SYLVIA PLATH
Selected Poems
chosen by
TED HUGHES
Contents
Title Page
Publisher’s Note
Miss Drake Proceeds to Supper
Spinster
Maudlin
Resolve
Night Shift
Full Fathom Five
Suicide off Egg Rock
The Hermit at Outermost House
Medallion
The Manor Garden
The Stones (from ‘Poem for a Birthday’)
The Burnt-Out Spa
You’re
Face Lift
Morning Song
Tulips
Insomniac
Wuthering Heights
Finisterre
The Moon and the Yew Tree
Mirror
The Babysitters
Little Fugue
An Appearance
Crossing the Water
Among the Narcissi
Elm
Poppies in July
A Birthday Present
The Bee Meeting
Daddy
Lesbos
Cut
By Candlelight
Ariel
Poppies in October
Nick and the Candlestick
Letter in November
Death & Co.
Mary’s Song
Winter Trees
Sheep in Fog
The Munich Mannequins
Words
Edge
About the Author
About the Editor
By the Same Author
Copyright
Publisher’s Note
The poems in this selection, like those in Sylvia Plath: Collected Poems, are arranged in chronological order of composition rather than of publication. For all of the poems apart from ‘Miss Drake Proceeds to Supper’ (1956) and ‘Resolve’ (1956), which have been published only in Collected Poems, dates of composition and the collections in which they originally appeared are given below.
The Colossus (London, 1960; New York, 1962): ‘Spinster’ (1956), ‘Maudlin’ (1956), ‘Night Shift’ (1957), ‘Full Fathom Five’ (1958), ‘Suicide off Egg Rock’ (1959), ‘The Hermit at Outermost House’ (1959), ‘Medallion’ (1959), ‘The Manor Garden’ (1959), ‘The Stones’ (1959), ‘The Burnt-Out Spa’ (1959)
Ariel (London and New York, 1965): ‘You’re’ (1960), ‘Morning Song’ (1961), ‘Tulips’ (1961), ‘The Moon and the Yew Tree’ (1961), ‘Little Fugue’ (1962), ‘Elm’ (1962), ‘Poppies in July’ (1962), ‘A Birthday Present’ (1962), ‘The Bee Meeting’ (1962), ‘Daddy’ (1962), ‘Cut’ (1962), ‘Ariel’ (1962), ‘Poppies in October’ (1962), ‘Nick and the Candlestick’ (1962), ‘Letter in November’ (1962), ‘Death & Co.’ (1962), ‘Sheep in Fog’ (1963), ‘The Munich Mannequins’ (1963), ‘Words’ (1963), ‘Edge’ (1963)
Crossing the Water (London and New York, 1971): ‘Face Lift’ (1961), ‘Insomniac’ (1961), ‘Wuthering Heights’ (1961), ‘Finisterre’ (1961), ‘Mirror’ (1961), ‘The Babysitters’ (1961), ‘An Appearance’ (1962), ‘Crossing the Water’ (1962), ‘Among the Narcissi’ (1962)
Winter Trees (London, 1971; New York, 1972): ‘Lesbos’ (1962), ‘By Candlelight’ (1962), ‘Mary’s Song’ (1962), ‘Winter Trees’ (1962)
SELECTED POEMS
Miss Drake Proceeds to Supper
No novice
In those elaborate rituals
Which allay the malice
Of knotted table and crooked chair,
The new woman in the ward
Wears purple, steps carefully
Among her secret combinations of eggshells
And breakable humming birds,
Footing sallow as a mouse
Between the cabbage-roses
Which are slowly opening their furred petals
To devour and drag her down
Into the carpet’s design.
With bird-quick eye cocked askew
She can see in the nick of time
How perilous needles grain the floorboards
And outwit their brambled plan;
Now through her ambushed air,
Adazzle with bright shards
Of broken glass,
She edges with wary breath,
Fending off jag and tooth,
Until, turning sideways,
She lifts one webbed foot after the other
Into the still, sultry weather
Of the patients’ dining room.
Spinster
Now this particular girl
With her latest suitor
Found herself, of a sudden, intolerably struck
By the birds’ irregular babel
And the leaves’ litter.
By this tumult afflicted, she
Observed her lover’s gestures unbalance the air,
His gait stray uneven
Through a rank wilderness of fern and flower.
She judged petals in disarray,
The whole season, sloven.
How she longed for winter then! –
Scrupulously austere in its order
Of white and black
Ice and rock, each sentiment within border,
And heart’s frosty discipline
Exact as a snowflake.
But here – a burgeoning
Unruly enough to pitch her five queenly wits
Into vulgar motley –
A treason not to be borne. Let idiots
Reel giddy in bedlam spring:
She withdrew neatly.
And round her house she set
Such a barricade of barb and check
Against mutinous weather
As no mere insurgent man could hope to break
With curse, fist, threat
Or love, either.
Maudlin
Mud-mattressed under the sign of the hag
In a clench of blood, the sleep-talking virgin
Gibbets with her curse the moon’s man,
Faggot-bearing Jack in his crackless egg:
Hatched with a claret hogshead to swig
He kings it, navel-knit to no groan,
But at the price of a pin-stitched skin
Fish-tailed girls purchase each white leg.
Resolve
Day of mist: day of tarnish
with hands
unserviceable, I wait
for the milk van
the one-eared cat
laps its gray paw
and the coal fire burns
outside, the little hedge leaves are
become quite yellow
a milk-film blurs
the empty bottles on the windowsill
no glory descends
two water drops poise
on the arched green
stem of my neighbor’s rose bush
o bent bow of thorns
the cat unsheathes its claws
the world turns
today
today I will not
disenchant my twelve black-gowned examiners
or bunch my fist
in the wind’s sneer.
Night Shift
It was not a heart, beating,
That muted boom, that clangor
Far off, not blood in the ears
Drumming up any fever
To impose on the evening.
The noise came from outside:
A metal detonating
Native, evidently, to
These stilled suburbs: nobody
Startled at it, though the sound
Shook the ground with its poundi
ng.
It took root at my coming
Till the thudding source, exposed,
Confounded inept guesswork:
Framed in windows of Main Street’s
Silver factory, immense
Hammers hoisted, wheels turning,
Stalled, let fall their vertical
Tonnage of metal and wood;
Stunned the marrow. Men in white
Undershirts circled, tending
Without stop those greased machines,
Tending, without stop, the blunt
Indefatigable fact.
Full Fathom Five
Old man, you surface seldom.
Then you come in with the tide’s coming
When seas wash cold, foam-
Capped: white hair, white beard, far-flung,
Crest and trough. Miles long
Extend the radial sheaves
Of your spread hair, in which wrinkling skeins
Knotted, caught, survives
The old myth of origins
Unimaginable. You float near
As keeled ice-mountains
Of the north, to be steered clear
Of, not fathomed. All obscurity
Starts with a danger:
Your dangers are many. I
Cannot look much but your form suffers
Some strange injury
And seems to die: so vapors
Ravel to clearness on the dawn sea.
The muddy rumors
Of your burial move me
To half-believe: your reappearance
Proves rumors shallow,
For the archaic trenched lines
Of your grained face shed time in runnels:
Ages beat like rains
On the unbeaten channels
Of the ocean. Such sage humor and
Durance are whirlpools
To make away with the ground-
Work of the earth and the sky’s ridgepole.
Waist down, you may wind
One labyrinthine tangle
To root deep among knuckles, shinbones,
Skulls. Inscrutable,
Below shoulders not once
Seen by any man who kept his head,
You defy questions;
You defy other godhood.
I walk dry on your kingdom’s border
Exiled to no good.
Your shelled bed I remember.
Father, this thick air is murderous.
I would breathe water.
Suicide off Egg Rock
Behind him the hotdogs split and drizzled
On the public grills, and the ochreous salt flats,
Gas tanks, factory stacks – that landscape
Of imperfections his bowels were part of –
Rippled and pulsed in the glassy updraught.
Sun struck the water like a damnation.
No pit of shadow to crawl into,
And his blood beating the old tattoo
I am, I am, I am. Children
Were squealing where combers broke and the spindrift
Raveled wind-ripped from the crest of the wave.
A mongrel working his legs to a gallop
Hustled a gull flock to flap off the sandspit.
He smoldered, as if stone-deaf, blindfold,
His body beached with the sea’s garbage,
A machine to breathe and beat forever.
Flies filing in through a dead skate’s eyehole
Buzzed and assailed the vaulted brainchamber.
The words in his book wormed off the pages.
Everything glittered like blank paper.
Everything shrank in the sun’s corrosive
Ray but Egg Rock on the blue wastage.
He heard when he walked into the water
The forgetful surf creaming on those ledges.
The Hermit at Outermost House
Sky and sea, horizon-hinged
Tablets of blank blue, couldn’t,
Clapped shut, flatten this man out.
The great gods, Stone-Head, Claw-Foot,
Winded by much rock-bumping
And claw-threat, realized that.
For what, then, had they endured
Dourly the long hots and colds,
Those old despots, if he sat
Laugh-shaken on his doorsill,
Backbone unbendable as
Timbers of his upright hut?
Hard gods were there, nothing else.
Still he thumbed out something else.
Thumbed no stony, horny pot,
But a certain meaning green.
He withstood them, that hermit.
Rock-face, crab-claw verged on green.
Gulls mulled in the greenest light.
Medallion
By the gate with star and moon
Worked into the peeled orange wood
The bronze snake lay in the sun
Inert as a shoelace; dead
But pliable still, his jaw
Unhinged and his grin crooked,
Tongue a rose-colored arrow.
Over my hand I hung him.
His little vermilion eye
Ignited with a glassed flame
As I turned him in the light;
When I split a rock one time
The garnet bits burned like that.
Dust dulled his back to ochre
The way sun ruins a trout.
Yet his belly kept its fire
Going under the chainmail,
The old jewels smoldering there
In each opaque belly-scale:
Sunset looked at through milk glass.
And I saw white maggots coil
Thin as pins in the dark bruise
Where his innards bulged as if
He were digesting a mouse.
Knifelike, he was chaste enough,
Pure death’s-metal. The yardman’s
Flung brick perfected his laugh.
The Manor Garden
The fountains are dry and the roses over.
Incense of death. Your day approaches.
The pears fatten like little buddhas.
A blue mist is dragging the lake.
You move through the era of fishes,
The smug centuries of the pig –
Head, toe and finger
Come clear of the shadow. History
Nourishes these broken flutings,
These crowns of acanthus,
And the crow settles her garments.
You inherit white heather, a bee’s wing,
Two suicides, the family wolves,
Hours of blankness. Some hard stars
Already yellow the heavens.
The spider on its own string
Crosses the lake. The worms
Quit their usual habitations.
The small birds converge, converge
With their gifts to a difficult borning.
The Stones
This is the city where men are mended.
I lie on a great anvil.
The flat blue sky-circle
Flew off like the hat of a doll
When I fell out of the light. I entered
The stomach of indifference, the wordless cupboard.
The mother of pestles diminished me.
I became a still pebble.
The stones of the belly were peaceable,
The head-stone quiet, jostled by nothing.
Only the mouth-hole piped out,
Importunate cricket
In a quarry of silences.
The people of the city heard it.
They hunted the stones, taciturn and separate,
The mouth-hole crying their locations.
Drunk as a foetus
I suck at the paps of darkness.
The food tubes embrace me. Sponges kiss my lichens away.
The jewelmaster drives his chisel to pry
Open one stone eye.
This is the after-hell: I see the light.
A wind unstoppers the chamber
Of the ear, old worrier.
Water mollifies the flint lip,
And daylight lays its sameness on the wall.
The grafters are cheerful,
Heating the pincers, hoisting the delicate hammers.
A current agitates the wires
Volt upon volt. Catgut stitches my fissures.
A workman walks by carrying a pink torso.
The storerooms are full of hearts.
This is the city of spare parts.
My swaddled legs and arms smell sweet as rubber.
Here they can doctor heads, or any limb.
On Fridays the little children come
To trade their hooks for hands.
Dead men leave eyes for others.
Love is the uniform of my bald nurse.
Love is the bone and sinew of my curse.
The vase, reconstructed, houses
The elusive rose.
Ten fingers shape a bowl for shadows.
My mendings itch. There is nothing to do.
I shall be good as new.
The Burnt-Out Spa