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.

Appalled by secret want, I rush From such assault of radiance.

disguising the constant horror in a coat of many-colored fictions; we mask our past in the green of eden, pretend future’s shining fruit can sprout from the navel of this present waste.

Born green we were to this flawed garden,