The Collected Poems

by Sylvia Plath

With such blight wrought on our bankrupt estate, What ceremony of words can patch the havoc?

Last summer’s reeds are all engraved in ice as is your image in my eye; dry frost glazes the window of my hurt; what solace can be struck from rock to make heart’s waste grow green again? Who’d walk in this bleak place?

Just how guilty are we when the ceiling reveals no cracks that can be decoded?

can our dreams ever blur the intransigent lines which draw the shape that shuts us in? absolute

in faith we shall board our imagined ship and wildly sail among sacred islands of the mad till death shatters the fabulous stars and makes us real.

‘In life, love gnawed my skin To this white bone; What love did then, love does now: Gnaws me through.’

‘There sits no higher court Than man’s red heart.’

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, thus wrenched from my one kingdom.

For a fashion that constricts White bodies in a wooden girdle, root to top Unfaced, unformed, the nipple-flowers Shrouded to suckle darkness?

Try entry, enter nightmares Until his chisel bequeaths Them life livelier than ours, A solider repose than death’s.

Ages beat like rains On the unbeaten channels Of the ocean. Such sage humor and Durance are whirlpools

You defy other godhood. I walk dry on your kingdom’s border Exiled to no good.

No violation but gives dividends of slow disaster: the bitten apple ends the eden of bucolic eve: understanding breaks through the skull’s shell and like a cuckoo in the nest makes hell for naïve larks who starve and grieve. What prince has ever seized the shining grail but that it turned into a milking pail? It’s likely that each secret sought will prove to be some common parlor fake: a craft with paint and powder that can make cleopatra from a slut.

To a Jilted Lover Cold on my narrow cot I lie and in sorrow look through my window-square of black: figured in the midnight sky, a mosaic of stars diagrams the falling years, while from the moon, my lover’s eye chills me to death with radiance of his frozen faith. Once I wounded him with so small a thorn I never thought his flesh would burn or that the heat within would grow until he stood incandescent as a god; now there is nowhere I can go to hide from him: moon and sun reflect his flame. In the morning all shall be the same again: stars pale before the angry dawn; the gilded cock will turn for me the rack of time until the peak of noon has come and by that glare, my love will see how I am still blazing in my golden hell.

Rocking across the lapis lazuli sea comes a flock of bottle battleships each with a telegram addressed to me. ‘Destroy your mirror and avoid mishaps,’ chirps the first; ‘live on a silent island where the water blots out all footsteps.’ The second sings: ‘Receive no roving gallant who seeks to dally in the port till dawn, for your fate involves a dark assailant.’ The third cries out as all the ships go down: ‘There is more than one good way to drown.’

In the air above my island flies a crowd of shining gulls that plunge to launch an accurate assault upon the eyes of the bold sailor falling under drench and hunger of the surf that plucks the land, devouring green gardens inch by inch. Blood runs in a glissando from the hand that lifts to consecrate the sunken man. Aloft, a lone gull halts upon the wind, announcing after glutted birds have flown: ‘There is more than one good way to drown.’ (3)

My room is a twittering gray box with a wall there and there and there again, and then a window which proves the sky sheer rigmarole