Winter Landscape, With Rooks by Sylvia Plath
Water in the millrace, through a sluice of stone, plunges headlong into that black pond where, absurd and out-of-season, a single swan floats chaste as snow, taunting the clouded mind which hungers to haul the white reflection down. The austere sun descends above the fen, an orange cyclops-eye, scorning to look longer on this landscape […]
Watercolor Of Grantchester Meadows by Sylvia Plath
There, spring lambs jam the sheepfold. In air Stilled, silvered as water in a glass Nothing is big or far. The small shrew chitters from its wilderness Of grassheads and is heard. Each thumb-sized bird Fits nimble-winged in thickets, and of good color. Cloudrack and owl-hollowed willows slanting over The bland Granta double their white […]
Waking In Winter by Sylvia Plath
I can taste the tin of the sky — the real tin thing. Winter dawn is the color of metal, The trees stiffen into place like burnt nerves. All night I have dreamed of destruction, annihilations — An assembly-line of cut throats, and you and I Inching off in the gray Chevrolet, drinking the green […]
Virgin In A Tree by Sylvia Plath
How this tart fable instructs And mocks! Here’s the parody of that moral mousetrap Set in the proverbs stitched on samplers Approving chased girls who get them to a tree And put on bark’s nun-black Habit which deflects All amorous arrows. For to sheathe the virgin shape In a scabbard of wood baffles pursuers, Whether […]
Two Views Of Withens by Sylvia Plath
Above whorled, spindling gorse, Sheepfoot-flattened grasses, Stone wall and ridgepole rise Prow-like through blurs Of fog in that hinterland few Hikers get to: Home of uncatchable Sage hen and spry rabbit, Where second wind, hip boot Help over hill And hill, and through peaty water. I found bare moor, A colorless weather, And the House […]
Two Views Of A Cadaver Room by Sylvia Plath
1 The day she visited the dissecting room They had four men laid out, black as burnt turkey, Already half unstrung. A vinegary fume Of the death vats clung to them; The white-smocked boys started working. The head of his cadaver had caved in, And she could scarcely make out anything In that rubble of […]
Two Sisters Of Persephone by Sylvia Plath
Two girls there are : within the house One sits; the other, without. Daylong a duet of shade and light Plays between these. In her dark wainscoted room The first works problems on A mathematical machine. Dry ticks mark time As she calculates each sum. At this barren enterprise Rat-shrewd go her squint eyes, Root-pale […]
Two Lovers And A Beachcomber By The Real Sea by Sylvia Plath
Cold and final, the imagination Shuts down its fabled summer house; Blue views are boarded up; our sweet vacation Dwindles in the hour-glass. Thoughts that found a maze of mermaid hair Tangling in the tide’s green fall Now fold their wings like bats and disappear Into the attic of the skull. We are not what […]
Two Campers In Cloud Country by Sylvia Plath
(Rock Lake, Canada) In this country there is neither measure nor balance To redress the dominance of rocks and woods, The passage, say, of these man-shaming clouds. No gesture of yours or mine could catch their attention, No word make them carry water or fire the kindling Like local trolls in the spell of a […]
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: […]