|
|
|
|
| |
I know the bottom, she says. I know it with my great tap root;
It is what you fear.
I do not fear it: I have been there.
Is it the sea you hear in me,
Its dissatisfactions?
Or the voice of nothing, that was you madness?
Love is a shadow.
How you lie and cry after it.
Listen: these are its hooves: it has gone off, like a horse.
All night I shall gallup thus, impetuously,
Till your head is a stone, your pillow a little turf,
Echoing, echoing.
Or shall I bring you the sound of poisons?
This is rain now, the big hush.
And this is the fruit of it: tin white, like arsenic.
I have suffered the atrocity of sunsets.
Scorched to the root
My red filaments burn and stand,a hand of wires.
Now I break up in pieces that fly about like clubs.
A wind of such violence
Will tolerate no bystanding: I must shriek.
The moon, also, is merciless: she would drag me
Cruelly, being barren.
Her radiance scathes me. Or perhaps I have caught her.
I let her go. I let her go
Diminished and flat, as after radical surgery.
How your bad dreams possess and endow me.
I am inhabited by a cry.
Nightly it flaps out
Looking, with its hooks, for something to love.
I am terrified by this dark thing
That sleeps in me;
All day I feel its soft, feathery turnings, its malignity.
Clouds pass and disperse.
Are those the faces of love, those pale irretrievables?
Is it for such I agitate my heart?
I am incapable of more knowledge.
What is this, this face
So murderous in its strangle of branches?--
Its snaky acids kiss.
It petrifies the will. These are the isolate, slow faults
That kill, that kill, that kill.
Sylvia Plath
Read poems about / on: horse, fear, kiss, moon, rain, red, wind, sea, dark, dream, sleep
|
|
User Rating: |
|
7.6
/10
(7 votes) |
|
|
|
|
| |
Click here to write your comments about this poem (Elm by Sylvia Plath)
Kentucky Refugee (7/12/2008 12:26:00 PM)
Sylvia Plath, tortured soul, in my darkest depressions, I can see your viewpoint. But now, and most of the time, Thank God, it is a relief not to be in a world where the fruit of the rain is 'tin white like arsenic' and a loving longing is seen as malignity. I find that these stark icicle images of aloneness arise when I am momentarily distracted from The Way. |
|
|
|
|
Sylvia Plath
Free
Poetry E-Book:
E-mail this poem to e friend