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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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, […]
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. ————— […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
Edge by Sylvia Plath
The woman is perfected Her dead Body wears the smile of accomplishment, The illusion of a Greek necessity Flows in the scrolls of her toga, Her bare Feet seem to be saying: We have come so far, it is over. Each dead child coiled, a white serpent, One at each little Pitcher of milk, now […]
Doomsday by Sylvia Plath
The idiot bird leaps out and drunken leans Atop the broken universal clock: The hour is crowed in lunatic thirteens. Out painted stages fall apart by scenes While all the actors halt in mortal shock: The idiot bird leaps out and drunken leans. Streets crack through in havoc-split ravines As the doomstruck city crumbles block […]
Departure by Sylvia Plath
The figs on the fig tree in the yard are green; Green, also, the grapes on the green vine Shading the brickred porch tiles. The money’s run out. How nature, sensing this, compounds her bitters. Ungifted, ungrieved, our leavetaking. The sun shines on unripe corn. Cats play in the stalks. Retrospect shall not often such […]
Denouement Villanelle by Sylvia Plath
The telegram says you have gone away And left our bankrupt circus on its own; There is nothing more for me to say. The maestro gives the singing birds their pay And they buy tickets for the tropic zone; The telegram says you have gone away. The clever woolly dogs have had their day They […]
Dark Wood, Dark Water by Sylvia Plath
This wood burns a dark Incense. Pale moss drips In elbow-scarves, beards From the archaic Bones of the great trees. Blue mists move over A lake thick with fish. Snails scroll the border Of the glazed water With coils of ram’s-horn. Out in the open Down there the late year Hammers her rare and Various […]
Cut by Sylvia Plath
What a thrill – My thumb instead of an onion. The top quite gone Except for a sort of hinge Of skin, A flap like a hat, Dead white. Then that red plush. Little pilgrim, The Indian’s axed your scalp. Your turkey wattle Carpet rolls Straight from the heart. I step on it, Clutching my […]
Contusion by Sylvia Plath
Color floods to the spot, dull purple. The rest of the body is all washed-out, The color of pearl. In a pit of a rock The sea sucks obsessively, One hollow thw whole sea’s pivot. The size of a fly, The doom mark Crawls down the wall. The heart shuts, The sea slides back, The […]
Childless Woman by Sylvia Plath
The womb Rattles its pod, the moon Discharges itself from the tree with nowhere to go. My landscape is a hand with no lines, The roads bunched to a knot, The knot myself, Myself the rose you acheive– This body, This ivory Ungodly as a child’s shriek. Spiderlike, I spin mirrors, Loyal to my image, […]
Child by Sylvia Plath
Your clear eye is the one absolutely beautiful thing. I want to fill it with color and ducks, The zoo of the new Whose name you meditate – April snowdrop, Indian pipe, Little Stalk without wrinkle, Pool in which images Should be grand and classical Not this troublous Wringing of hands, this dark Ceiling without […]
Channel Crossing by Sylvia Plath
On storm-struck deck, wind sirens caterwaul; With each tilt, shock and shudder, our blunt ship Cleaves forward into fury; dark as anger, Waves wallop, assaulting the stubborn hull. Flayed by spray, we take the challenge up, Grip the rail, squint ahead, and wonder how much longer Such force can last; but beyond, the neutral view […]
Brasilia by Sylvia Plath
Will they occur, These people with torso of steel Winged elbows and eyeholes Awaiting masses Of cloud to give them expression, These super-people! – And my baby a nail Driven, driven in. He shrieks in his grease Bones nosing for distance. And I, nearly extinct, His three teeth cutting Themselves on my thumb – And […]
Barren Woman by Sylvia Plath
Empty, I echo to the least footfall, Museum without statues, grand with pillars, porticoes, rotundas. In my courtyard a fountain leaps and sinks back into itself, Nun-hearted and blind to the world. Marble lilies Exhale their pallor like scent. I imagine myself with a great public, Mother of a white Nike and several bald-eyed Apollos. […]
Aquatic Nocturne by Sylvia Plath
deep in liquid turquoise slivers of dilute light quiver in thin streaks of bright tinfoil on mobile jet: pale flounder waver by tilting silver: in the shallows agile minnows flicker gilt: grapeblue mussels dilate lithe and pliant valves: dull lunar globes of blubous jellyfish glow milkgreen: eels twirl in wily spirals on elusive tails: adroir […]
April 18 by Sylvia Plath
the slime of all my yesterdays rots in the hollow of my skull and if my stomach would contract because of some explicable phenomenon such as pregnancy or constipation I would not remember you or that because of sleep infrequent as a moon of greencheese that because of food nourishing as violet leaves that because […]
Aerialist by Sylvia Plath
Aerialist Each night, this adroit young lady Lies among sheets Shredded fine as snowflakes Until dream takes her body From bed to strict tryouts In tightrope acrobatics. Nightly she balances Cat-clever on perilous wire In a gigantic hall, Footing her delicate dances To whipcrack and roar Which speak her maestro’s will. Gilded, coming correct Across […]
We’re Late by W H Auden
Clocks cannot tell our time of day For what event to pray Because we have no time, because We have no time until We know what time we fill, Why time is other than time was. Nor can our question satisfy The answer in the statue’s eye: Only the living ask whose brow May wear […]
They Wondered Why the Fruit had Been Forbidden by W H Auden
They wondered why the fruit had been forbidden: It taught them nothing new. They hid their pride, But did not listen much when they were chidden: They knew exactly what to do outside. They left. Immediately the memory faded Of all they known: they could not understand The dogs now who before had always aided; […]
The Waters by W H Auden
Poet,oracle and wit Like unsuccessful anglers by Th ponds of apperception sit, Baiting with the wrong request The vectors of their interest; At nightfall tell the angler’s lie. With time in tempest everywhere, To rafts of frail assumption cling The saintly and the insincere; Enraged phenonmena bear down In overwhelming waves to drown Both sufferer […]
The Two by W H Auden
You are the town and we are the clock. We are the guardians of the gate in the rock. The Two. On your left and on your right In the day and in the night, We are watching you. Wiser not to ask just what has occurred To them who disobeyed our word; To those […]
The Quest XII (Vocation) by W H Auden
Incredulous, he stared at the amused Official writing down his name among Those whose request to suffer was refused. The pen ceased scratching: though he came too late To join the martyrs, there was still a place Among the tempters for a caustic tongue. To test the resolution of the young With tales of the […]