The Collected Poems

by Sylvia Plath

Heavy Women

In Plaster

T...

Insomniac

Widow

Irrefutable, beautifully smug As Venus, pedestaled on a half-shell

Reference to Botticelli's Birth of Venus

Shawled in blond hair

Over each weighty stomach

a face Floats calm as a moon or a cloud.

Pink-buttocked infants attend them.

They step among the archetypes.

141 In Plaster

There are two of me now:

This new absolutely white person

and the old yel...

And the white person is certainly the...

She doesn’t need food, she is one of th...

At the beginning I h...

she had no personality— She lay in bed with me like a dead body And I was scared, because she w...

Only much whiter and unbreakable and with no complaints.

When I hit her she held still, like a true pacifist. Then I realized what she wanted was for me to love her:

She began to warm up, and I saw her advantages.

I gave her a soul, I bloomed out of her as a rose

And it was I who attracted everybody’s attention, Not her whiteness and beauty, as I had at first supposed.

In the morning she woke me early, reflecting the sun From her amazingly white torso, and I couldn’t help but notice Her tidiness and her calmness and her patience:

She humored my weakness like the best of nurses,

In time our relationship grew more intense.

I felt her criticizing me in spite of herself, As if my habits offended her in some way.

Then I saw what the trouble was: she thought she was immortal.

secretly she began to hope I’d die.

I wasn’t in any position to get rid of her. She’d supported me for so long I was quite limp—

Living with her was like living with my own coffin: Yet I still depended on her, though I did it regretfully.

I used to think we might make a go of it together—

After all, it was a kind of marriage, being so close.

Now I see it must be one or the other of us. She may be a saint, and I may be ugly and hairy, But she’ll soon find ou...

I’m collecting my strength...

shall manage with...

And she’ll perish with emptiness then, and be...

night sky

a sort of carbon paper,

A bonewhite light,

like death,

behind all ...

desert pillow,

sleeplessness Stretching its fine, irritating sand

embarrassments—the mizzling days Of childhood and adolescence,

sticky with dreams,

Parental faces on tall stalks, alternately st...

A garden of bug...

He is immune to pills: red, purple, blue—