The Collected Poems

by Sylvia Plath

Her attitude to her verse was artisan-like: if she couldn’t get a table out of the material, she was quite happy to get a chair, or even a toy. The end product for her was not so much a successful poem, as something that had temporarily exhausted her ingenuity.

rending the net Of all decorum which holds the whirlwind back.

Last summer’s reeds are all engraved in ice as is your image in my eye;

what solace can be struck from rock to make heart’s waste grow green again? Who’d walk in this bleak place?

Dans le fond des forêts votre image me suit. RACINE

“In the heart of the forest, your image follows me.”

And hungry, hungry, those taut thighs. His ardor snares me, lights the trees, And I run flaring in my skin;

All afternoon these lovers lay Until the sun turned pale from warm, Until sweet wind changed tune, blew harm:

each day demands we create our whole world over, disguising the constant horror in a coat of many-colored fictions;

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.

we freeze And marvel at the smashing nonchalance Of nature:

watching for night, with absinthe eye cocked on the lone, late, passer-by.

Born green we were to this flawed garden,

is tricked to falter in spilt blood.

brave love, dream not of staunching such strict flame, but come, lean to my wound; burn on, burn on.

By a mad miracle I go intact Among the common rout

So, perhaps I, knelled dumb by your absence, Alone can hear Sun’s parched scream, Every downfall and crash Of gutted star, And, more daft than any goose, This cracked world’s incessant gabble and hiss.

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.

Know you appear Vivid at my side, Denying you sprang out of my head, Claiming you feel Love fiery enough to prove flesh real, Though it’s quite clear All your beauty, all your wit, is a gift, my dear, From me.

‘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.’

How she longed for winter then!— Scrupulously austere in its order Of white and black Ice and rock, each sentiment within border, And heart’s frosty discipline Exact as a snowflake.

Let idiots Reel giddy in bedlam spring:

And round her house she set Such a barricade of barb and check Against mutinous weather As no mere insurgent man could hope to break With curse, fist, threat Or love, either.

Day of mist: day of tarnish

And, fixed in the crystal center, grinning fierce: Earth’s ever-green death’s head.

But let spotted leaves fall as they fall, Without ceremony, or portent.

Miracles occur, If you care to call those spasmodic Tricks of radiance miracles.

Remembering the white, triumphant spray On hawthorn boughs, with goodwill to endure They named their ship after the flower of May.

her eyes entertained no dream, And the sandman’s dust Lost lustre under her footsoles.

She turned back.

Any more than the old woman in her mud hut could Keep from cutting fat meat Out of the side of the generous moon when it Set foot nightly in her yard Until her knife had pared The moon to a rind of little light.

While this beggared brain Hatches no fortune, But from leaf, from grass, Thieves what it has.’

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 vein Far deeper in gross wood Than axe could cut. But before I might blind sense To see with the spotless soul, Each particular quirk so ravished me Every pock and stain bulked more beautiful Than flesh of any body Flawed by love’s prints.

Instead, a wanton fit Dragged each dazzled sense apart Surfeiting eye, ear, taste, touch, smell; Now, snared by this miraculous art, I ride earth’s burning carrousel Day in, day out,

We dreamed how we were perfect, and we were.

They poise and grieve as in some old tragedy.

As if, above love’s ruinage, we were The heaven those two dreamed of, in despair.

These three, unmasked now, bear Dry witness To the gross eating game We’d wink at if we didn’t hear Stars grinding, crumb by crumb, Our own grist down to its bony face.

I found bare moor, A colorless weather, And the House of Eros Low-lintelled, no palace; You, luckier, Report white pillars, a blue sky, The ghosts, kindly.

Valleys of grass altering In a light neither of dawn Nor nightfall,

Gravity’s Lost in the lift and drift of An easier element Than earth, and there is nothing So fine we cannot do it.

I learned, I learned, I learned elsewhere, From muses unhired by you, dear mother.

But the little planet bobbed away Like a soap-bubble as you called: Come here!

Men in white Undershirts circled, tending Without stop those greased machines, Tending, without stop, the blunt Indefatigable fact.

When words, like locusts, drummed the darkening air And left the cobs to rattle, bitten clean.

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 peasants know. My father died, and when he died He willed his books and shell away. The books burned up, sea took the shell, But I, I keep the voices he Set in my ear, and in my eye

dragons breathing without the frame of fables,

And though age drop Their leafy crowns, their fame soars,

Grit in the eye or a sore Thumb can make anyone wince, but the whole globe Expressive of grief turns gods, like kings, to rocks. Those rocks, cleft and worn, themselves then grow Ponderous and extend despair on earth’s Dark face. So might rigor mortis come to stiffen All creation, were it not for a bigger belly Still than swallows joy.

To you Perseus, the palm, and may you poise And repoise until time stop, the celestial balance Which weighs our madness with our sanity.