Let it perish
“Hugging my grudge, ugly and prickly, a sad sea urchin, I trudged off on my own, in the opposite direction toward the forbidding prison. As from a star I saw, coldly and soberly, the separateness of everything. I felt the wall of my skin; I am I. That stone is a stone. My beautiful fusion with the things of this world was over.
The Tide ebbed, sucked back into itself. There I was, a reject, with the dried black seaweed whose hard beads I liked to pop, hollowed orange and grapefruit halves and a garbage of shells. All at once, old and lonely, I eyed these–razor clams, fairy boats, weedy mussels, the oyster’s pocked gray lace (there was never a pearl) and tiny white ‘ice cream cones.’ You could always tell where the best shells were–at the rim of the last wave, marked by a mascara of tar. I picked up, frigidly, a stiff pink starfish. It lay at the heart of my palm, a joke dummy of my own hand. Sometimes I nursed starfish alive in jam jars of seawater and watched them grow back lost arms. On this day, this awful birthday of otherness, my rival, somebody else, I flung the starfish against a stone. Let it perish.”–Sylvia Plath
Tags: lovely quotations, modernism, prose poetry, sea, sylvia plath
Poetry: “The Rabbit Catcher” by Sylvia Plath
It was a place of force -
The wind gagging my mouth with my own blown hair,
Tearing off my voice, and the sea
Blinding me with its lights, the lives of the dead
Unreeling in it, spreading like oil.I tasted the malignity of the gorse,
Its black spikes,
The extreme unction of its yellow candle-flowers.
They had an efficiency, a great beauty,
And were extravagant, like torture.There was only one place to get to.
Simmering, perfumed,
The paths narrowed into the hollow.
And the snares almost effaced themselves –
Zeroes, shutting on nothing,Set close, like birth pangs.
The absence of shrieks
Made a hole in the hot day, a vacancy.
The glassy light was a clear wall,
The thickets quiet.I felt a still busyness, an intent.
I felt hands round a tea mug, dull, blunt,
Ringing the white china,
How they awaited him, those little deaths!
They waited like sweethearts. They excited him.And we, too, had a relationship -
Tight wires between us,
Pegs too deep to uproot, and a mind like a ring
Sliding shut on some quick thing,
The constriction killing me also.- Sylvia Plath, 1965
Tags: confessional poetry, emotive, hauntingly beautiful, metaphors, poetry, sylvia plath
Poetry: “Black Rook in Rainy Weather” by Sylvia Plath
On the stiff twig up there
Hunches a wet black rook
Arranging and rearranging its feathers in the rain.
I do not expect a miracle
Or an accidentTo set the sight on fire
In my eye, nor seek
Any more in the desultory weather some design,
But let spotted leaves fall as they fall,
Without ceremony, or portent.Although, I admit, I desire,
Occasionally, some backtalk
From the mute sky, I can’t honestly complain:
A certain minor light may still
Lean incandescentOut of kitchen table or chair
As if a celestial burning took
Possession of the most obtuse objects now and then —
Thus hallowing an interval
Otherwise inconsequentBy bestowing largesse, honor
One might say love. At any rate, I now walk
Wary (for it could happen
Even in this dull, ruinous landscape); sceptical,
Yet politic; ignorantOf whatever angel any choose to flare
Suddenly at my elbow. I only know that a rook
Ordering its black feathers can so shine
As to seize my senses, haul
My eyelids up, and grantA brief respite from fear
Of total neutrality. With luck,
Trekking stubborn through this season
Of fatigue, I shall
Patch together a contentOf sorts. Miracles occur.
If you care to call those spasmodic
Tricks of radiance miracles. The wait’s begun again,
The long wait for the angel,
For that rare, random descent.
—–Sylvia PlathTags: nature, poetry, sylvia plath, trees
Poetry: “Dark Woods, Dark Water”
This wood burns a dark
Incense. Pale moss drips
In elbow-scarves, beardsFrom the archaic
Bones of the great trees.
Blue mists move overA lake thick with fish.
Snails scroll the border
Of the glazed waterWith coils of ram’s-horn.
Out in the open
Down there the late yearHammers her rare and
Various metals.
Old pewter roots twistUp from the jet-backed
Mirror of water
And while the air’s clearHourglass sifts a
Drift of goldpieces
Bright waterlights areSliding their quoits one
After the other
Down boles of the fir.
— Sylvia PlathTags: nature, sylvia plath, woods
Poetry Corner: “Lady Lazarus”
I have done it again.
One year in every ten
I manage it–A sort of walking miracle, my skin
Bright as a Nazi lampshade,
My right footA paperweight,
My face a featureless, fine
Jew linen.Peel off the napkin
O my enemy.
Do I terrify?–The nose, the eye pits, the full set of teeth?
The sour breath
Will vanish in a day.Soon, soon the flesh
The grave cave ate will be
At home on meAnd I a smiling woman.
I am only thirty.
And like the cat I have nine times to die.This is Number Three.
What a trash
To annihilate each decade.What a million filaments.
The peanut-crunching crowd
Shoves in to seeThem unwrap me hand and foot–
The big strip tease.
Gentlemen, ladiesThese are my hands
My knees.
I may be skin and bone,Nevertheless, I am the same, identical woman.
The first time it happened I was ten.
It was an accident.The second time I meant
To last it out and not come back at all.
I rocked shutAs a seashell.
They had to call and call
And pick the worms off me like sticky pearls.Dying
Is an art, like everything else.
I do it exceptionally well.- from “Lady Lazarus” by Sylvia Plath
Tags: poetry, resurrection, sylvia plath
Poetry: “Tulips” by Sylvia Plath
This is one of my favorite poems ever.
The tulips are too excitable, it is winter here.
Look how white everything is, how quiet, how snowed-in.
I am learning peacefulness, lying by myself quietly
As the light lies on these white walls, this bed, these hands.
I am nobody; I have nothing to do with explosions.
I have given my name and my day-clothes up to the nurses
And my history to the anesthetist and my body to surgeons.Tags: emptiness, hospitals, poetry, self-awareness, sylvia plath
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