#sylvia plath poems

HAPPY 89th BIRTHDAY, my dearest Sylvia! ♥ RIP!

(27 October 1932, Boston, USA – 11 February 1963, London, UK)

—

POPPIES IN OCTOBER

Even the sun-clouds this morning cannot manage such skirts.
Nor the woman in the ambulance
Whose red heart blooms through her coat so astoundingly —

A gift, a love gift
Utterly unasked for
By a sky

Palely and flamily
Igniting its carbon monoxides, by eyes
Dulled to a halt under bowlers.

O my God, what am I
That these late mouths should cry open
In a forest of frost, in a dawn of cornflowers.

–Sylvia Plath, written 27 October 1962, in: Ariel, 1965

—

Photo credits: Sylvia Plath photographed by studio photogapher Eric Stahlberg in Northampton, Massachusetts during her final months as a student at Smith College in May 1955

This and two other photographs by Stahlberg were sold at the Sotheby’s auction “Your Own Sylvia: Sylvia Plath’s letters to Ted Hughes and other items, property of Frieda Hughes” in July 2021 for 1,764GBP.

Image source: https://www.sothebys.com/

via Twitter @LeapGilead

(Please don’t forget to also like the picture there)

ADMONITION

If you dissect a bird
To diagram the tongue
You’ll cut the chord
Articulating song.

If you flay a beast
To marvel at the mane
You’ll wreck the rest
From which the fur began.

If you assault a fish
To analyze the fin
Your hands will crush
The generatihg bone.

If you pluck out the heart
To find what makes it move,
You’ll halt the clock
That syncopates our love.

–Sylvia Plath, in: The Collected Poems, Juvenilia 1952-1956, 1981

viahttps://elisabetholiver.home.blog/

Fever 103°                        

Pure? What does it mean?
The tongues of hell
Are dull, dull as the triple

Tongues of dull, fat Cerebus
Who wheezes at the gate. Incapable
Of licking clean

The aguey tendon, the sin, the sin.
The tinder cries.
The indelible smell

Of a snuffed candle!
Love, love, the low smokes roll
From me like Isadora’s scarves, I’m in a fright

One scarf will catch and anchor in the wheel.
Such yellow sullen smokes
Make their own element. They will not rise,

But trundle round the globe
Choking the aged and the meek,
The weak

Hothouse baby in its crib,
The ghastly orchid
Hanging its hanging garden in the air,

Devilish leopard!
Radiation turned it white
And killed it in an hour.

Greasing the bodies of adulterers
Like Hiroshima ash and eating in.
The sin. The sin.

Darling, all night
I have been flickering, off, on, off, on.
The sheets grow heavy as a lecher’s kiss.

Three days. Three nights.
Lemon water, chicken
Water, water make me retch.

I am too pure for you or anyone.
Your body
Hurts me as the world hurts God. I am a lantern ——

My head a moon
Of Japanese paper, my gold beaten skin
Infinitely delicate and infinitely expensive.

Does not my heat astound you. And my light.
All by myself I am a huge camellia
Glowing and coming and going, flush on flush.

I think I am going up,
I think I may rise ——
The beads of hot metal fly, and I, love, I

Am a pure acetylene
Virgin
Attended by roses,

By kisses, by cherubim,
By whatever these pink things mean.
Not you, nor him

Not him, nor him
(My selves dissolving, old whore petticoats) ——
To Paradise.

–Sylvia Plath, written 20 October 1962,in:Ariel, 1965