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 […]
Notes To A Neophyte by Sylvia Plath
Take the general mumble, blunt as the faceless gut of an anonymous clam, vernacular as the strut of a slug or a small preamble by snail under hump of home: metamorphose the mollusk of vague vocabulary with the structural discipline: stiffen the ordinary malleable mask to the granite grin of bone. For such a tempering […]
Nick And The Candlestick by Sylvia Plath
I am a miner. The light burns blue. Waxy stalactites Drip and thicken, tears The earthen womb Exudes from its dead boredom. Black bat airs Wrap me, raggy shawls, Cold homicides. They weld to me like plums. Old cave of calcium Icicles, old echoer. Even the newts are white, Those holy Joes. And the fish, […]
New Year On Dartmoor by Sylvia Plath
This is newness : every little tawdry Obstacle glass-wrapped and peculiar, Glinting and clinking in a saint’s falsetto. Only you Don’t know what to make of the sudden slippiness, The blind, white, awful, inaccessible slant. There’s no getting up it by the words you know. No getting up by elephant or wheel or shoe. We […]
Never Try To Trick Me With A Kiss by Sylvia Plath
Never try to trick me with a kiss Pretending that the birds are here to stay; The dying man will scoff and scorn at this. A stone can masquerade where no heart is And virgins rise where lustful Venus lay: Never try to trick me with a kiss. Our noble doctor claims the pain is […]
Mussel Hunter At Rock Harbor by Sylvia Plath
I came before the water — Colorists came to get the Good of the Cape light that scours Sand grit to sided crystal And buffs and sleeks the blunt hulls Of the three fishing smacks beached On the bank of the river’s Backtracking tail. I’d come for Free fish-bait: the blue mussels Clumped like bulbs […]
Morning In The Hospital Solarium by Sylvia Plath
Sunlight strikes a glass of grapefruit juice, flaring green through philodendron leaves in this surrealistic house of pink and beige, impeccable bamboo, patronized by convalescent wives; heat shadows waver noiseless in bright window-squares until the women seem to float like dream-fish in the languid limbo of an undulant aquarium. Morning: another day, and talk taxis […]
Moonsong At Morning by Sylvia Plath
O moon of illusion, enchanting men with tinsel vision along the vein, cocks crow up a rival to mock your face and eclipse that oval which conjured us to leave our reason and come to this fabled horizon of caprice. Dawn shall dissever your silver veil which let lover think lover beautiful; the light of […]
Monologue At 3 AM by Sylvia Plath
Better that every fiber crack and fury make head, blood drenching vivid couch, carpet, floor and the snake-figured almanac vouching you are a million green counties from here, than to sit mute, twitching so under prickling stars, with stare, with curse blackening the time goodbyes were said, trains let go, and I, great magnanimous fool, […]
Miss Drake Proceeds To Supper by Sylvia Plath
No novice In those elaborate rituals Which allay the malice Of knotted table and crooked chair, The new woman in the ward Wears purple, steps carefully Among her secret combinations of eggshells And breakable hummingbirds, Footing sallow as a mouse Between the cabbage-roses Which are slowly opening their furred petals To devour and drag her […]
Metamorphoses Of The Moon by Sylvia Plath
Cold moons withdraw, refusing to come to terms with the pilot who dares all heaven’s harms to raid the zone where fate begins, flings silver gauntlet of his plane at space, demanding satisfaction; no duel takes place: the mute air merely thins and thins. Sky won’t be drawn closer: absolute, it holds aloof, a shrouded […]
Memoirs Of A Spinach-Picker by Sylvia Plath
They called the place Lookout Farm. Back then, the sun Didn’t go down in such a hurry. How it Lit things, that lamp of the Possible! Wet yet Lay over the leaves like a clear cellophane, A pane of dragonfly wing, when they left me With a hundred bushel baskets on the edge Of the […]
Mary’s Song by Sylvia Plath
The Sunday lamb cracks in its fat. The fat Sacrifices its opacity. . . . A window, holy gold. The fire makes it precious, The same fire Melting the tallow heretics, Ousting the Jews. Their thick palls float Over the cicatrix of Poland, burnt-out Germany. They do not die. Grey birds obsess my heart, Mouth-ash, […]
Man In Black by Sylvia Plath
Where the three magenta Breakwaters take the shove And suck of the grey sea To the left, and the wave Unfists against the dun Barb-wired headland of The Deer Island prison With its trim piggeries, Hen huts and cattle green To the right, and March ice Glazes the rock pools yet, Snuff-colored sand cliffs rise […]
Mad Girl’s Love Song by Sylvia Plath
“I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead; I lift my lids and all is born again. (I think I made you up inside my head.) The stars go waltzing out in blue and red, And arbitrary blackness gallops in: I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead. I dreamed that […]
Love Is A Parallax by Sylvia Plath
‘Perspective betrays with its dichotomy: train tracks always meet, not here, but only in the impossible mind’s eye; horizons beat a retreat as we embark on sophist seas to overtake that mark where wave pretends to drench real sky.’ ‘Well then, if we agree, it is not odd that one man’s devil is another’s god […]
Letter To A Purist by Sylvia Plath
That grandiose colossus who Stood astride The envious assaults of sea (Essaying, wave by wave, Tide by tide, To undo him, perpetually), Has nothing on you, O my love, O my great idiot, who With one foot Caught (as it were) in the muck-trap Of skin and bone, Dithers with the other way out In […]
Letter In November by Sylvia Plath
Love, the world Suddenly turns, turns color. The streetlight Splits through the rat’s tail Pods of the laburnum at nine in the morning. It is the Arctic, This little black Circle, with its tawn silk grasses – babies hair. There is a green in the air, Soft, delectable. It cushions me lovingly. I am flushed […]
A Lesson In Vengeance by Sylvia Plath
In the dour ages Of drafty cells and draftier castles, Of dragons breathing without the frame of fables, Saint and king unfisted obstruction’s knuckles By no miracle or majestic means, But by such abuses As smack of spite and the overscrupulous Twisting of thumbscrews: one soul tied in sinews, One white horse drowned, and all […]
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 […]
Last Words by Sylvia Plath
I do not want a plain box, I want a sarcophagus With tigery stripes, and a face on it Round as the moon, to stare up. I want to be looking at them when they come Picking among the dumb minerals, the roots. I see them already – the pale, star-distance faces. Now they are […]
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 […]
Insolent Storm Strikes At The Skull by Sylvia Plath
Insolent storm strikes at the skull, assaults the sleeping citadel, knocking the warden to his knees in impotence, to sue for peace, while wantonly amused by this, wind wakes the whole metropolis. Skeptic cyclones try the bone of strict and sacred skeleton; polemic gales prove point by point how flesh cleaves fast to frozen joint, […]
In Plaster by Sylvia Plath
I shall never get out of this! There are two of me now: This new absolutely white person and the old yellow one, And the white person is certainly the superior one. She doesn’t need food, she is one of the real saints. At the beginning I hated her, she had no personality – She […]
In Midas’ Country by Sylvia Plath
Meadows of gold dust. The silver Currents of the Connecticut fan And meander in bland pleatings under River-verge farms where rye-heads whiten. All’s polished to a dull luster In the sulfurous noon. We move With the languor of idols below The sky’s great bell glass and briefly engrave Our limbs’ image on a field of […]