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 […]
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 […]