peel off the napkin 0 […]
Kindness by Sylvia Plath
Kindness glides about my house. Dame Kindness, she is so nice! The blue and red jewels of her rings smoke In the windows, the mirrors Are filling with smiles. What is so real as the cry of a child? A rabbit’s cry may be wilder But it has no soul. Sugar can cure everything, so […]
Jilted by Sylvia Plath
My thoughts are crabbed and sallow, My tears like vinegar, Or the bitter blinking yellow Of an acetic star. Tonight the caustic wind, love, Gossips late and soon, And I wear the wry-faced pucker of The sour lemon moon. While like an early summer plum, Puny, green, and tart, Droops upon its wizened stem My […]
Insomniac by Sylvia Plath
The night is only a sort of carbon paper, Blueblack, with the much-poked periods of stars Letting in the light, peephole after peephole . . . A bonewhite light, like death, behind all things. Under the eyes of the stars and the moon’s rictus He suffers his desert pillow, sleeplessness Stretching its fine, irritating sand […]
Incommunicado by Sylvia Plath
The groundhog on the mountain did not run But fatly scuttled into the splayed fern And faced me, back to a ledge of dirt, to rattle Her sallow rodent teeth like castanets Against my leaning down, would not exchange For that wary clatter sound or gesture Of love : claws braced, at bay, my currency […]
I Want, I Want by Sylvia Plath
Open-mouthed, the baby god Immense, bald, though baby-headed, Cried out for the mother’s dug. The dry volcanoes cracked and split, Sand abraded the milkless lip. Cried then for the father’s blood Who set wasp, wolf and shark to work, Engineered the gannet’s beak. Dry-eyed, the inveterate patriarch Raised his men of skin and bone, Barbs […]
I Am Vertical by Sylvia Plath
But I would rather be horizontal. I am not a tree with my root in the soil Sucking up minerals and motherly love So that each March I may gleam into leaf, Nor am I the beauty of a garden bed Attracting my share of Ahs and spectacularly painted, Unknowing I must soon unpetal. Compared […]
Heavy Woman by Sylvia Plath
Irrefutable, beautifully smug As Venus, pedestalled on a half-shell Shawled in blond hair and the salt Scrim of a sea breeze, the women Settle in their belling dresses. Over each weighty stomach a face Floats calm as a moon or a cloud. Smiling to themselves, they meditate Devoutly as the Dutch bulb Forming its twenty […]
Hardcastle Crags by Sylvia Plath
Flintlike, her feet struck Such a racket of echoes from the steely street, Tacking in moon-blued crooks from the black Stone-built town, that she heard the quick air ignite Its tinder and shake A firework of echoes from wall To wall of the dark, dwarfed cottages. But the echoes died at her back as the […]
Gulliver by Sylvia Plath
Over your body the clouds go High, high and icily And a little flat, as if they Unlike swans, Having no reflections; Unlike you, With no strings attached. All cool, all blue. Unlike you — You, there on your back, Eyes to the sky. The spider-men have caught you, Winding and twining their petty fetters, […]
Green Rock, Winthrop Bay by Sylvia Plath
No lame excuses can gloss over Barge-tar clotted at the tide-line, the wrecked pier. I should have known better. Fifteen years between me and the bay Profited memory, but did away with the old scenery And patched this shoddy Makeshift of a view to quit My promise of an idyll. The blue’s worn out: It’s […]
Gold Mouths Cry by Sylvia Plath
Gold mouths cry with the green young certainty of the bronze boy remembering a thousand autumns and how a hundred thousand leaves came sliding down his shoulder blades persuaded by his bronze heroic reason. We ignore the coming doom of gold and we are glad in this bright metal season. Even the dead laugh among […]
Goatsucker by Sylvia Plath
Old goatherds swear how all night long they hear The warning whirr and burring of the bird Who wakes with darkness and till dawn works hard Vampiring dry of milk each great goat udder. Moon full, moon dark, the chary dairy farmer Dreams that his fattest cattle dwindle, fevered By claw-cuts of the Goatsucker, alias […]
Gigolo by Sylvia Plath
Pocket watch, I tick well. The streets are lizardly crevices Sheer-sided, with holes where to hide. It is best to meet in a cul-de-sac, A palace of velvet With windows of mirrors. There one is safe, There are no family photographs, No rings through the nose, no cries. Bright fish hooks, the smiles of women […]
Getting There by Sylvia Plath
How far is it? How far is it now? The gigantic gorilla interior Of the wheels move, they appall me — The terrible brains Of Krupp, black muzzles Revolving, the sound Punching out Absence! Like cannon. It is Russia I have to get across, it is some was or other. I am dragging my body […]
Full Fathom Five by Sylvia Plath
Old man, you surface seldom. Then you come in with the tide’s coming When seas wash cold, foam- Capped: white hair, white beard, far-flung, A dragnet, rising, falling, as waves Crest and trough. Miles long Extend the radial sheaves Of your spread hair, in which wrinkling skeins Knotted, caught, survives The old myth of orgins […]
Frog Autumn by Sylvia Plath
Summer grows old, cold-blooded mother. The insects are scant, skinny. In these palustral homes we only Croak and wither. Mornings dissipate in somnolence. The sun brightens tardily Among the pithless reeds. Flies fail us. he fen sickens. Frost drops even the spider. Clearly The genius of plenitude Houses himself elsewhwere. Our folk thin Lamentably. ————— […]
Firesong by Sylvia Plath
Born green we were to this flawed garden, but in speckled thickets, warted as a toad, spitefully skulks our warden, fixing his snare which hauls down buck, cock, trout, till all most fair is tricked to faulter in split blood. Now our whole task’s to hack some angel-shape worth wearing from his crabbed midden where […]
Finisterre by Sylvia Plath
This was the land’s end: the last fingers, knuckled and rheumatic, Cramped on nothing. Black Admonitory cliffs, and the sea exploding With no bottom, or anything on the other side of it, Whitened by the faces of the drowned. Now it is only gloomy, a dump of rocks — Leftover soldiers from old, messy wars. […]
Fiesta Melons by Sylvia Plath
In Benidorm there are melons, Whole donkey-carts full Of innumerable melons, Ovals and balls, Bright green and thumpable Laced over with stripes Of turtle-dark green. Chooose an egg-shape, a world-shape, Bowl one homeward to taste In the whitehot noon : Cream-smooth honeydews, Pink-pulped whoppers, Bump-rinded cantaloupes With orange cores. Each wedge wears a studding Of […]
Fever 103° by Sylvia Plath
Pure? What does it mean? The tongues of hell Are dull, dull as the triple Tongues of dull, fat Cerebus Who wheezes at the gate. Incapable Of licking clean The aguey tendon, the sin, the sin. The tinder cries. The indelible smell Of a snuffed candle! Love, love, the low smokes roll From me like […]
Female Author by Sylvia Plath
All day she plays at chess with the bones of the world: Favored (while suddenly the rains begin Beyond the window) she lies on cushions curled And nibbles an occasional bonbon of sin. Prim, pink-breasted, feminine, she nurses Chocolate fancies in rose-papered rooms Where polished higboys whisper creaking curses And hothouse roses shed immortal blooms. […]
Faun by Sylvia Plath
Haunched like a faun, he hooed From grove of moon-glint and fen-frost Until all owls in the twigged forest Flapped black to look and brood On the call this man made. No sound but a drunken coot Lurching home along river bank. Stars hung water-sunk, so a rank Of double star-eyes lit Boughs where those […]
Face Lift by Sylvia Plath
You bring me good news from the clinic, Whipping off your silk scarf, exhibiting the tight white Mummy-cloths, smiling: I’m all right. When I was nine, a lime-green anesthetist Fed me banana-gas through a frog mask. The nauseous vault Boomed with bad dreams and the Jovian voices of surgeons. Then mother swam up, holding a […]
Event by Sylvia Plath
How the elements solidify! — The moonlight, that chalk cliff In whose rift we lie Back to back. I hear an owl cry From its cold indigo. Intolerable vowels enter my heart. The child in the white crib revolves and sighs, Opens its mouth now, demanding. His little face is carved in pained, red wood. […]
Elm by Sylvia Plath
I know the bottom, she says. I know it with my great tap root; It is what you fear. I do not fear it: I have been there. Is it the sea you hear in me, Its dissatisfactions? Or the voice of nothing, that was you madness? Love is a shadow. How you lie and […]
Ella Mason And Her Eleven Cats by Sylvia Plath
Old Ella Mason keeps cats, eleven at last count, In her ramshackle house off Somerset Terrace; People make queries On seeing our neighbor’s cat-haunt, Saying: ‘Something’s addled in a woman who accommodates That many cats.’ Rum and red-faced as a water-melon, her voice Long gone to wheeze and seed, Ella Mason For no good reason […]