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.

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

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

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.