The Colossus Read online

  Sylvia Plath

  The Colossus & Other Poems

  Sylvia Plath was born in 1932 in Massachusetts. She began publishing poems and stories as a teenager and by the time she entered Smith College had won several poetry prizes. She was a Fulbright Scholar in Cambridge, England, and married British poet Ted Hughes in London in 1956. The young couple moved to the States, where Plath became an instructor at Smith College. Later, they moved back to England, where Plath continued writing poetry and wrote her novel, The Bell Jar, which was first published under the pseudonym Victoria Lucas in England in 1963. On February 11, 1963, Plath committed suicide. Her Collected Poems, published posthumously in 1981, won the Pulitzer Prize.

  FIRST VINTAGE INTERNATIONAL EDITION, MAY 1998

  Copyright © 1957, 1958, 1959, 1960, 1961, 1962, by Sylvia Plath

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published in hardcover in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., in 1962.

  First published in England in somewhat different form by William Heinemann Ltd.

  eISBN: 978-0-307-80882-0

  Random House Web address: www.randomhouse.com

  v3.1

  For Ted

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Arts in Society, The Atlantic Monthly, Audience, Chelsea, Critical Quarterly, Encounter, Grecourt Review, Harper’s Magazine, The Horn Book, The Hudson Review, The Kenyon Review, London Magazine, Mademoiselle, The Nation, The Observer, The Partisan Review, Poetry, The Sewanee Review, The Spectator, The Texas Literary Quarterly, and The Times Literary Supplement; also The New Yorker, where the following poems originally appeared: “Hardcastle Crags,” “Man in Black,” “Mussel Hunter at Rock Harbor,” and “Watercolor of Grantchester Meadows.” I would also like to thank Elizabeth Ames and the Trustees at Yaddo, where many of the poems were written.

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  About the Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  The Manor Garden

  Two Views of a Cadaver Room

  Night Shift

  Sow

  The Eye-mote

  Hardcastle Crags

  Faun

  Departure

  The Colossus

  Lorelei

  Point Shirley

  The Bull of Bendylaw

  All the Dead Dears

  Aftermath

  The Thin People

  Suicide Off Egg Rock

  Mushrooms

  I Want, I Want

  Watercolor of Grantchester Meadows

  The Ghost’s Leavetaking

  A Winter Ship

  Full Fathom Five

  Blue Moles

  Strumpet Song

  Man in Black

  Snakecharmer

  The Hermit at Outermost House

  The Disquieting Muses

  Medallion

  The Companionable Ills

  Moonrise

  Spinster

  Frog Autumn

  Mussel Hunter at Rock Harbor

  The Beekeeper’s Daughter

  The Times Are Tidy

  The Burnt-out Spa

  Sculptor

  Flute Notes from a Reedy Pond

  The Stones

  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.

  Two Views of a Cadaver Room

  1

  The day she visited the dissecting room

  They had four men laid out, black as burnt turkey,

  Already half unstrung. A vinegary fume

  Of the death vats clung to them;

  The white-smocked boys started working.

  The head of his cadaver had caved in,

  And she could scarcely make out anything

  In that rubble of skull plates and old leather.

  A sallow piece of string held it together.

  In their jars the snail-nosed babies moon and glow.

  He hands her the cut-out heart like a cracked heirloom.

  2

  In Brueghel’s panorama of smoke and slaughter

  Two people only are blind to the carrion army:

  He, afloat in the sea of her blue satin

  Skirts, sings in the direction

  Of her bare shoulder, while she bends,

  Fingering a leaflet of music, over him,

  Both of them deaf to the fiddle in the hands

  Of the death’s-head shadowing their song.

  These Flemish lovers flourish; not for long.

  Yet desolation, stalled in paint, spares the little country

  Foolish, delicate, in the lower right-hand corner.

  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 the outside:

  A metal detonating

  Native, evidently, to

  These stilled suburbs: nobody

  Startled at it, though the sound

  Shook the ground with its pounding.

  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.

  Sow

  God knows how our neighbor managed to breed

  His great sow:

  Whatever his shrewd secret, he kept it hid

  In the same way

  He kept the sow—impounded from public stare,

  Prize ribbon and pig show.

  But one dusk our questions commended us to a tour

  Through his lantern-lit

  Maze of barns to the lintel of the sunk sty door

  To gape at it:

  This was no rose-and-larkspurred china suckling

  With a penny slot

  For thrifty children, nor dolt pig ripe for heckling,

  About to be

  Glorified for prime flesh and golden crackling

  In a parsley halo;

  Nor even one of the common barnyard sows,

  Mire-smirched, blowzy,

  Maunching thistle and knotweed on her snout-cruise—

  Bloat tun of milk

  On the move, hedge
d by a litter of feat-foot ninnies

  Shrilling her hulk

  To halt for a swig at the pink teats. No. This vast

  Brobdingnag bulk

  Of a sow lounged belly-bedded on that black compost,

  Fat-rutted eyes

  Dream-filmed. What a vision of ancient hoghood must

  Thus wholly engross

  The great grandam!—our marvel blazoned a knight,

  Helmed, in cuirass,

  Unhorsed and shredded in the grove of combat

  By a grisly-bristled

  Boar, fabulous enough to straddle that sow’s heat.

  But our farmer whistled,

  Then, with a jocular fist thwacked the barrel nape,

  And the green-copse-castled

  Pig hove, letting legend like dried mud drop,

  Slowly, grunt

  On grunt, up in the flickering light to shape

  A monument

  Prodigious in gluttonies as that hog whose want

  Made lean Lent

  Of kitchen slops and, stomaching no constraint,

  Proceeded to swill

  The seven troughed seas and every earthquaking continent.

  The Eye-mote

  Blameless as daylight I stood looking

  At a field of horses, necks bent, manes blown,

  Tails streaming against the green

  Backdrop of sycamores. Sun was striking

  White chapel pinnacles over the roofs,

  Holding the horses, the clouds, the leaves

  Steadily rooted though they were all flowing

  Away to the left like reeds in a sea

  When the splinter flew in and stuck my eye,

  Needling it dark. Then I was seeing

  A melding of shapes in a hot rain:

  Horses warped on the altering green,

  Outlandish as double-humped camels or unicorns,

  Grazing at the margins of a bad monochrome,

  Beasts of oasis, a better time.

  Abrading my lid, the small grain burns:

  Red cinder around which I myself,

  Horses, planets and spires revolve.

  Neither tears nor the easing flush

  Of eyebaths can unseat the speck:

  It sticks, and it has stuck a week.

  I wear the present itch for flesh,

  Blind to what will be and what was.

  I dream that I am Oedipus.

  What I want back is what I was

  Before the bed, before the knife,

  Before the brooch-pin and the salve

  Fixed me in this parenthesis;

  Horses fluent in the wind,

  A place, a time gone out of mind.

  Hardcastle Crags

  Flintlike, her feet struck

  Such a racket of echoes from the steely street,

  Tacking in moon-blued crooks from the black

  Stone-built town, that she heard the quick air ignite

  Its tinder and shake

  A firework of echoes from wall

  To wall of the dark, dwarfed cottages.

  But the echoes died at her back as the walls

  Gave way to fields and the incessant seethe of grasses

  Riding in the full

  Of the moon, manes to the wind,

  Tireless, tied, as a moon-bound sea

  Moves on its root. Though a mist-wraith wound

  Up from the fissured valley and hung shoulder-high

  Ahead, it fattened

  To no family-featured ghost,

  Nor did any word body with a name

  The blank mood she walked in. Once past

  The dream-peopled village, her eyes entertained no dream,

  And the sandman’s dust

  Lost luster under her footsoles.

  The long wind, paring her person down

  To a pinch of flame, blew its burdened whistle

  In the whorl of her ear, and like a scooped-out pumpkin crown

  Her head cupped the babel.

  All the night gave her, in return

  For the paltry gift of her bulk and the beat

  Of her heart was the humped indifferent iron

  Of its hills, and its pastures bordered by black stone set

  On black stone. Barns

  Guarded broods and litters

  Behind shut doors; the dairy herds

  Knelt in the meadow mute as boulders;

  Sheep drowsed stoneward in their tussocks of wool, and birds,

  Twig-sleeping, wore

  Granite ruffs, their shadows

  The guise of leaves. The whole landscape

  Loomed absolute as the antique world was

  Once, in its earliest sway of lymph and sap,

  Unaltered by eyes,

  Enough to snuff the quick

  Of her small heat out, but before the weight

  Of stones and hills of stones could break

  Her down to mere quartz grit in that stony light

  She turned back.

  Faun

  Haunched like a faun, he hooed

  From grove of moon-glint and fen-frost

  Until all owls in the twigged forest

  Flapped black to look and brood

  On the call this man made.

  No sound but a drunken coot

  Lurching home along river bank.

  Stars hung water-sunk, so a rank

  Of double star-eyes lit

  Boughs where those owls sat.

  An arena of yellow eyes

  Watched the changing shape he cut,

  Saw hoof harden from foot, saw sprout

  Goat-horns. Marked how god rose

  And galloped woodward in that guise.

  Departure

  The figs on the fig tree in the yard are green;

  Green, also, the grapes on the green vine

  Shading the brickred porch tiles.

  The money’s run out.

  How nature, sensing this, compounds her bitters.

  Ungifted, ungrieved, our leavetaking.

  The sun shines on unripe corn.

  Cats play in the stalks.

  Retrospect shall not soften such penury—

  Sun’s brass, the moon’s steely patinas,

  The leaden slag of the world—

  But always expose

  The scraggy rock spit shielding the town’s blue bay

  Against which the brunt of outer sea

  Beats, is brutal endlessly.

  Gull-fouled, a stone hut

  Bares its low lintel to corroding weathers:

  Across that jut of ochreous rock

  Goats shamble, morose, rank-haired,

  To lick the sea-salt.

  The Colossus

  I shall never get you put together entirely,

  Pieced, glued, and properly jointed.

  Mule-bray, pig-grunt and bawdy cackles

  Proceed from your great lips.

  It’s worse than a barnyard.

  Perhaps you consider yourself an oracle,

  Mouthpiece of the dead, or of some god or other.

  Thirty years now I have labored

  To dredge the silt from your throat.

  I am none the wiser.

  Scaling little ladders with gluepots and pails of lysol

  I crawl like an ant in mourning

  Over the weedy acres of your brow

  To mend the immense skull plates and clear

  The bald, white tumuli of your eyes.

  A blue sky out of the Oresteia

  Arches above us. O father, all by yourself

  You are pithy and historical as the Roman Forum.

  I open my lunch on a hill of black cypress.

  Your fluted bones and acanthine hair are littered

  In their old anarchy to the horizon-line.

  It would take more than a lightning-stroke

  To create such a ruin.

  Nights, I squat in the cornucopia

  Of your left ear, out of the wind,

&nbs
p; Counting the red stars and those of plum-color.

  The sun rises under the pillar of your tongue.

  My hours are married to shadow.

  No longer do I listen for the scrape of a keel

  On the blank stones of the landing.

  Lorelei

  It is no night to drown in:

  A full moon, river lapsing

  Black beneath bland mirror-sheen,

  The blue water-mists dropping

  Scrim after scrim like fishnets

  Though fishermen are sleeping,

  The massive castle turrets

  Doubling themselves in a glass

  All stillness. Yet these shapes float

  Up toward me, troubling the face

  Of quiet. From the nadir