Sylvia Plath

Sheep In Fog

The hills step off into whiteness. 
People or stars
Regard me sadly, I disappoint them.

The train leaves a line of breath.
O slow
Horse the colour of rust,

Hooves, dolorous bells -
All morning the
Morning has been blackening,

A flower left out.
My bones hold a stillness, the far
Fields melt my heart.

They threaten
To let me through to a heaven
Starless and fatherless, a dark water.

Sylvia Plath

 

Nick and the Candlestick

I am a miner. The light burns blue.   

Waxy stalactites

Drip and thicken, tears

The earthen womb

Exudes from its dead boredom.   

Black bat airs

Wrap me, raggy shawls,   

Cold homicides.

They weld to me like plums.

Old cave of calcium   

Icicles, old echoer.

Even the newts are white,

Those holy Joes.

And the fish, the fish—

Christ! they are panes of ice,

A vice of knives,   

A piranha   

Religion, drinking

Its first communion out of my live toes.   

The candle

Gulps and recovers its small altitude,

Its yellows hearten.

O love, how did you get here?   

O embryo

Remembering, even in sleep,   

Your crossed position.   

The blood blooms clean

In you, ruby.   

The pain

You wake to is not yours.

Love, love,

I have hung our cave with roses,   

With soft rugs—

The last of Victoriana.   

Let the stars

Plummet to their dark address,

Let the mercuric   

Atoms that cripple drip   

Into the terrible well,

You are the one

Solid the spaces lean on, envious.   

You are the baby in the barn.

Sylvia Plath

Cut

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 bottle
Of pink fizz.  A celebration, this is.
Out of a gap
A million soldiers run,
Redcoats, every one.

Whose side are they on?
O my
Homunculus, I am ill.
I have taken a pill to kill

The thin
Papery feeling.
Saboteur,
Kamikaze man -

The stain on your
Gauze Ku Klux Klan
Babushka
Darkens and tarnishes and when
The balled
Pulp of your heart
Confronts its small
Mill of silence

How you jump -
Trepanned veteran,
Dirty girl,
Thumb stump.

John Barth

from Giles Goat Boy

 “Studentdom, he felt, must pass its own Examinations and define its own Commencement--a slow, most painful process, made the more anguishing by bloody intelligences like the Bonifacists of Siegfrieder College. Yet however it seemed at times that men got nowhere, but only repeated class by class the mistakes of their predecessors, two crucial facts about them were at once their hope and the limitation of their possibility, so he believed. One was their historicity: the campus was young, the student race even younger, and by contrast with the whole of past time, the great collegiate cultures had been born only yesterday. The other had to do with comparative cyclology, a field of systematic speculation he could not review for me just then, but whose present relevance lay in the correspondency he held to obtain between the life-history of individuals and the history of studentdom in general. As the embryologists maintained that ontogeny repeats phylogeny, so, Max claimed, the race itself--and on a smaller scale, West-Campus culture--followed demonstrably--in capital letters, as it were, or slow motion--the life-pattern of its least new freshman. This was the basis of Spielman's Law--ontogeny repeats cosmogeny--and there was much more to it and to the science of cyclology whereof it was first principle. The important thing for now was that, by his calculations, West-Campus as a whole was in mid-adolescence...

W. H. Auden

Lullaby

Lay your sleeping head, my love,
Human on my faithless arm;
Time and fevers burn away
Individual beauty from
Thoughtful children, and the grave
Proves the child ephemeral:
But in my arms till break of day
Let the living creature lie,
Mortal, guilty, but to me
The entirely beautiful.

Franz Wright

What’s beautiful? How do you define beauty? Best way I ever saw was Sappho—“Some people say, like, a herd of black horses running across the plain. Some say a flotilla of warships heading out from port are beautiful. I say whatever one loves is beautiful.” Whatever you love, that’s what’s beautiful. You have certain special and private places, and ideal places, you keep inside you, memories of times when, the way you’re constantly in childhood, having experienced the feeling like you’re just about to see through to the way things really should be. It’s real evident right away that they’re not. But you can still see how they should be, and you still feel it’s unfair that they’re not. That may be part of it. I don’t think it’s just puberty. That thing where that light goes out of children’s faces when they’re like eleven or something—it’s the saddest thing in the world. That may be part of it.