Midsummer Mobile by Sylvia Plath
Begin by dipping your brush into clear light. Then syncopate a sky of Dufy-blue With tilted spars of sloops revolved by white Gulls in a feathered fugue of wings. Outdo Seurat: fleck schooner flanks with sun and set A tremolo of turquoise quivering in The tessellated wave. Now nimbly let A tinsel pizzicato on fish […]
Mushrooms by Sylvia Plath
Overnight, very Whitely, discreetly, Very quietly Our toes, our noses Take hold on the loam, Acquire the air. Nobody sees us, Stops us, betrays us; The small grains make room. Soft fists insist on Heaving the needles, The leafy bedding, Even the paving. Our hammers, our rams, Earless and eyeless, Perfectly voiceless, Widen the crannies, […]
Metaphors by Sylvia Plath
I’m a riddle in nine syllables, An elephant, a ponderous house, A melon strolling on two tendrils. O red fruit, ivory, fine timbers! This loaf’s big with its yeasty rising. Money’s new-minted in this fat purse. I’m a means, a stage, a cow in calf. I’ve eaten a bag of green apples, Boarded the train […]
Morning Song by Sylvia Plath
Love set you going like a fat gold watch. The midwife slapped your footsoles, and your bald cry Took its place among the elements. Our voices echo, magnifying your arrival. New statue. In a drafty museum, your nakedness Shadows our safety. We stand round blankly as walls. I’m no more your mother Than the cloud […]
Medusa by Sylvia Plath
Off that landspit of stony mouth-plugs, Eyes rolled by white sticks, Ears cupping the sea’s incoherences, You house your unnerving head-God-ball, Lens of mercies, Your stooges Plying their wild cells in my keel’s shadow, Pushing by like hearts, Red stigmata at the very center, Riding the rip tide to the nearest point of departure, Dragging […]
Moonrise by Sylvia Plath
Grub-white mulberries redden among leaves. I’ll go out and sit in white like they do, Doing nothing. July’s juice rounds their nubs. This park is fleshed with idiot petals. White catalpa flowers tower, topple, Cast a round white shadow in their dying. A pigeon rudders down. It’s fantail’s white Vocation enough: opening, shutting White petals, […]
Medallion by Sylvia Plath
By the gate with star and moon Worked into the peeled orange wood The bronze snake lay in the sun Inert as a shoelace; dead But pliable still, his jaw Unhinged and his grin crooked, Tongue a rose-colored arrow. Over my hand I hung him. His little vermilion eye Ignited with a glassed flame As […]
Mirror by Sylvia Plath
I am silver and exact. I have no preconceptions. Whatever I see I swallow immediately Just as it is, unmisted by love or dislike. I am not cruel, only truthful ‘ The eye of a little god, four-cornered. Most of the time I meditate on the opposite wall. It is pink, with speckles. I have […]
Maudlin by Sylvia Plath
Mud-mattressed under the sign of the hag In a clench of blood, the sleep-talking virgin Gibbets with her curse the moon’s man, Faggot-bearing Jack in his crackless egg : Hatched with a claret hogshead to swig He kings it, navel-knit to no groan, But at the price of a pin-stitched skin Fish-tailed girls purchase each […]
Midsummer Mobile by Sylvia Plath
Begin by dipping your brush into clear light. Then syncopate a sky of Dufy-blue With tilted spars of sloops revolved by white Gulls in a feathered fugue of wings. Outdo Seurat: fleck schooner flanks with sun and set A tremolo of turquoise quivering in The tessellated wave. Now nimbly let A tinsel pizzicato on fish […]
Magnolia Shoals by Sylvia Plath
Up here among the gull cries we stroll through a maze of pale red-mottled relics, shells, claws as if it were summer still. That season has turned its back. Through the green sea gardens stall, bow, and recover their look of the imperishable gardens in an antique book or tapestries on a wall, leaves behind […]
Metaphors by Sylvia Plath
I’m a riddle in nine syllables, An elephant, a ponderous house, A melon strolling on two tendrils. O red fruit, ivory, fine timbers! This loaf’s big with its yeasty rising. Money’s new-minted in this fat purse. I’m a means, a stage, a cow in calf. I’ve eaten a bag of green apples, Boarded the train […]
Magi by Sylvia Plath
The abstracts hover like dull angels: Nothing so vulgar as a nose or an eye Bossing the ethereal blanks of their face-ovals. Their whiteness bears no relation to laundry, Snow, chalk or suchlike. They’re The real thing, all right: the Good, the True . . . Salutary and pure as boiled water, Loveless as the […]
Medusa by Sylvia Plath
Off that landspit of stony mouth-plugs, Eyes rolled by white sticks, Ears cupping the sea’s incoherences, You house your unnerving head-God-ball, Lens of mercies, Your stooges Plying their wild cells in my keel’s shadow, Pushing by like hearts, Red stigmata at the very center, Riding the rip tide to the nearest point of departure, Dragging […]
Maenad by Sylvia Plath
Once I was ordinary: Sat by my father’s bean tree Eating the fingers of wisdom. The birds made milk. When it thundered I hid under a flat stone. The mother of mouths didn’t love me. The old man shrank to a doll. O I am too big to go backward: Birdmilk is feathers, The bean […]
Medallion by Sylvia Plath
By the gate with star and moon Worked into the peeled orange wood The bronze snake lay in the sun Inert as a shoelace; dead But pliable still, his jaw Unhinged and his grin crooked, Tongue a rose-colored arrow. Over my hand I hung him. His little vermilion eye Ignited with a glassed flame As […]
Lyonnesse by Sylvia Plath
No use whistling for Lyonnesse! Sea-cold, sea-cold it certainly is. Take a look at the white, high berg on his forehead- There’s where it sunk. The blue, green, Gray, indeterminate gilt Sea of his eyes washing over it And a round bubble Popping upward from the mouths of bells People and cows. The Lyonians had […]
Maudlin by Sylvia Plath
Mud-mattressed under the sign of the hag In a clench of blood, the sleep-talking virgin Gibbets with her curse the moon’s man, Faggot-bearing Jack in his crackless egg : Hatched with a claret hogshead to swig He kings it, navel-knit to no groan, But at the price of a pin-stitched skin Fish-tailed girls purchase each […]
Lorelei by Sylvia Plath
It is no night to drown in: A full moon, river lapsing Black beneath bland mirror-sheen, The blue water-mists dropping Scrim after scrim like fishnets Though fishermen are sleeping, The massive castle turrets Doubling themselves in a glass All stillness. Yet these shapes float Up toward me, troubling the face Of quiet. From the nadir […]
Magnolia Shoals by Sylvia Plath
Up here among the gull cries we stroll through a maze of pale red-mottled relics, shells, claws as if it were summer still. That season has turned its back. Through the green sea gardens stall, bow, and recover their look of the imperishable gardens in an antique book or tapestries on a wall, leaves behind […]
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 […]
Magi by Sylvia Plath
The abstracts hover like dull angels: Nothing so vulgar as a nose or an eye Bossing the ethereal blanks of their face-ovals. Their whiteness bears no relation to laundry, Snow, chalk or suchlike. They’re The real thing, all right: the Good, the True . . . Salutary and pure as boiled water, Loveless as the […]
Maenad by Sylvia Plath
Once I was ordinary: Sat by my father’s bean tree Eating the fingers of wisdom. The birds made milk. When it thundered I hid under a flat stone. The mother of mouths didn’t love me. The old man shrank to a doll. O I am too big to go backward: Birdmilk is feathers, The bean […]
Lyonnesse by Sylvia Plath
No use whistling for Lyonnesse! Sea-cold, sea-cold it certainly is. Take a look at the white, high berg on his forehead- There’s where it sunk. The blue, green, Gray, indeterminate gilt Sea of his eyes washing over it And a round bubble Popping upward from the mouths of bells People and cows. The Lyonians had […]
Lorelei by Sylvia Plath
It is no night to drown in: A full moon, river lapsing Black beneath bland mirror-sheen, The blue water-mists dropping Scrim after scrim like fishnets Though fishermen are sleeping, The massive castle turrets Doubling themselves in a glass All stillness. Yet these shapes float Up toward me, troubling the face Of quiet. From the nadir […]
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 […]
Lesbos by Sylvia Plath
Viciousness in the kitchen! The potatoes hiss. It is all Hollywood, windowless, The fluorescent light wincing on and off like a terrible migraine, Coy paper strips for doors – Stage curtains, a widow’s frizz. And I, love, am a pathological liar, And my child – look at her, face down on the floor, Little unstrung […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
Jilted by Sylvia Plath
My thoughts are crabbed and sallow, My tears like vinegar, Or the bitter blinking yellow Of an acetic star. Tonight the caustic wind, love, Gossips late and soon, And I wear the wry-faced pucker of The sour lemon moon. While like an early summer plum, Puny, green, and tart, Droops upon its wizened stem My […]
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 […]
Incommunicado by Sylvia Plath
The groundhog on the mountain did not run But fatly scuttled into the splayed fern And faced me, back to a ledge of dirt, to rattle Her sallow rodent teeth like castanets Against my leaning down, would not exchange For that wary clatter sound or gesture Of love : claws braced, at bay, my currency […]
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 […]
I Am Vertical by Sylvia Plath
But I would rather be horizontal. I am not a tree with my root in the soil Sucking up minerals and motherly love So that each March I may gleam into leaf, Nor am I the beauty of a garden bed Attracting my share of Ahs and spectacularly painted, Unknowing I must soon unpetal. Compared […]
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, […]