Collected Poems

by Sylvia Plath

caught naked in the merely actual room, the stranger in the lavatory mirror puts on a public grin, repeats our name but scrupulously reflects the usual terror.

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.

Born green we were to this flawed garden,

Time comes round for that foul slut:

O my great idiot,

Through a whim of mine Over gables the moon’s celestial onion Hangs high.

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

with curse blackening the time goodbyes were said, trains let go, and I, great magnanimous fool, thus wrenched from my one kingdom.

O Cacophony, goddess of jazz and of quarrels, Crack-throated mistress of bagpipes and cymbals, Let be your con brios, your capricciosos, Crescendos, cadenzas, prestos and prestissimos, My head on the pillow (Piano, pianissimo) Lullayed by susurrous lyres and viols.

Exit from a smoking slit Her ruby dregs.

today today I will not disenchant my twelve black-gowned examiners or bunch my fist in the wind’s sneer.

O she felt No love in his eye, Worse—saw dangling from that spike-studded belt Ladies’ sheaved skulls: Mournfully the dry tongues clacked their guilt:

The whole landscape Loomed absolute as the antique world was Once, in its earliest sway of lymph and sap, Unaltered by eyes, Enough to snuff the quick Of her small heat out, but before the weight Of stones and hills of stones could break Her down to mere quartz grit in that stony light She turned back.

Two of us in a place meant for ten more— Our footsteps multiplied in the shadowy chambers, Our voices fathomed a profounder sound: The walnut banquet table, the twelve chairs Mirrored the intricate gestures of two others.

We dreamed their arguments, their stricken voices. We might embrace, but those two never did, Come, so unlike us, to a stiff impasse, Burdened in such a way we seemed the lighter— Ourselves the haunters, and they, flesh and blood; As if, above love’s ruinage, we were The heaven those two dreamed of, in despair.

And this is the kingdom you bore me to, Mother, mother. But no frown of mine Will betray the company I keep.

But all the accumulated last grunts, groans, Cries and heroic couplets concluding the million Enacted tragedies on these blood-soaked boards,