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 […]
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 […]