Eavesdropper by Sylvia Plath
Your brother will trim my hedges! They darken your house, Nosy grower, Mole on my shoulder, To be scratched absently, To bleed, if it comes to that. The stain of the tropics Still urinous on you, a sin. A kind of bush-stink. You may be local, But that yellow! Godawful! Your body one Long nicotine-finger […]
Doomsday by Sylvia Plath
The idiot bird leaps out and drunken leans Atop the broken universal clock: The hour is crowed in lunatic thirteens. Out painted stages fall apart by scenes While all the actors halt in mortal shock: The idiot bird leaps out and drunken leans. Streets crack through in havoc-split ravines As the doomstruck city crumbles block […]
Dialogue En Route by Sylvia Plath
‘If only something would happen!’ sighed Eve, the elevator-girl ace, to Adam the arrogant matador as they shot past the forty-ninth floor in a rocketing vertical clockcase, fast as a fallible falcon. ‘I wish millionaire uncles and aunts would umbrella like liberal toadstools in a shower of Chanel, Dior gowns, filet mignon and walloping wines, […]
Dialogue Between Ghost And Priest by Sylvia Plath
In the rectory garden on his evening walk Paced brisk Father Shawn. A cold day, a sodden one it was In black November. After a sliding rain Dew stood in chill sweat on each stalk, Each thorn; spiring from wet earth, a blue haze Hung caught in dark-webbed branches like a fabulous heron. Hauled sudden […]
Departure by Sylvia Plath
The figs on the fig tree in the yard are green; Green, also, the grapes on the green vine Shading the brickred porch tiles. The money’s run out. How nature, sensing this, compounds her bitters. Ungifted, ungrieved, our leavetaking. The sun shines on unripe corn. Cats play in the stalks. Retrospect shall not often such […]
Denouement Villanelle by Sylvia Plath
The telegram says you have gone away And left our bankrupt circus on its own; There is nothing more for me to say. The maestro gives the singing birds their pay And they buy tickets for the tropic zone; The telegram says you have gone away. The clever woolly dogs have had their day They […]
Dark Wood, Dark Water by Sylvia Plath
This wood burns a dark Incense. Pale moss drips In elbow-scarves, beards From the archaic Bones of the great trees. Blue mists move over A lake thick with fish. Snails scroll the border Of the glazed water With coils of ram’s-horn. Out in the open Down there the late year Hammers her rare and Various […]
Dark House by Sylvia Plath
This is a dark house, very big. I made it myself, Cell by cell from a quiet corner, Chewing at the grey paper, Oozing the glue drops, Whistling, wiggling my ears, Thinking of something else. It has so many cellars, Such eelish delvings! U an round as an owl, I see by my own light. […]
Danse Macabre by Sylvia Plath
Down among strict roots and rocks, eclipsed beneath blind lid of land goes the grass-embroidered box. Arranged in sheets of ice, the fond skeleton still craves to have fever from the world behind. Hands reach back to relics of nippled moons, extinct and cold, frozen in designs of love. At twelve, each skull is aureoled […]
Cut by Sylvia Plath
What a thrill – My thumb instead of an onion. The top quite gone Except for a sort of hinge Of skin, A flap like a hat, Dead white. Then that red plush. Little pilgrim, The Indian’s axed your scalp. Your turkey wattle Carpet rolls Straight from the heart. I step on it, Clutching my […]
Crystal Gazer by Sylvia Plath
Gerd sits spindle-shaped in her dark tent, Lean face gone tawn with seasons , Skin worn down to the knucklebones At her tough trade; without time’s taint The burnished ball hangs fire in her hands, a lens Fusing time’s three horizons. Two enter to tap her sight, a green pair Fresh leaved out in vows: […]
Contusion by Sylvia Plath
Color floods to the spot, dull purple. The rest of the body is all washed-out, The color of pearl. In a pit of a rock The sea sucks obsessively, One hollow thw whole sea’s pivot. The size of a fly, The doom mark Crawls down the wall. The heart shuts, The sea slides back, The […]
Cinderella by Sylvia Plath
The prince leans to the girl in scarlet heels, Her green eyes slant, hair flaring in a fan Of silver as the rondo slows; now reels Begin on tilted violins to span The whole revolving tall glass palace hall Where guests slide gliding into light like wine; Rose candles flicker on the lilac wall Reflecting […]
Childless Woman by Sylvia Plath
The womb Rattles its pod, the moon Discharges itself from the tree with nowhere to go. My landscape is a hand with no lines, The roads bunched to a knot, The knot myself, Myself the rose you acheive– This body, This ivory Ungodly as a child’s shriek. Spiderlike, I spin mirrors, Loyal to my image, […]
Child by Sylvia Plath
Your clear eye is the one absolutely beautiful thing. I want to fill it with color and ducks, The zoo of the new Whose name you meditate – April snowdrop, Indian pipe, Little Stalk without wrinkle, Pool in which images Should be grand and classical Not this troublous Wringing of hands, this dark Ceiling without […]
Channel Crossing by Sylvia Plath
On storm-struck deck, wind sirens caterwaul; With each tilt, shock and shudder, our blunt ship Cleaves forward into fury; dark as anger, Waves wallop, assaulting the stubborn hull. Flayed by spray, we take the challenge up, Grip the rail, squint ahead, and wonder how much longer Such force can last; but beyond, the neutral view […]
Candles by Sylvia Plath
They are the last romantics, these candles: Upside-down hearts of light tipping wax fingers, And the fingers, taken in by their own haloes, Grown milky, almost clear, like the bodies of saints. It is touching, the way they’ll ignore A whole family of prominent objects Simply to plumb the deeps of an eye In its […]
Bucolics by Sylvia Plath
Mayday: two came to field in such wise : `A daisied mead’, each said to each, So were they one; so sought they couch, Across barbed stile, through flocked brown cows. `No pitchforked farmer, please,’ she said; `May cockcrow guard us safe,’ said he; By blackthorn thicket, flower spray They pitched their coats, come to […]
Brasilia by Sylvia Plath
Will they occur, These people with torso of steel Winged elbows and eyeholes Awaiting masses Of cloud to give them expression, These super-people! – And my baby a nail Driven, driven in. He shrieks in his grease Bones nosing for distance. And I, nearly extinct, His three teeth cutting Themselves on my thumb – And […]
Blue Moles by Sylvia Plath
1 They’re out of the dark’s ragbag, these two Moles dead in the pebbled rut, Shapeless as flung gloves, a few feet apart — Blue suede a dog or fox has chewed. One, by himself, seemed pitiable enough, Little victim unearthed by some large creature From his orbit under the elm root. The second carcass […]
Berck-Plage by Sylvia Plath
(1) This is the sea, then, this great abeyance. How the sun’s poultice draws on my inflammation. Electrifyingly-colored sherbets, scooped from the freeze By pale girls, travel the air in scorched hands. Why is it so quiet, what are they hiding? I have two legs, and I move smilingly.. A sandy damper kills the vibrations; […]
Barren Woman by Sylvia Plath
Empty, I echo to the least footfall, Museum without statues, grand with pillars, porticoes, rotundas. In my courtyard a fountain leaps and sinks back into itself, Nun-hearted and blind to the world. Marble lilies Exhale their pallor like scent. I imagine myself with a great public, Mother of a white Nike and several bald-eyed Apollos. […]
Aquatic Nocturne by Sylvia Plath
deep in liquid turquoise slivers of dilute light quiver in thin streaks of bright tinfoil on mobile jet: pale flounder waver by tilting silver: in the shallows agile minnows flicker gilt: grapeblue mussels dilate lithe and pliant valves: dull lunar globes of blubous jellyfish glow milkgreen: eels twirl in wily spirals on elusive tails: adroir […]
April Aubade by Sylvia Plath
Worship this world of watercolor mood in glass pagodas hung with veils of green where diamonds jangle hymns within the blood and sap ascends the steeple of the vein. A saintly sparrow jargons madrigals to waken dreamers in the milky dawn, while tulips bow like a college of cardinals before that papal paragon, the sun. […]
April 18 by Sylvia Plath
the slime of all my yesterdays rots in the hollow of my skull and if my stomach would contract because of some explicable phenomenon such as pregnancy or constipation I would not remember you or that because of sleep infrequent as a moon of greencheese that because of food nourishing as violet leaves that because […]
Among The Narcissi by Sylvia Plath
Spry, wry, and gray as these March sticks, Percy bows, in his blue peajacket, among the narcissi. He is recuperating from something on the lung. The narcissi, too, are bowing to some big thing : It rattles their stars on the green hill where Percy Nurses the hardship of his stitches, and walks and walks. […]
Alicante Lullaby by Sylvia Plath
In Alicante they bowl the barrels Bumblingly over the nubs of the cobbles Past the yellow-paella eateries, Below the ramshackle back-alley balconies, While the cocks and hens In the roofgardens Scuttle repose with crowns and cackles. Kumquat-colored trolleys ding as they trundle Passengers under an indigo fizzle Needling spumily down from the wires: Alongside the […]
Aerialist by Sylvia Plath
Aerialist Each night, this adroit young lady Lies among sheets Shredded fine as snowflakes Until dream takes her body From bed to strict tryouts In tightrope acrobatics. Nightly she balances Cat-clever on perilous wire In a gigantic hall, Footing her delicate dances To whipcrack and roar Which speak her maestro’s will. Gilded, coming correct Across […]
Study in Hands by Théophile Gautier
Study in Hands by Théophile Gautier I Imperia I saw a plaster hand, on view In sculptor’s studio, set apart… Aspasia’s? Cleopatra’s?… Who? This fragment’s human work of art? Like lily silvered by the dawn, Frozen in kiss of snow, its light Loveliness dazzled me, and shone In poetry of purest white. Though pallid, wan, […]
Smoke by Théophile Gautier
Smoke by Théophile Gautier Over there, trees are sheltering A hunchedback hut… A slum, no more… Roof askew, walls and wainscoting Falling away… Moss hides the door. Only one shutter, hanging… But Seeping over the windowsill, Like frosted breath, proof that this hut, This slum, is living, breathing still. Corkscrew of smoke… A wisp of […]
Last Wish by Théophile Gautier
Last Wish by Théophile Gautier A long time have I known you… Why, Full eighteen years, I must confess! All pink are you; pale, blear am I. Winters, mine; yours, spring’s comeliness! White cemetery lilacs sprout Over my temples; but soon, now, The grove entire will bloom about My head, to shade my withered brow. […]
Whispers of Immortality by T. S. Eliot
WEBSTER was much possessed by death And saw the skull beneath the skin; And breastless creatures under ground Leaned backward with a lipless grin. Daffodil bulbs instead of balls Stared from the sockets of the eyes! He knew that thought clings round dead limbs Tightening its lusts and luxuries. Donne, I suppose, was such another […]
The Song Of The Jellicles by T. S. Eliot
Jellicle Cats come out tonight, Jellicle Cats come one come all: The Jellicle Moon is shining bright– Jellicles come to the Jellicle Ball. Jellicle Cats are black and white, Jellicle Cats are rather small; Jellicle Cats are merry and bright, And pleasant to hear when they caterwaul. Jellicle Cats have cheerful faces, Jellicle Cats have […]
The Rum Tum Tugger by T. S. Eliot
The Rum Tum Tugger is a Curious Cat: If you offer him pheasant he would rather have grouse. If you put him in a house he would much prefer a flat, If you put him in a flat then he’d rather have a house. If you set him on a mouse then he only wants […]
The Old Gumbie Cat by T. S. Eliot
I have a Gumbie Cat in mind, her name is Jennyanydots; Her coat is of the tabby kind, with tiger stripes and leopard spots. All day she sits upon the stair or on the steps or on the mat; She sits and sits and sits and sits–and that’s what makes a Gumbie Cat! But when […]
The Naming Of Cats by T. S. Eliot
The Naming of Cats is a difficult matter, It isn’t just one of your holiday games; You may think at first I’m as mad as a hatter When I tell you, a cat must have THREE DIFFERENT NAMES. First of all, there’s the name that the family use daily, Such as Peter, Augustus, Alonzo or […]
The Hollow Men by T. S. Eliot
Mistah Kurtz — he dead. A penny for the Old Guy I We are the hollow men We are the stuffed men Leaning together Headpiece filled with straw. Alas! Our dried voices, when We whisper together Are quiet and meaningless As wind in dry grass Or rats’ feet over broken glass In our dry cellar […]
The Boston Evening Transcript by T. S. Eliot
THE READERS of the Boston Evening Transcript Sway in the wind like a field of ripe corn. When evening quickens faintly in the street, Wakening the appetites of life in some And to others bringing the Boston Evening Transcript, I mount the steps and ring the bell, turning Wearily, as one would turn to nod […]
The Ad-Dressing Of Cats by T. S. Eliot
You’ve read of several kinds of Cat, And my opinion now is that You should need no interpreter To understand their character. You now have learned enough to see That Cats are much like you and me And other people whom we find Possessed of various types of mind. For some are same and some […]
Sweeney Erect by T. S. Eliot
And the trees about me, Let them be dry and leafless; let the rocks Groan with continual surges; and behind me Make all a desolation. Look, look, wenches! PAINT me a cavernous waste shore Cast in the unstilled Cyclades, Paint me the bold anfractuous rocks Faced by the snarled and yelping seas. Display me Aeolus […]