Selected Poems of Sylvia Plath Read online

  The babies look in their hospital

  Icebox, a simple

  Frill at the neck,

  Then the flutings of their Ionian

  Death-gowns,

  Then two little feet.

  He does not smile or smoke.

  The other does that,

  His hair long and plausive.

  Bastard

  Masturbating a glitter,

  He wants to be loved.

  I do not stir.

  The frost makes a flower,

  The dew makes a star,

  The dead bell,

  The dead bell.

  Somebody’s done for.

  Mary’s Song

  The Sunday lamb cracks in its fat.

  The fat

  Sacrifices its opacity …

  A window, holy gold.

  The fire makes it precious,

  The same fire

  Melting the tallow heretics,

  Ousting the Jews.

  Their thick palls float

  Over the cicatrix of Poland, burnt-out

  Germany.

  They do not die.

  Gray birds obsess my heart,

  Mouth-ash, ash of eye.

  They settle. On the high

  Precipice

  That emptied one man into space

  The ovens glowed like heavens, incandescent.

  It is a heart,

  This holocaust I walk in,

  O golden child the world will kill and eat.

  Winter Trees

  The wet dawn inks are doing their blue dissolve.

  On their blotter of fog the trees

  Seem a botanical drawing –

  Memories growing, ring on ring,

  A series of weddings.

  Knowing neither abortions nor bitchery,

  Truer than women,

  They seed so effortlessly!

  Tasting the winds, that are footless,

  Waist-deep in history –

  Full of wings, otherworldliness.

  In this, they are Ledas.

  O mother of leaves and sweetness

  Who are these pietàs?

  The shadows of ringdoves chanting, but easing nothing.

  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 color 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.

  The Munich Mannequins

  Perfection is terrible, it cannot have children.

  Cold as snow breath, it tamps the womb

  Where the yew trees blow like hydras,

  The tree of life and the tree of life

  Unloosing their moons, month after month, to no purpose.

  The blood flood is the flood of love,

  The absolute sacrifice.

  It means: no more idols but me,

  Me and you.

  So, in their sulfur loveliness, in their smiles

  These mannequins lean tonight

  In Munich, morgue between Paris and Rome,

  Naked and bald in their furs,

  Orange lollies on silver sticks,

  Intolerable, without mind.

  The snow drops its pieces of darkness,

  Nobody’s about. In the hotels

  Hands will be opening doors and setting

  Down shoes for a polish of carbon

  Into which broad toes will go tomorrow.

  O the domesticity of these windows,

  The baby lace, the green-leaved confectionery,

  The thick Germans slumbering in their bottomless Stolz.

  And the black phones on hooks

  Glittering

  Glittering and digesting

  Voicelessness. The snow has no voice.

  Words

  Axes

  After whose stroke the wood rings,

  And the echoes!

  Echoes traveling

  Off from the center like horses.

  The sap

  Wells like tears, like the

  Water striving

  To re-establish its mirror

  Over the rock

  That drops and turns,

  A white skull,

  Eaten by weedy greens.

  Years later I

  Encounter them on the road –

  Words dry and riderless,

  The indefatigable hoof-taps.

  While

  From the bottom of the pool, fixed stars

  Govern a life.

  Edge

  The woman is perfected.

  Her dead

  Body wears the smile of accomplishment,

  The illusion of a Greek necessity

  Flows in the scrolls of her toga,

  Her bare

  Feet seem to be saying:

  We have come so far, it is over.

  Each dead child coiled, a white serpent,

  One at each little

  Pitcher of milk, now empty.

  She has folded

  Them back into her body as petals

  Of a rose close when the garden

  Stiffens and odors bleed

  From the sweet, deep throats of the night flower.

  The moon has nothing to be sad about,

  Staring from her hood of bone.

  She is used to this sort of thing.

  Her blacks crackle and drag.

  About the Author

  Sylvia Plath (1932–1963) was born in Boston, Massachusetts, and studied at Smith College. In 1955 she went to Cambridge University on a Fulbright scholarship, where she met and later married Ted Hughes. She published one collection of poems in her lifetime, The Colossus (1960), and a novel, The Bell Jar (1963). Her Collected Poems, which contains her poetry written from 1956 until her death, was published in 1981 and was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for poetry.

  About the Editor

  Ted Hughes (1930–1998) was born in Yorkshire. His first book, The Hawk in the Rain, was published in 1957 by Faber and Faber and was followed by many volumes of poetry and prose for adults and children. He received the Whitbread Book of the Year for two consecutive years for his last published collections of poetry, Tales from Ovid (1997) and Birthday Letters (1998). He was Poet Laureate from 1984, and in 1998 he was appointed to the Order of Merit.

  By the Same Author

  poetry

  ARIEL

  THE COLOSSUS

  CROSSING THE WATER

  WINTER TREES

  COLLECTED POEMS (edited by Ted Hughes)

  fiction

  THE BELL JAR

  JOHNNY PANIC AND THE BIBLE OF DREAMS

  for children

  THE BED BOOK

  (illustrated by Quentin Blake)

  THE IT-DOESN’T-MATTER-SUIT

  (illustrated by Rotraut Susanne Berner)

  COLLECTED CHILDREN’S STORIES

  biography

  LETTERS HOME: CORRESPONDENCE 1950–1963

  (edited by Aurelia Schober Plath)

  THE JOURNALS OF SYLVIA PLATH

  (edited by Karen V. Kukil)

  Copyright

  First published in 1985

  by Faber and Faber Ltd

  Bloomsbury House

  74–77 Great Russell Street

  London WC1B 3DA

  This ebook edition first published in 2011

  All rights reserved

  © The Estate of Sylvia Plath, 1960, 1965, 1971, 1981, 1985

  The right of Sylvia Plath to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with Section 77 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Ac
t 1988

  This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights, and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly

  ISBN 978–0–571–26224–3