Oana’s Reviews > The Poems of Sylvia Plath > Status Update

“Soft rain and shifting cloud: / you are all. / […] I can no longer see / the twisted limbs / the vacant smiles, / for the rain beats, beats, beats, / and all dissolve / as if they were not; / as if they never were. / The rain is all. / The rain is I.”
(Rain, 1949)

“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. […]”
(Sheep in Fog, 1962)

“[…] I see myself as a shadow, neither man nor woman, / Neither a woman, happy to be like a man, nor a man / Blunt and flat enough to feel no lack. I FEEL A LACK. / I hold my fingers up, ten white pickets. / See, the darkness is leaking from the cracks. / I cannot contain it. I cannot contain my life.”
(Three Women)

“[…] I am a root, a stone, an owl pellet, / Without dreams of any sort. / Mother, you are the one mouth / I would be a tongue to. Mother of otherness / Eat me. Wastebasket gaper, shadow of doorways.”
(Poem for a birthday)

“I brought my love to bear, and then you died. / […] / I am the ghost of an infamous suicide, / My own blue razor rusting in my throat. / O pardon the one who knocks for pardon at / Your gate, father -- your hound-bitch, daughter, friend. / It was my love that did us both to death.”
(Electra on Azalea Path)

‘[…] saltstruck world is sucked within whirlpool spin, / plummeting through the pupil of green sea / to drown in the absinthe of your eye.’
(Sonnet for a Green-Eyed Sailor)