Introduction

By the time of her death, on 11 February 1963, Sylvia Plath had written a large bulk of poetry. To my knowledge, she never scrapped any of her poetic efforts. With one or two exceptions, she brought every piece she worked on to some final form acceptable to her, rejecting at most the odd verse, or a false head or a false tail. Her attitude to her verse was artisan-like: if she couldn’t get a table out of the material, she was quite happy to get a chair, or even a toy. The end product for her was not so much a successful poem, as something that had temporarily exhausted her ingenuity. So this book contains not merely what verse she saved, but—after 1956—all she wrote.

From quite early she began to assemble her poems into a prospective collection, which at various times she presented—always hopeful—to publishers and to the judging committees of contests. The collection evolved through the years in a natural way, shedding old poems and growing new ones, until by the time the contract for The Colossus was signed with Heinemann, in London, on 11 February 1960, this first book had gone through several titles and several changes of substance. ‘I had a vision in the dark art lecture room today of the title of my book of poems,’ she wrote in early 1958. ‘It came to me suddenly with great clarity that The Earthenware Head was the right title, the only title.’ She goes on to say, ‘Somehow this new title spells for me the release from the old crystal-brittle and sugarfaceted voice of Circus in Three Rings and Two Lovers and a Beachcomber’ (the two immediately preceding titles). Two months later she had replaced The Earthenware Head, briefly, with The Everlasting Monday. A fortnight later the title had become Full Fathom Five, ‘after what I consider one of my best and most curiously moving poems, about my father-sea god-muse . . . “[The Lady and] The Earthenware Head” is out: once, in England, my “best poem”: too fancy, glassy, patchy and rigid—it embarrasses me now—with its ten elaborate epithets for head in five verses.’

During the next year Full Fathom Five was replaced by The Bull of Bendy law, but then in May 1959 she wrote: ‘Changed title of poetry book in an inspiration to The Devil of the Stairs . . . this title encompasses my book and “explains” the poems of despair, which is as deceitful as hope is.’ This title lasted until October, when she was at Yaddo, and now on a different kind of inspiration she noted: ‘Wrote two poems that pleased me. One a poem to Nicholas’ (she expected a son, and titled the poem ‘The Manor Garden’) ‘and one the old father-worship subject’ (which she titled ‘The Colossus’). ‘But different. Weirder. I see a picture, a weather, in these poems. Took “Medallion” out of the early book and made up my mind to start a second book, regardless. The main thing is to get rid of the idea that what I write now is for the old book. That soggy book. So I have three poems for the new, temporarily called The Colossus and other poems.’

This decision to start a new book ‘regardless’, and get rid of all that she’d written up to then, coincided with the first real breakthrough in her writing, as it is now possible to see. The actual inner process of this quite sudden development is interestingly recorded, in a metaphorical way, in ‘Poem for a Birthday’, which she was thinking about on 22 October 1959 (cf. note on No. 119). On 4 November she wrote: ‘Miraculously I wrote seven poems in my “Poem for a Birthday” sequence, and the two little ones before it, “The Manor Garden” and “The Colossus”, I find colorful and amusing. But the manuscript of my [old] book seems dead to me. So far off, so far gone. It has almost no chance of finding a publisher: just sent it out to the seventh. . . . There is nothing for it but to try to publish it in England.’ A few days later she noted: ‘I wrote a good poem this week on our walk Sunday to the burnt-out spa, a second-book poem. How it consoles me, the idea of a second book with these new poems: “The Manor Garden”, “The Colossus”, the seven birthday poems and perhaps “Medallion”, if I don’t stick it in my present book.’ But then she realized: ‘If I were accepted by a publisher . . . I would feel a need to throw all my new poems in, to bolster the book.’

This last is exactly what happened. With time running out at Yaddo, which had suddenly become so fruitful for her, followed by the upheaval of returning to England in December, she was able to add very little to her ‘second’ book. So it was this combination of the old poems, which she had inwardly rejected, and the few new ones that seemed to her so different, that James Michie told her—in January 1960—Heinemann would like to publish, under the title of The Colossus.

Once that contract had been signed, she started again, though with a noticeable difference. As before, a poem was always ‘a book poem’ or ‘not a book poem’, but now she seemed more relaxed about it, and made no attempt to find an anxious mothering title for the growing brood, over the next two years, until she was overtaken by the inspiration that produced the poems of the last six months of her life.

Some time around Christmas 1962, she gathered most of what are now known as the ‘Ariel’ poems in a black spring binder, and arranged them in a careful sequence. (At the time, she pointed out that it began with the word ‘Love’ and ended with the word ‘Spring’. The exact order of her text is given in the Notes, p. 295.) This collection of hers excluded almost everything she had written between The Colossus and July 1962—or two and a half years’ work. She had her usual trouble with a title. On the title-page of her manuscript The Rival is replaced by A Birthday Present which is replaced by Daddy. It was only a short time before she died that she altered the title again, to Ariel.

The Ariel eventually published in 1965 was a somewhat different volume from the one she had planned. It incorporated most of the dozen or so poems she had gone on to write in 1963, though she herself, recognizing the different inspiration of these new pieces, regarded them as the beginnings of a third book. It omitted some of the more personally aggressive poems from 1962, and might have omitted one or two more if she had not already published them herself in magazines—so that by 1965 they were widely known. The collection that appeared was my eventual compromise between publishing a large bulk of her work—including much of the post-Colossus but pre-Ariel verse—and introducing her late work more cautiously, printing perhaps only twenty poems to begin with. (Several advisers had felt that the violent contradictory feelings expressed in those pieces might prove hard for the reading public to take. In one sense, as it turned out, this apprehension showed some insight.)

A further collection, Crossing the Water (1971), contained most of the poems written between the two earlier books; and the same year the final collection, Winter Trees, was published, containing eighteen uncollected poems of the late period together with her verse play for radio, Three Women, which had been written in early 1962.

The aim of the present complete edition, which contains a numbered sequence of the 224 poems written after 1956 together with a further 50 poems chosen from her pre-1956 work, is to bring Sylvia Plath’s poetry together in one volume, including the various uncollected and unpublished pieces, and to set everything in as true a chronological order as is possible, so that the whole progress and achievement of this unusual poet will become accessible to readers.

The manuscripts on which this collection is based fall roughly into three phases, and each has presented slightly different problems to the editor.

The first phase might be called her juvenilia and the first slight problem here was to decide where it ended. A logical division occurs, conveniently, at the end of 1955, just after the end of her twenty-third year. The 220 or more poems written before this are of interest mainly to specialists. Sylvia Plath had set these pieces (many of them from her early teens) firmly behind her and would certainly never have republished them herself. Nevertheless, quite a few seem worth preserving for the general reader. At their best, they are as distinctive and as finished as anything she wrote later. They can be intensely artificial, but they are always lit with her unique excitement. And that sense of a deep mathematical inevitability in the sound and texture of her lines was well developed quite early. One can see here, too, how exclusively her writing depended on a supercharged system of inner symbols and images, an enclosed cosmic circus. If that could have been projected visually, the substance and patterning of these poems would have made very curious mandalas. As poems, they are always inspired high jinks, but frequently quite a bit more. And even at their weakest they help chart the full acceleration towards her final take-off.

The greater part of these early poems survive in final typed copies; some others have been recovered from magazines, and still others, not in the typescript and not appearing in any magazine, have turned up in letters and elsewhere. Presumably there may be more, still hidden. The chronological order of the work of this period is often impossible to determine, except in its broadest outlines. A date can sometimes be fixed from a letter or from the date of magazine publication, but she occasionally took poems up again—sometimes years later—and reworked them.

From this whole pre-1956 period, I have selected what seem to be the best, some fifty pieces, and these are printed—as nearly as possible in the order of their writing—at the back of the book, as an appendix. Also given there is a complete list, alphabetically by title, of all the pre-1956 poems that survive, with dates where these can be assigned.

The second phase of Sylvia Plath’s writing falls between early 1956 and late 1960. Early 1956 presents itself as a watershed, because from later this year come the earliest poems of her first collection, The Colossus. And from this time I worked closely with her and watched the poems being written, so I am reasonably sure that everything is here. Searching over the years, we have failed to unearth any others. Final typescripts exist for all of them. The chronological order, also, is less in doubt here, though the problem does still linger. Her evolution as a poet went rapidly through successive moults of style, as she realized her true matter and voice. Each fresh phase tended to bring out a group of poems bearing a general family likeness, and is usually associated in my memory with a particular time and place. At each move we made, she seemed to shed a style.

So the sequence of the groups of poems through this period is fairly certain. But I am rarely sure now which poem comes before which in any particular group. In among them, the odd poem will pop up that looks like a leftover from long before. Occasionally, she anticipated herself and produced a poem (‘Two Lovers and a Beachcomber by the Real Sea’, for instance, in the pre-1956 selection, or ‘The Stones’ from her 1959 ‘Poem for a Birthday’) which now seems to belong quite a bit later. In several cases I can fix poems precisely to a date and place. (She was writing ‘Miss Drake Proceeds to Supper’ on a parapet over the Seine on 21 June 1956.) Then again, in one or two cases the dates she left on the manuscripts contradict what seem to me very definite memories. So I have nowhere attempted to affix a date where none appears on the manuscript. Fortunately, after 1956 she kept a full record of the dates on which she sent her poems off to magazines, and she usually did this as soon as possible after writing them, which sets one limit to my approximations of order.

The third and final phase of her work, from the editorial point of view, dates from about September 1960. Around that time, she started the habit of dating the final typescript of each poem. On the two or three occasions when she modified a poem later, she dated the revision as well. From early 1962 she began to save all her handwritten drafts (which up to that time she had systematically destroyed as she went along), and provisional final versions among these are usually dated as well. So throughout this period the calendar sequence is correct, and the only occasional doubt concerns the order of composition among poems written on the same day.

I have resisted the temptation to reproduce the drafts of these last poems in variorum completeness. These drafts are arguably an important part of Sylvia Plath’s complete works. Some of the handwritten pages are aswarm with startling, beautiful phrases and lines, crowding all over the place, many of them in no way less remarkable than the ones she eventually picked out to make her final poem. But printing them all would have made a huge volume.

A poem ‘for two voices’, never produced or published, is given in the notes to the poem ‘Ouija’ (No. 62), where it is relevant. Some cancelled but quite large fragments or sections of poems are also given in the Notes, and the poet’s literal rendering of Rilke’s ‘A Prophet’. The Notes provide brief biographical information for each of the years 1956-1963, and the background on certain poems. A concordance sets out the contents of each of the four published volumes in terms of the chronological numbering adopted in this complete edition.

Thanks and acknowledgements are due to Judith Kroll, who went over the manuscripts and did much to establish many of the final texts in their detail, and to the Lilly Library, Indiana University, Bloomington, for access to the Sylvia Plath Archive of juvenilia.

August 1980 

TED HUGHES

POEMS

1956-1963

Through portico of my elegant house you stalk

With your wild furies, disturbing garlands of fruit

And the fabulous lutes and peacocks, rending the net

Of all decorum which holds the whirlwind back.

Now, rich order of walls is fallen; rooks croak

Above the appalling ruin; in bleak light

Of your stormy eye, magic takes flight

Like a daunted witch, quitting castle when real days break.

Fractured pillars frame prospects of rock;

While you stand heroic in coat and tie, I sit

Composed in Grecian tunic and psyche-knot,

Rooted to your black look, the play turned tragic:

With such blight wrought on our bankrupt estate,

What ceremony of words can patch the havoc?

2     Winter Landscape, with Rooks

Water in the millrace, through a sluice of stone,

plunges headlong into that black pond

where, absurd and out-of-season, a single swan

floats chaste as snow, taunting the clouded mind

which hungers to haul the white reflection down.

The austere sun descends above the fen,

an orange cyclops-eye, scorning to look

longer on this landscape of chagrin;

feathered dark in thought, I stalk like a rook,

brooding as the winter night comes on.

Last summer’s reeds are all engraved in ice

as is your image in my eye; dry frost

glazes the window of my hurt; what solace

can be struck from rock to make heart’s waste

grow green again? Who’d walk in this bleak place?

3     Pursuit

Dans le fond des forêts votre image me suit.

RACINE

There is a panther stalks me down:

One day I’ll have my death of him;

His greed has set the woods aflame,

He prowls more lordly than the sun.

Most soft, most suavely glides that step,

Advancing always at my back;

From gaunt hemlock, rooks croak havoc:

The hunt is on, and sprung the trap.

Flayed by thorns I trek the rocks,

Haggard through the hot white noon.

Along red network of his veins

What fires run, what craving wakes?

Insatiate, he ransacks the land

Condemned by our ancestral fault,

Crying: blood, let blood be spilt;

Meat must glut his mouth’s raw wound.

Keen the rending teeth and sweet

The singeing fury of his fur;

His kisses parch, each paw’s a briar,

Doom consummates that appetite.

In the wake of this fierce cat,

Kindled like torches for his joy,

Charred and ravened women lie,

Become his starving body’s bait.

Now hills hatch menace, spawning shade;

Midnight cloaks the sultry grove;

The black marauder, hauled by love

On fluent haunches, keeps my speed.

Behind snarled thickets of my eyes

Lurks the lithe one; in dreams’ ambush

Bright those claws that mar the flesh

And hungry, hungry, those taut thighs.

His ardor snares me, lights the trees,

And I run flaring in my skin;

What lull, what cool can lap me in

When burns and brands that yellow gaze?

I hurl my heart to halt his pace,

To quench his thirst I squander blood;

He eats, and still his need seeks food,

Compels a total sacrifice.

His voice waylays me, spells a trance,

The gutted forest falls to ash;

Appalled by secret want, I rush

From such assault of radiance.

Entering the tower of my fears,

I shut my doors on that dark guilt,

I bolt the door, each door I bolt.

Blood quickens, gonging in my ears:

The panther’s tread is on the stairs,

Coming up and up the stairs.

4     Bucolics

Mayday: two came to field in such wise:

‘A daisied mead,’ each said to each,

So were they one; so sought they couch,

Across barbed stile, through flocked brown cows.

‘No pitchforked farmer, please,’ she said;

‘May cockcrow guard us safe,’ said he;

By blackthorn thicket, flower spray

They pitched their coats, come to green bed.

Below: a fen where water stood;

Aslant: their hill of stinging nettle;

Then, honor-bound, mute grazing cattle;

Above: leaf-wraithed white air, white cloud.

All afternoon these lovers lay

Until the sun turned pale from warm,

Until sweet wind changed tune, blew harm:

Cruel nettles stung her ankles raw.

Rueful, most vexed, that tender skin

Should accept so fell a wound,

He stamped and cracked stalks to the ground

Which had caused his dear girl pain.

Now he goes from his rightful road

And, under honor, will depart;

While she stands burning, venom-girt,

In wait for sharper smart to fade.

5     Tale of a Tub

The photographic chamber of the eye

records bare painted walls, while an electric light

flays the chromium nerves of plumbing raw;

such poverty assaults the ego; caught

naked in the merely actual room,

the stranger in the lavatory mirror

puts on a public grin, repeats our name

but scrupulously reflects the usual terror.

Just how guilty are we when the ceiling

reveals no cracks that can be decoded? when washbowl

maintains it has no more holy calling

than physical ablution, and the towel

dryly disclaims that fierce troll faces lurk

in its explicit folds? or when the window,

blind with steam, will not admit the dark

which shrouds our prospects in ambiguous shadow?

Twenty years ago, the familiar tub

bred an ample batch of omens; but now

water faucets spawn no danger; each crab

and octopus—scrabbling just beyond the view,

waiting for some accidental break

in ritual, to strike—is definitely gone;

the authentic sea denies them and will pluck

fantastic flesh down to the honest bone.

We take the plunge; under water our limbs

waver, faintly green, shuddering away

from the genuine color of skin; can our dreams

ever blur the intransigent lines which draw

the shape that shuts us in? absolute fact

intrudes even when the revolted eye

is closed; the tub exists behind our back:

its glittering surfaces are blank and true.

Yet always the ridiculous nude flanks urge

the fabrication of some cloth to cover

such starkness; accuracy must not stalk at large:

each day demands we create our whole world over,

disguising the constant horror in a coat

of many-colored fictions; we mask our past

in the green of eden, pretend future’s shining fruit

can sprout from the navel of this present waste.

In this particular tub, two knees jut up

like icebergs, while minute brown hairs rise

on arms and legs in a fringe of kelp; green soap

navigates the tidal slosh of seas

breaking on legendary beaches; in faith

we shall board our imagined ship and wildly sail

among sacred islands of the mad till death

shatters the fabulous stars and makes us real.

6     Southern Sunrise

Color of lemon, mango, peach,

These storybook villas

Still dream behind

Shutters, their balconies

Fine as hand-

Made lace, or a leaf-and-flower pen-sketch.

Tilting with the winds,

On arrowy stems,

Pineapple-barked,

A green crescent of palms

Sends up its forked

Firework of fronds.

A quartz-clear dawn

Inch by bright inch

Gilds all our Avenue,

And out of the blue drench

Of Angels’ Bay

Rises the round red watermelon sun.

7     Channel Crossing

On storm-struck deck, wind sirens caterwaul;

With each tilt, shock and shudder, our blunt ship

Cleaves forward into fury; dark as anger,

Waves wallop, assaulting the stubborn hull.

Flayed by spray, we take the challenge up,

Grip the rail, squint ahead, and wonder how much longer

Such force can last; but beyond, the neutral view

Shows, rank on rank, the hungry seas advancing.

Below, rocked havoc-sick, voyagers lie

Retching in bright orange basins; a refugee

Sprawls, hunched in black, among baggage, wincing

Under the strict mask of his agony.

Far from the sweet stench of that perilous air

In which our comrades are betrayed, we freeze

And marvel at the smashing nonchalance

Of nature: what better way to test taut fiber

Than against this onslaught, these casual blasts of ice

That wrestle with us like angels; the mere chance

Of making harbor through this racketing flux

Taunts us to valor. Blue sailors sang that our journey

Would be full of sun, white gulls, and water drenched

With radiance, peacock-colored; instead, bleak rocks

Jutted early to mark our going, while sky

Curded over with clouds and chalk cliffs blanched

In sullen light of the inauspicious day.

Now, free, by hazard’s quirk, from the common ill

Knocking our brothers down, we strike a stance

Most mock-heroic, to cloak our waking awe

At this rare rumpus which no man can control:

Meek and proud both fall; stark violence

Lays all walls waste; private estates are torn,

Ransacked in the public eye. We forsake

Our lone luck now, compelled by bond, by blood,

To keep some unsaid pact; perhaps concern

Is helpless here, quite extra, yet we must make

The gesture, bend and hold the prone man’s head.

And so we sail toward cities, streets and homes

Of other men, where statues celebrate

Brave acts played out in peace, in war; all dangers

End: green shores appear; we assume our names,

Our luggage, as docks halt our brief epic; no debt

Survives arrival; we walk the plank with strangers.

8     Prospect

Among orange-tile rooftops

and chimney pots

the fen fog slips,

gray as rats,

while on spotted branch

of the sycamore

two black rooks hunch

and darkly glare,

watching for night,

with absinthe eye

cocked on the lone, late,

passer-by.

9     The Queen’s Complaint

In ruck and quibble of courtfolk

This giant hulked, I tell you, on her scene

With hands like derricks,

Looks fierce and black as rooks;

Why, all the windows broke when he stalked in.

Her dainty acres he ramped through

And used her gentle doves with manners rude;

I do not know

What fury urged him slay

Her antelope who meant him naught but good.

She spoke most chiding in his ear

Till he some pity took upon her crying;

Of rich attire

He made her shoulders bare

And solaced her, but quit her at cock’s crowing.

A hundred heralds she sent out

To summon in her slight all doughty men

Whose force might fit

Shape of her sleep, her thought—

None of that greenhorn lot matched her bright crown.

So she is come to this rare pass

Whereby she treks in blood through sun and squall

And sings you thus:

‘How sad, alas, it is

To see my people shrunk so small, so small.’

10     Ode for Ted

From under crunch of my man’s boot

green oat-sprouts jut;

he names a lapwing, starts rabbits in a rout

legging it most nimble

to sprigged hedge of bramble,

stalks red fox, shrewd stoat.

Loam-humps, he says, moles shunt

up from delved worm-haunt;

blue fur, moles have; hefting chalk-hulled flint

he with rock splits open

knobbed quartz; flayed colors ripen

rich, brown, sudden in sunglint.

For his least look, scant acres yield:

each finger-furrowed field

heaves forth stalk, leaf, fruit-nubbed emerald;

bright grain sprung so rarely

he hauls to his will early;

at his hand’s staunch hest, birds build.

Ringdoves roost well within his wood,

shirr songs to suit which mood

he saunters in; how but most glad

could be this adam’s woman

when all earth his words do summon

leaps to laud such man’s blood!

21 April 1956

11     Firesong

Born green we were

to this flawed garden,

but in speckled thickets, warted as a toad,

spitefully skulks our warden,

fixing his snare

which hauls down buck, cock, trout, till all most fair

is tricked to falter in spilt blood.

Now our whole task’s to hack

some angel-shape worth wearing

from his crabbed midden where all’s wrought so awry

that no straight inquiring

could unlock

shrewd catch silting our each bright act back

to unmade mud cloaked by sour sky.

Sweet salts warped stem

of weeds we tackle towards way’s rank ending;

scorched by red sun

we heft globed flint, racked in veins’ barbed bindings;

brave love, dream

not of staunching such strict flame, but come,

lean to my wound; burn on, burn on.

12     Song for a Summer’s Day

Through fen and farmland walking

With my own country love

I saw slow flocked cows move

White hulks on their day’s cruising;

Sweet grass sprang for their grazing.

The air was bright for looking:

Most far in blue, aloft,

Clouds steered a burnished drift;

Larks’ nip and tuck arising

Came in for my love’s praising.

Sheen of the noon sun striking

Took my heart as if

It were a green-tipped leaf

Kindled by my love’s pleasing

Into an ardent blazing.

And so, together, talking,

Through Sunday’s honey-air

We walked (and still walk there—

Out of the sun’s bruising)

Till the night mists came rising.

13     Two Sisters of Persephone

Two girls there are: within the house

One sits; the other, without.

Daylong a duet of shade and light

Plays between these.

In her dark wainscoted room

The first works problems on

A mathematical machine.

Dry ticks mark time

As she calculates each sum.

At this barren enterprise

Rat-shrewd go her squint eyes,

Root-pale her meager frame.

Bronzed as earth, the second lies,

Hearing ticks blown gold

Like pollen on bright air. Lulled

Near a bed of poppies,

She sees how their red silk flare

Of petaled blood

Burns open to sun’s blade.

On that green altar

Freely become sun’s bride, the latter

Grows quick with seed.

Grass-couched in her labor’s pride,

She bears a king. Turned bitter

And sallow as any lemon,

The other, wry virgin to the last,

Goes graveward with flesh laid waste,

Worm-husbanded, yet no woman.

14     Vanity Fair

Through frost-thick weather

This witch sidles, fingers crooked, as if

Caught in a hazardous medium that might

Merely by its continuing

Attach her to heaven.

At eye’s envious corner

Crow’s-feet copy veining on stained leaf;

Cold squint steals sky’s color; while bruit

Of bells calls holy ones, her tongue

Backtalks at the raven

Cleaving furred air

Over her skull’s midden; no knife

Rivals her whetted look, divining what conceit

Waylays simple girls, church-going,

And what heart’s oven

Craves most to cook batter

Rich in strayings with every amorous oaf,

Ready, for a trinket,

To squander owl-hours on bracken bedding,

Flesh unshriven.

Against virgin prayer

This sorceress sets mirrors enough

To distract beauty’s thought;

Lovesick at first fond song,

Each vain girl’s driven

To believe beyond heart’s flare

No fire is, nor in any book proof

Sun hoists soul up after lids fall shut;

So she wills all to the black king.

The worst sloven

Vies with best queen over

Right to blaze as satan’s wife;

Housed in earth, those million brides shriek out.

Some burn short, some long,

Staked in pride’s coven.

15     Strumpet Song

With white frost gone

And all green dreams not worth much,

After a lean day’s work

Time comes round for that foul slut:

Mere bruit of her takes our street

Until every man,

Red, pale or dark,

Veers to her slouch.

Mark, I cry, that mouth

Made to do violence on,

That seamed face

Askew with blotch, dint, scar

Struck by each dour year.

Walks there not some such one man

As can spare breath

To patch with brand of love this rank grimace

Which out from black tarn, ditch and cup

Into my most chaste own eyes

Looks up.

16     Tinker Jack and the Tidy Wives

‘Come lady, bring that pot

Gone black of polish

And whatever pan this mending master

Should trim back to shape.

I’ll correct each mar

On silver dish,

And shine that kettle of copper

At your fireside

Bright as blood.

‘Come lady, bring that face

Fallen from luster.

Time’s soot in bleared eye

Can be made to glister

For small charge.

No form’s gone so awry,

Crook-back or bandy-leg,

But Tinker Jack can forge

Beauty from hag.

‘Whatever scath

Fierce fire’s wrought

Jack will touch up

And fit for use.

What scar’s been knocked

Into cracked heart

Jack shall repair.

‘And if there be

Young wives still blithe,

Still fair,

Whose labor’s not yet smoked

Their fine skin sere,

From their white heat

Before he part

Let Jack catch fire.’

17     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.

18     Street Song

By a mad miracle I go intact

Among the common rout

Thronging sidewalk, street,

And bickering shops;

Nobody blinks a lid, gapes,

Or cries that this raw flesh

Reeks of the butcher’s cleaver,

Its heart and guts hung hooked

And bloodied as a cow’s split frame

Parceled out by white-jacketed assassins.

Oh no, for I strut it clever

As a greenly escaped idiot,

Buying wine, bread,

Yellow-casqued chrysanthemums—

Arming myself with the most reasonable items

To ward off, at all cost, suspicions

Roused by thorned hands, feet, head,

And that great wound

Squandering red

From the flayed side.

Even as my each mangled nerve-end

Trills its hurt out

Above pitch of pedestrian ear,

So, perhaps I, knelled dumb by your absence,

Alone can hear

Sun’s parched scream,

Every downfall and crash

Of gutted star,

And, more daft than any goose,

This cracked world’s incessant gabble and hiss.

19     Letter to a Purist

That grandiose colossus who

Stood astride

The envious assaults of sea

(Essaying, wave by wave,

Tide by tide,

To undo him, perpetually),

Has nothing on you,

O my love,

O my great idiot, who

With one foot

Caught (as it were) in the muck-trap

Of skin and bone,

Dithers with the other way out

In preposterous provinces of the madcap

Cloud-cuckoo,

Agawp at the impeccable moon.

20     Soliloquy of the Solipsist

I?

I walk alone;

The midnight street

Spins itself from under my feet;

When my eyes shut

These dreaming houses all snuff out;

Through a whim of mine

Over gables the moon’s celestial onion

Hangs high.

I

Make houses shrink

And trees diminish

By going far; my look’s leash

Dangles the puppet-people

Who, unaware how they dwindle,

Laugh, kiss, get drunk,

Nor guess that if I choose to blink

They die.

I

When in good humor,

Give grass its green

Blazon sky blue, and endow the sun

With gold;

Yet, in my wintriest moods, I hold

Absolute power

To boycott color and forbid any flower

To be.

I

Know you appear

Vivid at my side,

Denying you sprang out of my head,

Claiming you feel

Love fiery enough to prove flesh real,

Though it’s quite clear

All your beauty, all your wit, is a gift, my dear,

From me.

21     Dialogue Between Ghost and Priest

In the rectory garden on his evening walk

Paced brisk Father Shawn. A cold day, a sodden one it was

In black November. After a sliding rain

Dew stood in chill sweat on each stalk,

Each thorn; spiring from wet earth, a blue haze

Hung caught in dark-webbed branches like a fabulous heron.

Hauled sudden from solitude,

Hair prickling on his head,

Father Shawn perceived a ghost

Shaping itself from that mist.

‘How now,’ Father Shawn crisply addressed the ghost

Wavering there, gauze-edged, smelling of woodsmoke,

‘What manner of business are you on?

From your blue pallor, I’d say you inhabited the frozen waste

Of hell, and not the fiery part. Yet to judge by that dazzled look,

That noble mien, perhaps you’ve late quitted heaven?’

In voice furred with frost,

Ghost said to priest:

‘Neither of those countries do I frequent:

Earth is my haunt.’

‘Come, come,’ Father Shawn gave an impatient shrug,

‘I don’t ask you to spin some ridiculous fable

Of gilded harps or gnawing fire: simply tell

After your life’s end, what just epilogue

God ordained to follow up your days. Is it such trouble

To satisfy the questions of a curious old fool.’’

‘In life, love gnawed my skin

To this white bone;

What love did then, love does now:

Gnaws me through.’

‘What love,’ asked Father Shawn, ‘but too great love

Of flawed earth-flesh could cause this sorry pass?

Some damned condition you are in:

Thinking never to have left the world, you grieve

As though alive, shriveling in torment thus

To atone as shade for sin that lured blind man.’

‘The day of doom

Is not yet come.

Until that time

A crock of dust is my dear home.’

‘Fond phantom,’ cried shocked Father Shawn,

‘Can there be such stubbornness—

A soul grown feverish, clutching its dead body-tree

Like a last storm-crossed leaf? Best get you gone

To judgment in a higher court of grace.

Repent, depart, before God’s trump-crack splits the sky.’

From that pale mist

Ghost swore to priest:

‘There sits no higher court

Than man’s red heart.’

22     The Glutton

He, hunger-stung, hard to slake,

So fitted is for my black luck

(With heat such as no man could have

And yet keep kind)

That all merit’s in being meat

Seasoned how he’d most approve;

Blood’s broth,

Filched by his hand,

Choice wassail makes, cooked hot,

Cupped quick to mouth;

Though prime parts cram each rich meal,

He’ll not spare

Nor scant his want until

Sacked larder’s gone bone-bare.

23     Monologue at 3 a.m.

Better that every fiber crack

and fury make head,

blood drenching vivid

couch, carpet, floor

and the snake-figured almanac

vouching you are

a million green counties from here,

than to sit mute, twitching so

under prickling stars,

with stare, with curse

blackening the time

goodbyes were said, trains let go,

and I, great magnanimous fool, thus wrenched from

my one kingdom.

24     Miss Drake Proceeds to Supper

No novice

In those elaborate rituals

Which allay the malice

Of knotted table and crooked chair,

The new woman in the ward

Wears purple, steps carefully

Among her secret combinations of eggshells

And breakable hummingbirds,

Footing sallow as a mouse

Between the cabbage-roses

Which are slowly opening their furred petals

To devour and drag her down

Into the carpet’s design.

With bird-quick eye cocked askew

She can see in the nick of time

How perilous needles grain the floorboards

And outwit their brambled plan;

Now through her ambushed air,

Adazzle with bright shards

Of broken glass,

She edges with wary breath,

Fending off jag and tooth,

Until, turning sideways,

She lifts one webbed foot after the other

Into the still, sultry weather

Of the patients’ dining room.

25     Recantation

‘Tea leaves I’ve given up,

And that crooked line

On the queen’s palm

Is no more my concern.

On my black pilgrimage

This moon-pocked crystal ball

Will break before it help;

Rather than croak out

What’s to come,

My darling ravens are flown.

‘Forswear those freezing tricks of sight

And all else I’ve taught

Against the flower in the blood:

Not wealth nor wisdom stands

Above the simple vein,

The straight mouth.

Go to your greenhorn youth

Before time ends

And do good

With your white hands.’

26     The Shrike

When night comes black

Such royal dreams beckon this man

As lift him apart

From his earth-wife’s side

To wing, sleep-feathered,

The singular air,

While she, envious bride,

Cannot follow after, but lies

With her blank brown eyes starved wide,

Twisting curses in the tangled sheet

With taloned fingers,

Shaking in her skull’s cage

The stuffed shape of her flown mate

Escaped among moon-plumaged strangers;

So hungered, she must wait in rage

Until bird-racketing dawn

When her shrike-face

Leans to peck open those locked lids, to eat

Crowns, palace, all

That nightlong stole her male,

And with red beak

Spike and suck out

Last blood-drop of that truant heart.

27     Alicante Lullaby

In Alicante they bowl the barrels

Bumblingly over the nubs of the cobbles

Past the yellow-paella eateries,

Below the ramshackle back-alley balconies,

While the cocks and hens

In the roofgardens

Scuttle repose with crowns and cackles.

Kumquat-colored trolleys ding as they trundle

Passengers under an indigo fizzle

Needling spumily down from the wires:

Alongside the sibilant harbor the lovers

Hear loudspeakers boom

From each neon-lit palm

Rumbas and sambas no ear-flaps can muffle.

O Cacophony, goddess of jazz and of quarrels,

Crack-throated mistress of bagpipes and cymbals,

Let be your con brios, your capricciosos,

Crescendos, cadenzas, prestos and prestissimos,

My head on the pillow

(Piano, pianissimo)

Lullayed by susurrous lyres and viols.

28     Dream with Clam-Diggers

This dream budded bright with leaves around the edges,

Its clear air winnowed by angels; she was come

Back to her early sea-town home

Scathed, stained after tedious pilgrimages.

Barefoot, she stood, in shock of that returning,

Beside a neighbor’s house

With shingles burnished as glass,

Blinds lowered on that hot morning.

No change met her: garden terrace, all summer

Tanged by melting tar,

Sloped seaward to plunge in blue; fed by white fire,

The whole scene flared welcome to this roamer.

High against heaven, gulls went wheeling soundless

Over tidal-flats where three children played

Silent and shining on a green rock bedded in mud,

Their fabulous heyday endless.

With green rock gliding, a delicate schooner

Decked forth in cockle-shells,

They sailed till tide foamed round their ankles

And the fair ship sank, its crew knelled home for dinner.

Plucked back thus sudden to that far innocence,

She, in her shabby travel garb, began

Walking eager toward water, when there, one by one,

Clam-diggers rose up out of dark slime at her offense.

Grim as gargoyles from years spent squatting at sea’s border

In wait amid snarled weed and wrack of wave

To trap this wayward girl at her first move of love,

Now with stake and pitchfork they advance, flint eyes fixed on murder.

29     Wreath for a Bridal

What though green leaves only witness

Such pact as is made once only; what matter

That owl voice sole ‘yes’, while cows utter

Low moos of approve; let sun surpliced in brightness

Stand stock still to laud these mated ones

Whose stark act all coming double luck joins.

Couched daylong in cloisters of stinging nettle

They lie, cut-grass assaulting each separate sense

With savor; coupled so, pure paragons of Constance,

This pair seek single state from that dual battle.

Now speak some sacrament to parry scruple

For wedlock wrought within love’s proper chapel.

Call here with flying colors all watchful birds

To people the twigged aisles; lead babel tongues

Of animals to choir: ‘Look what thresh of wings

Wields guard of honor over these!’ Starred with words

Let night bless that luck-rooted mead of clover

Where, bedded like angels, two burn one in fever.

From this holy day on, all pollen blown

Shall strew broadcast so rare a seed on wind

That every breath, thus teeming, set the land

Sprouting fruit, flowers, children most fair in legion

To slay spawn of dragon’s teeth; speaking this promise,

Let flesh be knit, and each step hence go famous.

30     Epitaph for Fire and Flower

You might as well haul up

This wave’s green peak on wire

To prevent fall, or anchor the fluent air

In quartz, as crack your skull to keep

These two most perishable lovers from the touch

That will kindle angels’ envy, scorch and drop

Their fond hearts charred as any match.

Seek no stony camera-eye to fix

The passing dazzle of each face

In black and white, or put on ice

Mouth’s instant flare for future looks;

Stars shoot their petals, and suns run to seed,

However you may sweat to hold such darling wrecks

Hived like honey in your head.

Now in the crux of their vows hang your ear,

Still as a shell: hear what an age of glass

These lovers prophesy to lock embrace

Secure in museum diamond for the stare

Of astounded generations; they wrestle

To conquer cinder’s kingdom in the stroke of an hour

And hoard faith safe in a fossil.

But though they’d rivet sinews in rock

And have every weathercock kiss hang fire

As if to outflame a phoenix, the moment’s spur

Drives nimble blood too quick

For a wish to tether: they ride nightlong

In their heartbeats’ blazing wake until red cock

Plucks bare that comet’s flowering.

Dawn snuffs out star’s spent wick,

Even as love’s dear fools cry evergreen,

And a languor of wax congeals the vein

No matter how fiercely lit; staunch contracts break

And recoil in the altering light: the radiant limb

Blows ash in each lover’s eye; the ardent look

Blackens flesh to bone and devours them.

31     Fiesta Melons

In Benidorm there are melons,

Whole donkey-carts full

Of innumerable melons,

Ovals and balls,

Bright green and thumpable

Laced over with stripes

Of turtle-dark green.

Choose an egg-shape, a world-shape,

Bowl one homeward to taste

In the whitehot noon:

Cream-smooth honeydews,

Pink-pulped whoppers,

Bump-rinded cantaloupes

With orange cores.

Each wedge wears a studding

Of blanched seeds or black seeds

To strew like confetti

Under the feet of

This market of melon-eating

Fiesta-goers.

32     The Goring

Arena dust rusted by four bulls’ blood to a dull redness,

The afternoon at a bad end under the crowd’s truculence,

The ritual death each time botched among dropped capes, ill-judged

stabs,

The strongest will seemed a will toward ceremony. Obese, dark-

Faced in his rich yellows, tassels, pompons, braid, the picador

Rode out against the fifth bull to brace his pike and slowly bear

Down deep into the bent bull-neck. Cumbrous routine, not artwork.

Instinct for art began with the bull’s horn lofting in the mob’s

Hush a lumped man-shape. The whole act formal, fluent as a dance.

Blood faultlessly broached redeemed the sullied air, the earth’s grossness.

33     The Beggars

Nightfall, cold eye—neither disheartens

These goatish tragedians who

Hawk misfortune like figs and chickens

And, plaintiff against each day, decry

Nature’s partial, haphazard thumb.

Under white wall and Moorish window

Griefs honest grimace, debased by time,

Caricatures itself and thrives

On the coins of pity. At random

A beggar stops among eggs and loaves,

Props a leg-stump upon a crutch,

Jiggles his tin cup at the goodwives.

By lack and loss these beggars encroach

On spirits tenderer than theirs,

Suffering-toughened beyond the fetch

Of finest conscience.

Nightfall obscures

The bay’s sheer, extravagant blue,

White house and almond grove. The beggars

Outlast their evilest star, wryly

And with a perfidious verve

Baffle the dark, the pitying eye.

34     Spider

Anansi, black busybody of the folktales,

You scuttle out on impulse

Blunt in self-interest

As a sledge hammer, as a man’s bunched fist,

Yet of devils the cleverest

To get your carousals told:

You spun the cosmic web: you squint from center field.

Last summer I came upon your Spanish cousin,

Notable robber baron,

Behind a goatherd’s hut:

Near his small stonehenge above the ants’ route,

One-third ant-size, a leggy spot,

He tripped an ant with a rope

Scarcely visible. About and about the slope

Of his redoubt he ran his nimble filament,

Each time round winding that ant

Tighter to the cocoon

Already veiling the gray spool of stone

From which coils, caught ants waved legs in

Torpid warning, or lay still

And suffered their livelier fellows to struggle.

Then briskly scaled his altar tiered with tethered ants,

Nodding in a somnolence

Appalling to witness,

To the barbarous outlook, from there chose

His next martyr to the gross cause

Of concupiscence. Once more

With black alacrity bound round his prisoner.

The ants—a file of comers, a file of goers—

Persevered on a set course

No scruple could disrupt,

Obeying orders of instinct till swept

Off-stage and infamously wrapped

Up by a spry black deus

Ex machina. Nor did they seem deterred by this.

35     Spinster

Now this particular girl

During a ceremonious April walk

With her latest suitor

Found herself, of a sudden, intolerably struck

By the birds’ irregular babel

And the leaves’ litter.

By this tumult afflicted, she

Observed her lover’s gestures unbalance the air,

His gait stray uneven

Through a rank wilderness of fern and flower.

She judged petals in disarray,

The whole season, sloven.

How she longed for winter then!—

Scrupulously austere in its order

Of white and black

Ice and rock, each sentiment within border,

And heart’s frosty discipline

Exact as a snowflake.

But here—a burgeoning

Unruly enough to pitch her five queenly wits

Into vulgar motley—

A treason not to be borne. Let idiots

Reel giddy in bedlam spring:

She withdrew neatly.

And round her house she set

Such a barricade of barb and check

Against mutinous weather

As no mere insurgent man could hope to break

With curse, fist, threat

Or love, either.

36     Rhyme

I’ve got a stubborn goose whose gut’s

Honeycombed with golden eggs,

Yet won’t lay one.

She, addled in her goose-wit, struts

The barnyard like those taloned hags

Who ogle men

And crimp their wrinkles in a grin,

Jangling their great money bags.

While I eat grits

She fattens on the finest grain.

Now, as I hone my knife, she begs

Pardon, and that’s

So humbly done, I’d turn this keen

Steel on myself before profit

By such a rogue’s

Act, but—how those feathers shine!

Exit from a smoking slit

Her ruby dregs.

37     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 the jut of ochreous rock

Goats shamble, morose, rank-haired,

To lick the sea-salt.

38     Maudlin

Mud-mattressed under the sign of the hag

In a clench of blood, the sleep-talking virgin

Gibbets with her curse the moon’s man,

Faggot-bearing Jack in his crackless egg:

Hatched with a claret hogshead to swig

He kings it, navel-knit to no groan,

But at the price of a pin-stitched skin

Fish-tailed girls purchase each white leg.

39     Resolve

Day of mist: day of tarnish

with hands

unserviceable, I wait

for the milk van

the one-eared cat

laps its gray paw

and the coal fire burns

outside, the little hedge leaves are

become quite yellow

a milk-film blurs

the empty bottles on the windowsill

no glory descends

two water drops poise

on the arched green

stem of my neighbor’s rose bush

o bent bow of thorns

the cat unsheathes its claws

the world turns

today

today I will not

disenchant my twelve black-gowned examiners

or bunch my fist

in the wind’s sneer.

40     Landowners

From my rented attic with no earth

To call my own except the air-motes,

I malign the leaden perspective

Of identical gray brick houses,

Orange roof-tiles, orange chimney pots,

And see that first house, as if between

Mirrors, engendering a spectral

Corridor of inane replicas,

Flimsily peopled.

                     But landowners

Own their cabbage roots, a space of stars,

Indigenous peace. Such substance makes

My eyeful of reflections a ghost’s

Eyeful, which, envious, would define

Death as striking root on one land-tract;

Life, its own vaporous wayfarings.

41     Ella Mason and Her Eleven Cats

Old Ella Mason keeps cats, eleven at last count,

In her ramshackle house off Somerset Terrace;

People make queries

On seeing our neighbor’s cat-haunt,

Saying: ‘Something’s addled in a woman who accommodates

That many cats.’

Rum and red-faced as a water-melon, her voice

Long gone to wheeze and seed, Ella Mason

For no good reason

Plays hostess to Tabby, Tom and increase,

With cream and chicken-gut feasting the palates

Of finical cats.

Village stories go that in olden days

Ella flounced about, minx-thin and haughty,

A fashionable beauty,

Slaying the dandies with her emerald eyes;

Now, run to fat, she’s a spinster whose door shuts

On all but cats.

Once we children sneaked over to spy Miss Mason

Napping in her kitchen paved with saucers.

On antimacassars

Table-top, cupboard shelf, cats lounged brazen,

One gruff-timbred purr rolling from furred throats:

Such stentorian cats!

With poke and giggle, ready to skedaddle,

We peered agog through the cobwebbed door

Straight into yellow glare

Of guardian cats crouched round their idol,

While Ella drowsed whiskered with sleek face, sly wits:

Sphinx-queen of cats.

‘Look! there she goes, Cat-Lady Mason!’

We snickered as she shambled down Somerset Terrace

To market for her dearies,

More mammoth and blowsy with every season;

‘Miss Ella’s got loony from keeping in cahoots

With eleven cats.’

But now turned kinder with time, we mark Miss Mason

Blinking green-eyed and solitary

At girls who marry—

Demure ones, lithe ones, needing no lesson

That vain jades sulk single down bridal nights,

Accurst as wild-cats.

42     Crystal Gazer

Gerd sits spindle-shanked in her dark tent,

Lean face gone tawn with seasons,

Skin worn down to the knucklebones

At her tough trade; without time’s taint

The burnished ball hangs fire in her hands, a lens

Fusing time’s three horizons.

Two enter to tap her sight, a green pair

Fresh leaved out in vows: ‘Come tell

How we shall do together,

Well or ill.’ Gerd slants a look at each: most dear,

Each to the other; fit fiber for stern weather.

Slowly she spins the ball:

‘I see two stalwart apple trees

Coupled by branches intertwined

And, springing all about,

Staunch saplings; to this house, thriving days

Will bring crop’s increase, and harvest fruit

Follow on kind wind.’

‘No hardship then?’ he asks. ‘We’ll take

Whatever trial’s to come, so say true.’

His bride echoes his word. At that,

Gerd whirls the ball ablaze: ‘Rough storm,’ she grants, ‘may wreak

Some havoc on tender limb, and yet

Strengthen that orchard thereby.’

Their small price paid, these wedded ones

Walk forth into sun-moneyed air, quickened

To savor their span of flourishing.

Aloof, squatting mummy-wise, Gerd scans

That clairvoyant quartz which once, at her own wishing,

Exacted her first simple sight for this strict second.

Then, a free-gadding hoyden, Gerd had craved

To govern more sight than given to a woman

By wits alone: to foresee her lover’s faith

And their future lot, she braved

Church curse to ken that crooked oath

Whereby one hires a demon.

A flash like doomcrack rent night’s black:

God’s work stood anchored in that glare

Focusing all time’s day-suns in one

So beggar Gerd might aim her look

At gorgon-prospects with power to strike to stone

Hearts of those who pierced time’s core.

What Gerd saw then engraved her mind

Plague-pitted as the moon: each bud

Shriveling to cinders at its source,

Each love blazing blind to its gutted end—

And, fixed in the crystal center, grinning fierce:

Earth’s ever-green death’s head.

43     November Graveyard

The scene stands stubborn: skinflint trees

Hoard last year’s leaves, won’t mourn, wear sackcloth, or turn

To elegiac dryads, and dour grass

Guards the hard-hearted emerald of its grassiness

However the grandiloquent mind may scorn

Such poverty. No dead men’s cries

Flower forget-me-nots between the stones

Paving this grave ground. Here’s honest rot

To unpick the heart, pare bone

Free of the Fictive vein. When one stark skeleton

Bulks real, all saints’ tongues fall quiet:

Flies watch no resurrections in the sun.

At the essential landscape stare, stare

Till your eyes foist a vision dazzling on the wind:

Whatever lost ghosts flare,

Damned, howling in their shrouds across the moor

Rave on the leash of the starving mind

Which peoples the bare room, the blank, untenanted air.

44     Black Rook in Rainy Weather

On the stiff twig up there

Hunches a wet black rook

Arranging and rearranging its feathers in the rain.

I do not expect a miracle

Or an accident

To set the sight on fire

In my eye, nor seek

Any more in the desultory weather some design,

But let spotted leaves fall as they fall,

Without ceremony, or portent.

Although, I admit, I desire,

Occasionally, some backtalk

From the mute sky, I can’t honestly complain:

A certain minor light may still

Lean incandescent

Out of kitchen table or chair

As if a celestial burning took

Possession of the most obtuse objects now and then—

Thus hallowing an interval

Otherwise inconsequent

By bestowing largesse, honor,

One might say love. At any rate, I now walk

Wary (for it could happen

Even in this dull, ruinous landscape); skeptical,

Yet politic; ignorant

Of whatever angel may choose to flare

Suddenly at my elbow. I only know that a rook

Ordering its black feathers can so shine

As to seize my senses, haul

My eyelids up, and grant

A brief respite from fear

Of total neutrality. With luck,

Trekking stubborn through this season

Of fatigue, I shall

Patch together a content

Of sorts. Miracles occur,

If you care to call those spasmodic

Tricks of radiance miracles. The wait’s begun again,

The long wait for the angel,

For that rare, random descent.

1957

45     The Snowman on the Moor

Stalemated their armies stood, with tottering banners:

She flung from a room

Still ringing with bruit of insults and dishonors

And in fury left him

Glowering at the coal-fire: ‘Come find me’—her last taunt.

He did not come

But sat on, guarding his grim battlement.

By the doorstep

Her winter-beheaded daisies, marrowless, gaunt,

Warned her to keep

Indoors with politic goodwill, not haste

Into a landscape

Of stark wind-harrowed hills and weltering mist;

But from the house

She stalked intractable as a driven ghost

Across moor snows

Pocked by rook-claw and rabbit-track: she must yet win

Him to his knees—

Let him send police and hounds to bring her in.

Nursing her rage

Through bare whistling heather, over stiles of black stone,

To the world’s white edge

She came, and called hell to subdue an unruly man

And join her siege.

It was no fire-blurting fork-tailed demon

Volcanoed hot

From marble snow-heap of moor to ride that woman

With spur and knout

Down from pride’s size: instead, a grisly-thewed,

Austere, corpse-white

Giant heaved into the distance, stone-hatcheted,

Sky-high, and snow

Floured his whirling beard, and at his tread

Ambushed birds by

Dozens dropped dead in the hedges: o she felt

No love in his eye,

Worse—saw dangling from that spike-studded belt

Ladies’ sheaved skulls:

Mournfully the dry tongues clacked their guilt:

‘Our wit made fools

Of kings, unmanned kings’ sons: our masteries

Amused court halls:

For that brag, we barnacle these iron thighs.’

Throned in the thick

Of a blizzard, the giant roared up with his chittering trophies.

From brunt of axe-crack

She shied sideways: a white fizz! and the giant, pursuing,

Crumbled to smoke.

Humbled then, and crying,

The girl bent homeward, brimful of gentle talk

And mild obeying.

46     Mayflower

Throughout black winter the red haws withstood

Assault of snow-flawed winds from the dour skies

And, bright as blood-drops, proved no brave branch dies

If root’s firm-fixed and resolution good.

Now, as green sap ascends the steepled wood,

Each hedge with such white bloom astounds our eyes

As sprang from Joseph’s rod, and testifies

How best beauty’s born of hardihood.

So when staunch island stock chose forfeiture

Of the homeland hearth to plough their pilgrim way

Across Atlantic furrows, dark, unsure—

Remembering the white, triumphant spray

On hawthorn boughs, with goodwill to endure

They named their ship after the flower of May.

47     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, hedged 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.

48     The Everlasting Monday

Thou shalt have an everlasting

Monday and stand in the moon.

The moon’s man stands in his shell,

Bent under a bundle

Of sticks. The light falls chalk and cold

Upon our bedspread.

His teeth are chattering among the leprous

Peaks and craters of those extinct volcanoes.

He also against black frost

Would pick sticks, would not rest

Until his own lit room outshone

Sunday’s ghost of sun;

Now works his hell of Mondays in the moon’s ball,

Fireless, seven chill seas chained to his ankle.

49     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 lustre 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.

50     The Thin People

They are always with us, the thin people

Meager of dimension as the gray people

On a movie-screen. They

Are unreal, we say:

It was only in a movie, it was only

In a war making evil headlines when we

Were small that they famished and

Grew so lean and would not round

Out their stalky limbs again though peace

Plumped the bellies of the mice

Under the meanest table.

It was during the long hunger-battle

They found their talent to persevere

In thinness, to come, later,

Into our bad dreams, their menace

Not guns, not abuses,

But a thin silence.

Wrapped in flea-ridden donkey skins,

Empty of complaint, forever

Drinking vinegar from tin cups: they wore

The insufferable nimbus of the lot-drawn

Scapegoat. But so thin,

So weedy a race could not remain in dreams,

Could not remain outlandish victims

In the contracted country of the head

Any more than the old woman in her mud hut could

Keep from cutting fat meat

Out of the side of the generous moon when it

Set foot nightly in her yard

Until her knife had pared

The moon to a rind of little light.

Now the thin people do not obliterate

Themselves as the dawn

Grayness blues, reddens, and the outline

Of the world comes clear and fills with color.

They persist in the sunlit room: the wallpaper

Frieze of cabbage-roses and cornflowers pales

Under their thin-lipped smiles,

Their withering kingship.

How they prop each other up!

We own no wildernesses rich and deep enough

For stronghold against their stiff

Battalions. See, how the tree boles flatten

And lose their good browns

If the thin people simply stand in the forest,

Making the world go thin as a wasp’s nest

And grayer; not even moving their bones.

51     On the Difficulty of Conjuring Up a Dryad

Ravening through the persistent bric-à-brac

Of blunt pencils, rose-sprigged coffee cup,

Postage stamps, stacked books’ clamor and yawp,

Neighborhood cockcrow—all nature’s prodigal backtalk,

The vaunting mind

Snubs impromptu spiels of wind

And wrestles to impose

Its own order on what is.

‘With my fantasy alone,’ brags the importunate head,

Arrogant among rook-tongued spaces,

Sheep greens, finned falls, ‘I shall compose a crisis

To stun sky black out, drive gibbering mad

Trout, cock, ram,

That bulk so calm

On my jealous stare,

Self-sufficient as they are.’

But no hocus-pocus of green angels

Damasks with dazzle the threadbare eye;

‘My trouble, doctor, is: I see a tree,

And that damn scrupulous tree won’t practice wiles

To beguile sight:

E.g., by cant of light

Concoct a Daphne;

My tree stays tree.

‘However I wrench obstinate bark and trunk

To my sweet will, no luminous shape

Steps out radiant in limb, eye, lip,

To hoodwink the honest earth which pointblank

Spurns such fiction

As nymphs; cold vision

Will have no counterfeit

Palmed off on it.

‘No doubt now in dream-propertied fall some moon-eyed,

Star-lucky sleight-of-hand man watches

My jilting lady squander coin, gold leaf stock ditches,

And the opulent air go studded with seed,

While this beggared brain

Hatches no fortune,

But from leaf, from grass,

Thieves what it has.’

52     On the Plethora of Dryads

Hearing a white saint rave

About a quintessential beauty

Visible only to the paragon heart,

I tried my sight on an apple-tree

That for eccentric knob and wart

Had all my love.

Without meat or drink I sat

Starving my fantasy down

To discover that metaphysical Tree which hid

From my worldling look its brilliant vein

Far deeper in gross wood

Than axe could cut.

But before I might blind sense

To see with the spotless soul,

Each particular quirk so ravished me

Every pock and stain bulked more beautiful

Than flesh of any body

Flawed by love’s prints.

Battle however I would

To break through that patchwork

Of leaves’ bicker and whisk in babel tongues,

Streak and mottle of tawn bark,

No visionary lightnings

Pierced my dense lid.

Instead, a wanton fit

Dragged each dazzled sense apart

Surfeiting eye, ear, taste, touch, smell;

Now, snared by this miraculous art,

I ride earth’s burning carrousel

Day in, day out,

And such grit corrupts my eyes

I must watch sluttish dryads twitch

Their multifarious silks in the holy grove

Until no chaste tree but suffers blotch

Under flux of those seductive

Reds, greens, blues.

53     The Other Two

All summer we moved in a villa brimful of echoes,

Cool as the pearled interior of a conch.

Bells, hooves, of the high-stepping black goats woke us.

Around our bed the baronial furniture

Foundered through levels of light seagreen and strange.

Not one leaf wrinkled in the clearing air.

We dreamed how we were perfect, and we were.

Against bare, whitewashed walls, the furniture

Anchored itself, griffin-legged and darkly grained.

Two of us in a place meant for ten more—

Our footsteps multiplied in the shadowy chambers,

Our voices fathomed a profounder sound:

The walnut banquet table, the twelve chairs

Mirrored the intricate gestures of two others.

Heavy as statuary, shapes not ours

Performed a dumbshow in the polished wood,

That cabinet without windows or doors:

He lifts an arm to bring her close, but she

Shies from his touch: his is an iron mood.

Seeing her freeze, he turns his face away.

They poise and grieve as in some old tragedy.

Moon-blanched and implacable, he and she

Would not be eased, released. Our each example

Of tenderness dove through their purgatory

Like a planet, a stone, swallowed in a great darkness,

Leaving no sparky track, setting up no ripple.

Nightly we left them in their desert place.

Lights out, they dogged us, sleepless and envious:

We dreamed their arguments, their stricken voices.

We might embrace, but those two never did,

Come, so unlike us, to a stiff impasse,

Burdened in such a way we seemed the lighter—

Ourselves the haunters, and they, flesh and blood;

As if, above love’s ruinage, we were

The heaven those two dreamed of, in despair.

54     The Lady and the Earthenware Head

Fired in sanguine clay, the model head

Fit nowhere: brickdust-complected, eye under a dense lid,

On the long bookshelf it stood

Stolidly propping thick volumes of prose: spite-set

Ape of her look. Best rid

Hearthstone at once of the outrageous head;

Still, she felt loath to junk it.

No place, it seemed, for the effigy to fare

Free from all molesting. Rough boys,

Spying a pate to spare

Glowering sullen and pompous from an ash-heap,

Might well seize this prize,

Maltreat the hostage head in shocking wise,

And waken the sly nerve up

That knits to each original its coarse copy. A dark tarn

She thought of then, thick-silted, with weeds obscured,

To serve her exacting turn:

But out of the watery aspic, laureled by fins,

The simulacrum leered,

Lewdly beckoning, and her courage wavered:

She blenched, as one who drowns,

And resolved more ceremoniously to lodge

The mimic head—in a crotched willow, green-

Vaulted by foliage:

Let bell-tongued birds descant in blackest feather

On the rendering, grain by grain,

Of that uncouth shape to simple sod again

Through drear and dulcet weather.

Yet, shrined on her shelf, the grisly visage endured,

Despite her wrung hands, her tears, her praying: Vanish!

Steadfast and evil-starred,

It ogled through rock-fault, wind-flaw and fisted wave—

An antique hag-head, too tough for knife to finish,

Refusing to diminish

By one jot its basilisk-look of love.

55     All the Dead Dears

In the Archaeological Museum in Cambridge is a stone
coffin of the fourth century A.D. containing the skeletons
of a woman, a mouse and a shrew. The ankle-bone of the
woman has been slightly gnawn.

Rigged poker-stiff on her back

With a granite grin

This antique museum-cased lady

Lies, companioned by the gimcrack

Relics of a mouse and a shrew

That battened for a day on her ankle-bone.

These three, unmasked now, bear

Dry witness

To the gross eating game

We’d wink at if we didn’t hear

Stars grinding, crumb by crumb,

Our own grist down to its bony face.

How they grip us through thin and thick,

These barnacle dead!

This lady here’s no kin

Of mine, yet kin she is: she’ll suck

Blood and whistle my marrow clean

To prove it. As I think now of her head,

From the mercury-backed glass

Mother, grandmother, greatgrandmother

Reach hag hands to haul me in,

And an image looms under the fishpond surface

Where the daft father went down

With orange duck-feet winnowing his hair—

All the long gone darlings: they

Get back, though, soon,

Soon: be it by wakes, weddings,

Childbirths or a family barbecue:

Any touch, taste, tang’s

Fit for those outlaws to ride home on,

And to sanctuary: usurping the armchair

Between tick

And tack of the clock, until we go,

Each skulled-and-crossboned Gulliver

Riddled with ghosts, to lie

Deadlocked with them, taking root as cradles rock.

56     Natural History

That lofty monarch, Monarch Mind,

Blue-blooded in coarse country reigned;

Though he bedded in ermine, gorged on roast,

Pure Philosophy his love engrossed:

While subjects hungered, empty-pursed,

With stars, with angels, he conversed

Till, sick of their ruler’s godling airs,

In one body those earthborn commoners

Rose up and put royal nerves to the rack:

King Egg-Head saw his domain crack,

His crown usurped by the low brow

Of the base, barbarous Prince Ow.

57     Two Views of Withens

Above whorled, spindling gorse,

Sheepfoot-flattened grasses,

Stone wall and ridgepole rise

Prow-like through blurs

Of fog in that hinterland few

Hikers get to:

Home of uncatchable

Sage hen and spry rabbit,

Where second wind, hip boot

Help over hill

And hill, and through peaty water.

I found bare moor,

A colorless weather,

And the House of Eros

Low-lintelled, no palace;

You, luckier,

Report white pillars, a blue sky,

The ghosts, kindly.

58     The Great Carbuncle

We came over the moor-top

Through air streaming and green-lit,

Stone farms foundering in it,

Valleys of grass altering

In a light neither of dawn

Nor nightfall, our hands, faces

Lucent as porcelain, the earth’s

Claim and weight gone out of them.

Some such transfiguring moved

The eight pilgrims towards its source—

Toward that great jewel: shown often,

Never given; hidden, yet

Simultaneously seen

On moor-top, at sea-bottom,

Knowable only by light

Other than noon, than moon, stars—

The once-known way becoming

Wholly other, and ourselves

Estranged, changed, suspended where

Angels are rumored, clearly

Floating, among the floating

Tables and chairs. Gravity’s

Lost in the lift and drift of

An easier element

Than earth, and there is nothing

So fine we cannot do it.

But nearing means distancing:

At the common homecoming

Light withdraws. Chairs, tables drop

Down: the body weighs like stone.

59     Words for a Nursery

Rosebud, knot of worms,

Heir of the first five

Shapers, I open:

Five moony crescents

For eyes to light me

Toward what I can grab,

Milk-spout, big finger

So many ladders

Giving a leg up

To these limber hooks.

I learn, good circus

Dog that I am, how

To move, serve, steer food,

Index the arrow,

Thumbhead, blunt helper,

My master’s fetcher,

Whipper of itches,

No pocket dozer,

I shut on the key

Of this blue-green toy.

Five-antlered, branching

Touchy antenna,

I nose out the lay

Of thistle and silk,

Cold pole and hot plate.

Old historian,

My page this desert

Crossed by three causeways,

Leathery, treeless,

With five whorled landspits.

Brown-backed, white-bellied

As a flatfish, I

Swim the Sea of Do,

The left my lackey,

My backward image.

Penbearer, scrubnurse,

The captain’s batman,

By heart here I hold

Coin, button, trigger

And his love’s body.

Ill-served he’ll be when

Age manhandles me

(A crab to nap on

Chairarms and tables,

Five wickless candles

To wag at the dark)

And worse-served when death

Makes off with this rose,

Five worms in a box

To feed the thin crows.

60     The Disquieting Muses

Mother, mother, what illbred aunt

Or what disfigured and unsightly

Cousin did you so unwisely keep

Unasked to my christening, that she

Sent these ladies in her stead

With heads like darning-eggs to nod

And nod and nod at foot and head

And at the left side of my crib?

Mother, who made to order stories

Of Mixie Blackshort the heroic bear,

Mother, whose witches always, always

Got baked into gingerbread, I wonder

Whether you saw them, whether you said

Words to rid me of those three ladies

Nodding by night around my bed,

Mouthless, eyeless, with stitched bald head.

In the hurricane, when father’s twelve

Study windows bellied in

Like bubbles about to break, you fed

My brother and me cookies and Ovaltine

And helped the two of us to choir:

‘Thor is angry: boom boom boom!

Thor is angry: we don’t care!’

But those ladies broke the panes.

When on tiptoe the schoolgirls danced,

Blinking flashlights like fireflies

And singing the glowworm song, I could

Not lift a foot in the twinkle-dress

But, heavy-footed, stood aside

In the shadow cast by my dismal-headed

Godmothers, and you cried and cried:

And the shadow stretched, the lights went out.

Mother, you sent me to piano lessons

And praised my arabesques and trills

Although each teacher found my touch

Oddly wooden in spite of scales

And the hours of practicing, my ear

Tone-deaf and yes, unteachable.

I learned, I learned, I learned elsewhere,

From muses unhired by you, dear mother.

I woke one day to see you, mother,

Floating above me in bluest air

On a green balloon bright with a million

Flowers and bluebirds that never were

Never, never, found anywhere.

But the little planet bobbed away

Like a soap-bubble as you called: Come here!

And I faced my traveling companions.

Day now, night now, at head, side, feet,

They stand their vigil in gowns of stone,

Faces blank as the day I was born,

Their shadows long in the setting sun

That never brightens or goes down.

And this is the kingdom you bore me to,

Mother, mother. But no frown of mine

Will betray the company I keep.

61     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 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.

62     Ouija

It is a chilly god, a god of shades,

Rises to the glass from his black fathoms.

At the window, those unborn, those undone

Assemble with the frail paleness of moths,

An envious phosphorescence in their wings.

Vermilions, bronzes, colors of the sun

In the coal fire will not wholly console them.

Imagine their deep hunger, deep as the dark

For the blood-heat that would ruddle or reclaim.

The glass mouth sucks blood-heat from my forefinger.

The old god dribbles, in return, his words.

The old god, too, writes aureate poetry

In tarnished modes, maundering among the wastes,

Fair chronicler of every foul declension.

Age, and ages of prose, have uncoiled

His talking whirlwind, abated his excessive temper

When words, like locusts, drummed the darkening air

And left the cobs to rattle, bitten clean.

Skies once wearing a blue, divine hauteur

Ravel above us, mistily descend,

Thickening with motes, to a marriage with the mire.

He hymns the rotten queen with saffron hair

Who has saltier aphrodisiacs

Than virgins’ tears. That bawdy queen of death,

Her wormy couriers are at his bones.

Still he hymns juice of her, hot nectarine.

I see him, horny-skinned and tough, construe

What flinty pebbles the ploughblade upturns

As ponderable tokens of her love.

He, godly, doddering, spells

No succinct Gabriel from the letters here

But floridly, his amorous nostalgias.

63     On the Decline of Oracles

My father kept a vaulted conch

By two bronze bookends of ships in sail,

And as I listened its cold teeth seethed

With voices of that ambiguous sea

Old Böcklin missed, who held a shell

To hear the sea he could not hear.

What the seashell spoke to his inner ear

He knew, but no peasants know.

My father died, and when he died

He willed his books and shell away.

The books burned up, sea took the shell,

But I, I keep the voices he

Set in my ear, and in my eye

The sight of those blue, unseen waves

For which the ghost of Böcklin grieves.

The peasants feast and multiply.

Eclipsing the spitted ox I see

Neither brazen swan nor burning star,

Heraldry of a starker age,

But three men entering the yard,

And those men coming up the stair.

Profitless, their gossiping images

Invade the cloistral eye like pages

From a gross comic strip, and toward

The happening of this happening

The earth turns now. In half an hour

I shall go down the shabby stair and meet,

Coming up, those three. Worth

Less than present, past—this future.

Worthless such vision to eyes gone dull

That once descried Troy’s towers fall,

Saw evil break out of the north.

64     Snakecharmer

As the gods began one world, and man another,

So the snakecharmer begins a snaky sphere

With moon-eye, mouth-pipe. He pipes. Pipes green. Pipes water.

Pipes water green until green waters waver

With reedy lengths and necks and undulatings.

And as his notes twine green, the green river

Shapes its images around his songs.

He pipes a place to stand on, but no rocks,

No floor: a wave of flickering grass tongues

Supports his foot. He pipes a world of snakes,

Of sways and coilings, from the snake-rooted bottom

Of his mind. And now nothing but snakes

Is visible. The snake-scales have become

Leaf, become eyelid; snake-bodies, bough, breast

Of tree and human. And he within this snakedom

Rules the writhings which make manifest

His snakehood and his might with pliant tunes

From his thin pipe. Out of this green nest

As out of Eden’s navel twist the lines

Of snaky generations: let there be snakes!

And snakes there were, are, will be—till yawns

Consume this piper and he tires of music

And pipes the world back to the simple fabric

Of snake-warp, snake-weft. Pipes the cloth of snakes

To a melting of green waters, till no snake

Shows its head, and those green waters back to

Water, to green, to nothing like a snake.

Puts up his pipe, and lids his moony eye.

65     A Lesson in Vengeance

In the dour ages

Of drafty cells and draftier castles,

Of dragons breathing without the frame of fables,

Saint and king unfisted obstruction’s knuckles

By no miracle or majestic means,

But by such abuses

As smack of spite and the overscrupulous

Twisting of thumbscrews: one soul tied in sinews,

One white horse drowned, and all the unconquered pinnacles

Of God’s city and Babylon’s

Must wait, while here Suso’s

Hand hones his tacks and needles,

Scourging to sores his own red sluices

For the relish of heaven, relentless, dousing with prickles

Of horsehair and lice his horny loins;

While there irate Cyrus

Squanders a summer and the brawn of his heroes

To rebuke the horse-swallowing River Gyndes:

He split it into three hundred and sixty trickles

A girl could wade without wetting her shins.

Still, latter-day sages,

Smiling at this behavior, subjugating their enemies

Neatly, nicely, by disbelief or bridges,

Never grip, as their grandsires did, that devil who chuckles

From grain of the marrow and the river-bed grains.

1958

66     Virgin in a Tree

How this tart fable instructs

And mocks! Here’s the parody of that moral mousetrap

Set in the proverbs stitched on samplers

Approving chased girls who get them to a tree

And put on bark’s nun-black

Habit which deflects

All amorous arrows. For to sheathe the virgin shape

In a scabbard of wood baffles pursuers,

Whether goat-thighed or god-haloed. Ever since that first Daphne

Switched her incomparable back

For a bay-tree hide, respect’s

Twined to her hard limbs like ivy: the puritan lip

Cries: ‘Celebrate Syrinx whose demurs

Won her the frog-colored skin, pale pith and watery

Bed of a reed. Look:

Pine-needle armor protects

Pitys from Pan’s assault! And though age drop

Their leafy crowns, their fame soars,

Eclipsing Eva, Cleo and Helen of Troy:

For which of those would speak

For a fashion that constricts

White bodies in a wooden girdle, root to top

Unfaced, unformed, the nipple-flowers

Shrouded to suckle darkness? Only they

Who keep cool and holy make

A sanctum to attract

Green virgins, consecrating limb and lip

To chastity’s service: like prophets, like preachers,

They descant on the serene and seraphic beauty

Of virgins for virginity’s sake.’

Be certain some such pact’s

Been struck to keep all glory in the grip

Of ugly spinsters and barren sirs

As you etch on the inner window of your eye

This virgin on her rack:

She, ripe and unplucked, ’s

Lain splayed too long in the tortuous boughs: overripe

Now, dour-faced, her fingers

Stiff as twigs, her body woodenly

Askew, she’ll ache and wake

Though doomsday bud. Neglect’s

Given her lips that lemon-tasting droop:

Untongued, all beauty’s bright juice sours.

Tree-twist will ape this gross anatomy

Till irony’s bough break.

67     Perseus

The Triumph of Wit Over Suffering

Head alone shows you in the prodigious act

Of digesting what centuries alone digest:

The mammoth, lumbering statuary of sorrow,

Indissoluble enough to riddle the guts

Of a whale with holes and holes, and bleed him white

Into salt seas. Hercules had a simple time,

Rinsing those stables: a baby’s tears would do it.

But who’d volunteer to gulp the Laocoön,

The Dying Gaul and those innumerable pietàs

Festering on the dim walls of Europe’s chapels,

Museums and sepulchers? You.

You

Who borrowed feathers for your feet, not lead,

Not nails, and a mirror to keep the snaky head

In safe perspective, could outface the gorgon-grimace

Of human agony: a look to numb

Limbs: not a basilisk-blink, nor a double whammy,

But all the accumulated last grunts, groans,

Cries and heroic couplets concluding the million

Enacted tragedies on these blood-soaked boards,

And every private twinge a hissing asp

To petrify your eyes, and every village

Catastrophe a writhing length of cobra,

And the decline of empires the thick coil of a vast

Anaconda.

Imagine: the world

Fisted to a foetus head, ravined, seamed

With suffering from conception upwards, and there

You have it in hand. Grit in the eye or a sore

Thumb can make anyone wince, but the whole globe

Expressive of grief turns gods, like kings, to rocks.

Those rocks, cleft and worn, themselves then grow

Ponderous and extend despair on earth’s

Dark face.

So might rigor mortis come to stiffen

All creation, were it not for a bigger belly

Still than swallows joy.

You enter now,

Armed with feathers to tickle as well as fly,

And a fun-house mirror that turns the tragic muse

To the beheaded head of a sullen doll, one braid,

A bedraggled snake, hanging limp as the absurd mouth

Hangs in its lugubrious pout. Where are

The classic limbs of stubborn Antigone?

The red, royal robes of Phèdre? The tear-dazzled

Sorrows of Malfi’s gentle duchess?

Gone

In the deep convulsion gripping your face, muscles

And sinews bunched, victorious, as the cosmic

Laugh does away with the unstitching, plaguey wounds

Of an eternal sufferer.

To you

Perseus, the palm, and may you poise

And repoise until time stop, the celestial balance

Which weighs our madness with our sanity.

68     Battle-Scene

From the Comic Operatic Fantasy The Seafarer

It beguiles—

This little Odyssey

In pink and lavender

Over a surface of gently-

Graded turquoise tiles

That represent a sea

With chequered waves and gaily

Bear up the seafarer,

Gaily, gaily,

In his pink plume and armor.

A lantern-frail

Gondola of paper

Ferries the fishpond Sindbad

Who poises his pastel spear

Toward three pinky-purple

Monsters which uprear

Off the ocean-floor

With fanged and dreadful head.

Beware, beware

The whale, the shark, the squid.

But fins and scales

Of each scrolled sea-beast

Troll no slime, no weed.

They are polished for the joust,

They gleam like easter eggshells,

Rose and amethyst.

Ahab, fulfill your boast:

Bring home each storied head.

One thrust, one thrust,

One thrust: and they are sped.

So fables go.

And so all children sing

Their bathtub battles deep,

Hazardous and long,

But oh, sage grownups know

Sea-dragon for sofa, fang

For pasteboard, and siren-song

For fever in a sleep.

Laughing, laughing

Of graybeards wakes us up.

69     Yadwigha, on a Red Couch, Among Lilies

A Sestina for the Douanier

Yadwigha, the literalists once wondered how you

Came to be lying on this baroque couch

Upholstered in red velvet, under the eye

Of uncaged tigers and a tropical moon,

Set in an intricate wilderness of green

Heart-shaped leaves, like catalpa leaves, and lilies

Of monstrous size, like no well-bred lilies.

It seems the consistent critics wanted you

To choose between your world of jungle green

And the fashionable monde of the red couch

With its prim bric-à-brac, without a moon

To turn you luminous, without the eye

Of tigers to be stilled by your dark eye

And body whiter than its frill of lilies:

They’d have had yellow silk screening the moon,

Leaves and lilies flattened to paper behind you

Or, at most, to a mille-fleurs tapestry. But the couch

Stood stubborn in its jungle: red against green,

Red against fifty variants of green,

The couch glared out at the prosaic eye.

So Rousseau, to explain why the red couch

Persisted in the picture with the lilies,

Tigers, snakes, and the snakecharmer and you,

And birds of paradise, and the round moon,

Described how you fell dreaming at full of moon

On a red velvet couch within your green-

Tessellated boudoir. Hearing flutes, you

Dreamed yourself away in the moon’s eye

To a beryl jungle, and dreamed that bright moon-lilies

Nodded their petaled heads around your couch.

And that, Rousseau told the critics, was why the couch

Accompanied you. So they nodded at the couch with the moon

And the snakecharmer’s song and the gigantic lilies,

Marvelingly numbered the many shades of green.

But to a friend, in private, Rousseau confessed his eye

So possessed by the glowing red of the couch which you,

Yadwigha, pose on, that he put you on the couch

To feed his eye with red: such red! under the moon,

In the midst of all that green and those great lilies!

27 March 1958

70     A Winter’s Tale

On Boston Common a red star

Gleams, wired to a tall Ulmus

Americana. Magi near

The domed State House.

Old Joseph holds an alpenstock.

Two waxen oxen flank the Child.

A black sheep leads the shepherds’ flock.

Mary looks mild.

Angels—more feminine and douce

Than models from Bonwit’s or Jay’s,

Haloes lustrous as Sirius—

Gilt trumpets raise.

By S. S. Pierce, by S. S. Pierce,

The red-nosed, blue-caped women ring

For money. Lord, the crowds are fierce!

There’s caroling

On Winter Street, on Temple Place.

Poodles are baking cookies in

Filene’s show windows. Grant us grace,

Donner, Blitzen,

And all you Santa’s deer who browse

By leave of the Park Commission

On grass that once fed Boston cows.

In unison

On Pinckney, Mount Vernon, Chestnut,

The wreathed doors open to the crowd.

Noel! Noel! No mouth is shut.

Off key and loud

The populace sings toward the sill

Of windows with odd violet panes.

O Little City on a Hill!

The cordial strains

Of bellringers and singers rouse

Frost-bitten pigeons, eddy forth

From Charles Street to the Custom House,

From South Station to North.

71     Above the Oxbow

Here in this valley of discreet academies

We have not mountains, but mounts, truncated hillocks

To the Adirondacks, to northern Monadnock,

Themselves mere rocky hillocks to an Everest.

Still, they’re our best mustering of height: by

Comparison with the sunken silver-grizzled

Back of the Connecticut, the river-level

Flats of Hadley farms, they’re lofty enough

Elevations to be called something more than hills.

Green, wholly green, they stand their knobby spine

Against our sky: they are what we look southward to

Up Pleasant Street at Main. Poising their shapes

Between the snuff and red tar-paper apartments,

They mound a summer coolness in our view.

To people who live in the bottom of valleys

A rise in the landscape, hummock or hogback, looks

To be meant for climbing. A peculiar logic

In going up for the coming down if the post

We start at’s the same post we finish by,

But it’s the clear conversion at the top can hold

Us to the oblique road, in spite of a fitful

Wish for even ground, and it’s the last cliff

Ledge will dislodge our cramped concept of space, unwall

Horizons beyond vision, spill vision

After the horizons, stretching the narrowed eye

To full capacity. We climb in hopes

Of such seeing up the leaf-shuttered escarpments,

Blindered by green, under a green-grained sky

Into the blue. Tops define themselves as places

Where nothing higher’s to be looked to. Downward looks

Follow the black arrow-backs of swifts on their track

Of the air eddies’ loop and arc though air’s at rest

To us, since we see no leaf edge stir high

Here on a mount overlaid with leaves. The paint-peeled

Hundred-year-old hotel sustains its ramshackle

Four-way veranda, view-keeping above

The fallen timbers of its once remarkable

Funicular railway, witness to gone

Time, and to graces gone with the time. A state view-

Keeper collects half-dollars for the slopes

Of state scenery, sells soda, shows off viewpoints.

A ruddy skylight paints the gray oxbow

And paints the river’s pale circumfluent stillness

As roses broach their carmine in a mirror. Flux

Of the desultory currents—all that unique

Stipple of shifting wave-tips is ironed out, lost

In the simplified orderings of sky-

Lorded perspectives. Maplike, the far fields are ruled

By correct green lines and no seedy free-for-all

Of asparagus heads. Cars run their suave

Colored beads on the strung roads, and the people stroll

Straightforwardly across the springing green.

All’s peace and discipline down there. Till lately we

Lived under the shadow of hot rooftops

And never saw how coolly we might move. For once

A high hush quietens the crickets’ cry.

72     Memoirs of a Spinach-Picker

They called the place Lookout Farm.

Back then, the sun

Didn’t go down in such a hurry. How it

Lit things, that lamp of the Possible!

Wet yet

Lay over the leaves like a clear cellophane,

A pane of dragonfly wing, when they left me

With a hundred bushel baskets on the edge

Of the spinach patch.

Bunch after bunch of green

Upstanding spinach-tips wedged in a circle—

Layer on layer, and you had a basket

Irreproachable as any lettuce head,

Pure leafage. A hundred baskets by day’s end.

Sun and sky mirrored the green of the spinach.

In the tin pail shaded by yellow paper

Well-water kept cool at the start of the rows.

The water had an iron taste, and the air,

Even, a tang of metal.

Day in, day out,

I bent over the plants in my leather-kneed

Dungarees, proud as a lady in a sea

Of prize roses, culling the fullest florets;

My world pyramided with laden baskets.

I’d only to set one foot in wilderness—

A whole sea of spinach-heads leaned to my hand.

73     The Ghost’s Leavetaking

Enter the chilly no-man’s land of about

Five o’clock in the morning, the no-color void

Where the waking head rubbishes out the draggled lot

Of sulfurous dreamscapes and obscure lunar conundrums

Which seemed, when dreamed, to mean so profoundly much,

Gets ready to face the ready-made creation

Of chairs and bureaus and sleep-twisted sheets.

This is the kingdom of the fading apparition,

The oracular ghost who dwindles on pin-legs

To a knot of laundry, with a classic bunch of sheets

Upraised, as a hand, emblematic of farewell.

At this joint between two worlds and two entirely

Incompatible modes of time, the raw material

Of our meat-and-potato thoughts assumes the nimbus

Of ambrosial revelation. And so departs.

Chair and bureau are the hieroglyphs

Of some godly utterance wakened heads ignore:

So these posed sheets, before they thin to nothing,

Speak in sign language of a lost otherworld,

A world we lose by merely waking up.

Trailing its telltale tatters only at the outermost

Fringe of mundane vision, this ghost goes

Hand aloft, goodbye, goodbye, not down

Into the rocky gizzard of the earth,

But toward a region where our thick atmosphere

Diminishes, and God knows what is there.

A point of exclamation marks that sky

In ringing orange like a stellar carrot.

Its round period, displaced and green,

Suspends beside it the first point, the starting

Point of Eden, next the new moon’s curve.

Go, ghost of our mother and father, ghost of us,

And ghost of our dreams’ children, in those sheets

Which signify our origin and end,

To the cloud-cuckoo land of color wheels

And pristine alphabets and cows that moo

And moo as they jump over moons as new

As that crisp cusp towards which you voyage now.

Hail and farewell. Hello, goodbye. O keeper

Of the profane grail, the dreaming skull.

74     Sculptor

For Leonard Baskin

To his house the bodiless

Come to barter endlessly

Vision, wisdom, for bodies

Palpable as his, and weighty.

Hands moving move priestlier

Than priest’s hands, invoke no vain

Images of light and air

But sure stations in bronze, wood, stone.

Obdurate, in dense-grained wood,

A bald angel blocks and shapes

The flimsy light; arms folded

Watches his cumbrous world eclipse

Inane worlds of wind and cloud.

Bronze dead dominate the floor,

Resistive, ruddy-bodied,

Dwarfing us. Our bodies flicker

Toward extinction in those eyes

Which, without him, were beggared

Of place, time, and their bodies.

Emulous spirits make discord,

Try entry, enter nightmares

Until his chisel bequeaths

Them life livelier than ours,

A solider repose than death’s.

75     Full Fathom Five

Old man, you surface seldom.

Then you come in with the tide’s coming

When seas wash cold, foam-

Capped: white hair, white beard, far-flung,

A dragnet, rising, falling, as waves

Crest and trough. Miles long

Extend the radial sheaves

Of your spread hair, in which wrinkling skeins

Knotted, caught, survives

The old myth of origins

Unimaginable. You float near

As keeled ice-mountains

Of the north, to be steered clear

Of, not fathomed. All obscurity

Starts with a danger:

Your dangers are many. I

Cannot look much but your form suffers

Some strange injury

And seems to die: so vapors

Ravel to clearness on the dawn sea.

The muddy rumors

Of your burial move me

To half-believe: your reappearance

Proves rumors shallow,

For the archaic trenched lines

Of your grained face shed time in runnels:

Ages beat like rains

On the unbeaten channels

Of the ocean. Such sage humor and

Durance are whirlpools

To make away with the ground-

Work of the earth and the sky’s ridgepole.

Waist down, you may wind

One labyrinthine tangle

To root deep among knuckles, shinbones,

Skulls. Inscrutable,

Below shoulders not once

Seen by any man who kept his head,

You defy questions;

You defy other godhood.

I walk dry on your kingdom’s border

Exiled to no good.

Your shelled bed I remember.

Father, this thick air is murderous.

I would breathe water.

76     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

They rise, their limbs ponderous

With richness, hair heavier

Than sculpted marble. They sing

Of a world more full and clear

Than can be. Sisters, your song

Bears a burden too weighty

For the whorled ear’s listening

Here, in a well-steered country,

Under a balanced ruler.

Deranging by harmony

Beyond the mundane order,

Your voices lay siege. You lodge

On the pitched reefs of nightmare,

Promising sure harborage;

By day, descant from borders

Of hebetude, from the ledge

Also of high windows. Worse

Even than your maddening

Song, your silence. At the source

Of your ice-hearted calling—

Drunkenness of the great depths.

O river, I see drifting

Deep in your flux of silver

Those great goddesses of peace.

Stone, stone, ferry me down there.

77     Mussel Hunter at Rock Harbor

I came before the water-

Colorists came to get the

Good of the Cape light that scours

Sand grit to sided crystal

And buffs and sleeks the blunt hulls

Of the three fishing smacks beached

On the bank of the river’s

Backtracking tail. I’d come for

Free fish-bait: the blue mussels

Clumped like bulbs at the grass-root

Margin of the tidal pools.

Dawn tide stood dead low. I smelt

Mud stench, shell guts, gulls’ leavings;

Heard a queer crusty scrabble

Cease, and I neared the silenced

Edge of a cratered pool-bed

The mussels hung dull blue and

Conspicuous, yet it seemed

A sly world’s hinges had swung

Shut against me. All held still.

Though I counted scant seconds,

Enough ages lapsed to win

Confidence of safe-conduct

In the wary otherworld

Eyeing me. Grass put forth claws;

Small mud knobs, nudged from under,

Displaced their domes as tiny

Knights might doff their casques. The crabs

Inched from their pigmy burrows

And from the trench-dug mud, all

Camouflaged in mottled mail

Of browns and greens. Each wore one

Claw swollen to a shield large

As itself—no fiddler’s arm

Grown Gargantuan by trade,

But grown grimly, and grimly

Borne, for a use beyond my

Guessing of it. Sibilant

Mass-motived hordes, they sidled

Out in a converging stream

Toward the pool-mouth, perhaps to

Meet the thin and sluggish thread

Of sea retracing its tide-

Way up the river-basin.

Or to avoid me. They moved

Obliquely with a dry-wet

Sound, with a glittery wisp

And trickle. Could they feel mud

Pleasurable under claws

As I could between bare toes?

That question ended it—I

Stood shut out, for once, for all,

Puzzling the passage of their

Absolutely alien

Order as I might puzzle

At the clear tail of Halley’s

Comet coolly giving my

Orbit the go-by, made known

By a family name it

Knew nothing of. So the crabs

Went about their business, which

Wasn’t fiddling, and I filled

A big handkerchief with blue

Mussels. From what the crabs saw,

If they could see, I was one

Two-legged mussel-picker.

High on the airy thatching

Of the dense grasses I found

The husk of a fiddler-crab,

Intact, strangely strayed above

His world of mud—green color

And innards bleached and blown off

Somewhere by much sun and wind;

There was no telling if he’d

Died recluse or suicide

Or headstrong Columbus crab.

The crab-face, etched and set there,

Grimaced as skulls grimace: it

Had an Oriental look,

A samurai death mask done

On a tiger tooth, less for

Art’s sake than God’s. Far from sea—

Where red-freckled crab-backs, claws

And whole crabs, dead, their soggy

Bellies pallid and upturned,

Perform their shambling waltzes

On the waves’ dissolving turn

And return, losing themselves

Bit by bit to their friendly

Element—this relic saved

Face, to face the bald-faced sun.

78     Moonrise

Grub-white mulberries redden among leaves.

I’ll go out and sit in white like they do,

Doing nothing. July’s juice rounds their nubs.

This park is fleshed with idiot petals.

White catalpa flowers tower, topple,

Cast a round white shadow in their dying.

A pigeon rudders down. Its fan-tail’s white.

Vocation enough: opening, shutting

White petals, white fan-tails, ten white fingers.

Enough for fingernails to make half-moons

Redden in white palms no labor reddens.

White bruises toward color, else collapses.

Berries redden. A body of whiteness

Rots, and smells of rot under its headstone

Though the body walk out in clean linen.

I smell that whiteness here, beneath the stones

Where small ants roll their eggs, where grubs fatten.

Death may whiten in sun or out of it.

Death whitens in the egg and out of it.

I can see no color for this whiteness.

White: it is a complexion of the mind.

I tire, imagining white Niagaras

Build up from a rock root, as fountains build

Against the weighty image of their fall.

Lucina, bony mother, laboring

Among the socketed white stars, your face

Of candor pares white flesh to the white bone,

Who drag our ancient father at the heel,

White-bearded, weary. The berries purple

And bleed. The white stomach may ripen yet.

79     Frog Autumn

Summer grows old, cold-blooded mother.

The insects are scant, skinny.

In these palustral homes we only

Croak and wither.

Mornings dissipate in somnolence.

The sun brightens tardily

Among the pithless reeds. Flies fail us.

The fen sickens.

Frost drops even the spider. Clearly

The genius of plenitude

Houses himself elsewhere. Our folk thin

Lamentably.

80     In Midas’ Country

Meadows of gold dust. The silver

Currents of the Connecticut fan

And meander in bland pleatings under

River-verge farms where rye-heads whiten.

All’s polished to a dull luster

In the sulfurous noon. We move

With the languor of idols below

The sky’s great bell glass and briefly engrave

Our limbs’ image on a field of straw

And goldenrod as on gold leaf.

It might be heaven, this static

Plenitude: apples gold on the bough,

Goldfinch, goldfish, golden tiger cat stock-

Still in one gigantic tapestry—

And lovers affable, dovelike.

But now the water-skiers race,

Bracing their knees. On unseen towlines

They cleave the river’s greening patinas;

The mirror quivers to smithereens.

They stunt like clowns in the circus.

So we are hauled, though we would stop

On this amber bank where grasses bleach.

Already the farmer’s after his crop,

August gives over its Midas touch,

Wind bares a flintier landscape.

81     Incommunicado

The groundhog on the mountain did not run

But fatly scuttled into the splayed fern

And faced me, back to a ledge of dirt, to rattle

Her sallow rodent teeth like castanets

Against my leaning down, would not exchange

For that wary clatter sound or gesture

Of love: claws braced, at bay, my currency not hers.

Such meetings never occur in märchen

Where love-met groundhogs love one in return,

Where straight talk is the rule, whether warm or hostile,

Which no gruff animal misinterprets.

From what grace am I fallen. Tongues are strange,

Signs say nothing. The falcon who spoke clear

To Canacee cries gibberish to coarsened ears.

82     Child’s Park Stones

In sunless air, under pines

Green to the point of blackness, some

   Founding father set these lobed, warped stones

To loom in the leaf-filtered gloom

Black as the charred knuckle-bones

Of a giant or extinct

Animal, come from another

   Age, another planet surely. Flanked

By the orange and fuchsia bonfire

Of azaleas, sacrosanct

These stones guard a dark repose

And keep their shapes intact while sun

   Alters shadows of rose and iris—

Long, short, long—in the lit garden

And kindles a day’s-end blaze

Colored to dull the pigment

Of the azaleas, yet burnt out

   Quick as they. To follow the light’s tint

And intensity by midnight

By noon and throughout the brunt

Of various weathers is

To know the still heart of the stones:

   Stones that take the whole summer to lose

Their dream of the winter’s cold; stones

Warming at core only as

Frost forms. No man’s crowbar could

Uproot them: their beards are ever-

   Green. Nor do they, once in a hundred

Years, go down to drink the river:

No thirst disturbs a stone’s bed.

83     Owl

Clocks belled twelve. Main Street showed otherwise

Than its suburb of woods: nimbus-

Lit, but unpeopled, held its windows

Of wedding pastries,

Diamond rings, potted roses, fox-skins

Ruddy on the wax mannequins

In a glassed tableau of affluence.

From deep-sunk basements

What moved the pale, raptorial owl

Then, to squall above the level

Of streetlights and wires, its wall to wall

Wingspread in control

Of the ferrying currents, belly

Dense-feathered, fearfully soft to

Look upon? Rats’ teeth gut the city

Shaken by owl cry.

26 June 1958

84     Whiteness I Remember

Whiteness being what I remember

About Sam: whiteness and the great run

He gave me. I’ve gone nowhere since but

Going’s been tame deviation. White,

Not of heraldic stallions: off-white

Of the stable horse whose history’s

Humdrum, unexceptionable, his

Tried sobriety hiring him out

To novices and to the timid.

Yet the dapple toning his white down

To safe gray never grayed his temper.

I see him one-tracked, stubborn, white horse,

First horse under me, high as the roofs,

His neat trot pitching my tense poise up,

Unsettling the steady-rooted green

Of country hedgerows and cow pastures

To a giddy jog. Then for ill will

Or to try me he suddenly set

Green grass streaming, houses a river

Of pale fronts, straw thatchings, the hard road

An anvil, hooves four hammers to jolt

Me off into their space of beating,

Stirrups undone, and decorum. And

Wouldn’t slow for the hauled reins, his name,

Or shouts of walkers: crossroad traffic

Stalling curbside at his oncoming,

The world subdued to his run of it.

I hung on his neck. Resoluteness

Simplified me: a rider, riding

Hung out over hazard, over hooves

Loud on earth’s bedrock. Almost thrown, not

Thrown: fear, wisdom, at one: all colors

Spinning to still in his one whiteness.

9 July 1958

85     Fable of the Rhododendron Stealers

I walked the unwalked garden of rose-beds

In the public park; at home felt the want

Of a single rose present to imagine

The garden’s remainder in full paint.

The stone lion-head set in the wall

Let drop its spittle of sluggish green

Into the stone basin. I snipped

An orange bud, pocketed it. When

It had opened its orange in my vase,

Retrogressed to blowze, I next chose red;

Argued my conscience clear which robbed

The park of less red than withering did.

Musk satisfied my nose, red my eye,

The petals’ nap my fingertips:

I considered the poetry I rescued

From blind air, from complete eclipse.

Yet today, a yellow bud in my hand,

I stalled at sudden noisy crashes

From the laurel thicket. No one approached.

A spasm took the rhododendron bushes:

Three girls, engrossed, were wrenching full clusters

Of cerise and pink from the rhododendron,

Mountaining them on spread newspaper.

They brassily picked, slowed by no chagrin,

And wouldn’t pause for my straight look.

But gave me pause, my rose a charge,

Whether nicety stood confounded by love,

Or petty thievery by large.

86     The Death of Myth-Making

Two virtues ride, by stallion, by nag,

To grind our knives and scissors:

Lantern-jawed Reason, squat Common Sense,

One courting doctors of all sorts,

One, housewives and shopkeepers.

The trees are lopped, the poodles trim,

The laborer’s nails pared level

Since those two civil servants set

Their whetstone to the blunted edge

And minced the muddling devil

Whose owl-eyes in the scraggly wood

Scared mothers to miscarry,

Drove the dogs to cringe and whine,

And turned the farmboy’s temper wolfish,

The housewife’s, desultory.

87     Green Rock, Winthrop Bay

No lame excuses can gloss over

Barge-tar clotted at the tide-line, the wrecked piet

I should have known better.

Fifteen years between me and the bay

Profited memory, but did away with the old scenery

And patched this shoddy

Makeshift of a view to quit

My promise of an idyll. the blue’s worn out:

It’s a niggard estate,

Inimical now. The great green rock

We gave good use as ship and house is black

With tarry muck

And periwinkles, shrunk to common

Size. The cries of scavenging gulls sound thin

In the traffic of planes

From Logan Airport opposite.

Gulls circle gray under shadow of a steelier flight.

Loss cancels profit.

Unless you do this tawdry harbor

A service and ignore it, I go a liar

Gilding what’s eyesore,

Or must take loophole and blame time

For the rock’s dwarfed lump, for the drabbled scum,

For a churlish welcome.

88     The Companionable Ills

The nose-end that twitches, the old imperfections—

Tolerable now as moles on the face

Put up with until chagrin gives place

To a wry complaisance—

Dug in first as God’s spurs

To start the spirit out of the mud

It stabled in; long-used, became well-loved

Bedfellows of the spirit’s debauch, fond masters.

89     I Want, I Want

Open-mouthed, the baby god

Immense, bald, though baby-headed,

Cried out for the mother’s dug.

The dry volcanoes cracked and spit,

Sand abraded the milkless lip.

Cried then for the father’s blood

Who set wasp, wolf and shark to work,

Engineered the gannet’s beak.

Dry-eyed, the inveterate patriarch

Raised his men of skin and bone,

Barbs on the crown of gilded wire,

Thorns on the bloody rose-stem.

90     Poems, Potatoes

The word, defining, muzzles; the drawn line

Ousts mistier peers and thrives, murderous,

In establishments which imagined lines

Can only haunt. Sturdy as potatoes,

Stones, without conscience, word and line endure,

Given an inch. Not that they’re gross (although

Afterthought often would have them alter

To delicacy, to poise) but that they

Shortchange me continuously: whether

More or other, they still dissatisfy.

Unpoemed, unpictured, the potato

Bunches its knobby browns on a vastly

Superior page; the blunt stone also.

91     The Times Are Tidy

Unlucky the hero born

In this province of the stuck record

Where the most watchful cooks go jobless

And the mayor’s rôtisserie turns

Round of its own accord.

There’s no career in the venture

Of riding against the lizard,

Himself withered these latter-days

To leaf-size from lack of action:

History’s beaten the hazard.

The last crone got burnt up

More than eight decades back

With the love-hot herb, the talking cat,

But the children are better for it,

The cow milks cream an inch thick.

1959

92     The Bull of Bendylaw

The black bull bellowed before the sea.

The sea, till that day orderly,

Hove up against Bendylaw.

The queen in the mulberry arbor stared

Stiff as a queen on a playing card.

The king fingered his beard.

A blue sea, four horny bull-feet,

A bull-snouted sea that wouldn’t stay put,

Bucked at the garden gate.

Along box-lined walks in the florid sun

Toward the rowdy bellow and back again

The lords and ladies ran.

The great bronze gate began to crack,

The sea broke in at every crack,

Pellmell, blueblack.

The bull surged up, the bull surged down,

Not to be stayed by a daisy chain

Nor by any learned man.

O the king’s tidy acre is under the sea,

And the royal rose in the bull’s belly,

And the bull on the king’s highway.

93     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

While 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.

94     Point Shirley

From Water-Tower Hill to the brick prison

The shingle booms, bickering under

The sea’s collapse.

Snowcakes break and welter. This year

The gritted wave leaps

The seawall and drops onto a bier

Of quahog chips,

Leaving a salty mash of ice to whiten

In my grandmother’s sand yard. She is dead,

Whose laundry snapped and froze here, who

Kept house against

What the sluttish, rutted sea could do.

Squall waves once danced

Ship timbers in through the cellar window;

A thresh-tailed, lanced

Shark littered in the geranium bed—

Such collusion of mulish elements

She wore her broom straws to the nub.

Twenty years out

Of her hand, the house still hugs in each drab

Stucco socket

The purple egg-stones: from Great Head’s knob

To the filled-in Gut

The sea in its cold gizzard ground those rounds.

Nobody wintering now behind

The planked-up windows where she set

Her wheat loaves

And apple cakes to cool. What is it

Survives, grieves

So, over this battered, obstinate spit

Of gravel? The waves’

Spewed relics clicker masses in the wind,

Grey waves the stub-necked eiders ride.

A labor of love, and that labor lost.

Steadily the sea

Eats at Point Shirley. She died blessed,

And I come by

Bones, bones only, pawed and tossed,

A dog-faced sea.

The sun sinks under Boston, bloody red.

I would get from these dry-papped stones

The milk your love instilled in them.

The black ducks dive.

And though your graciousness might stream,

And I contrive,

Grandmother, stones are nothing of home

To that spumiest dove.

Against both bar and tower the black sea runs.

95     Goatsucker

Old goatherds swear how all night long they hear

The warning whirr and burring of the bird

Who wakes with darkness and till dawn works hard

Vampiring dry of milk each great goat udder.

Moon full, moon dark, the chary dairy farmer

Dreams that his fattest cattle dwindle, fevered

By claw-cuts of the Goatsucker, alias Devil-bird,

Its eye, flashlit, a chip of ruby fire.

So fables say the Goatsucker moves, masked from men’s sight

In an ebony air, on wings of witch cloth,

Well-named, ill-famed a knavish fly-by-night,

Yet it never milked any goat, nor dealt cow death

And shadows only—cave-mouth bristle beset—

Cockchafers and the wan, green luna moth.

96     Watercolor of Grantchester Meadows

There, spring lambs jam the sheepfold. In air

Stilled, silvered as water in a glass

Nothing is big or far.

The small shrew chitters from its wilderness

Of grassheads and is heard.

Each thumb-size bird

Flits nimble-winged in thickets, and of good color.

Cloudwrack and owl-hollowed willows slanting over

The bland Granta double their white and green

World under the sheer water

And ride that flux at anchor, upside down.

The punter sinks his pole.

In Byron’s pool

Cat-tails part where the tame cygnets steer.

It is a country on a nursery plate.

Spotted cows revolve their jaws and crop

Red clover or gnaw beetroot

Bellied on a nimbus of sun-glazed buttercup.

Hedging meadows of benign

Arcadian green

The blood-berried hawthorn hides its spines with white.

Droll, vegetarian, the water rat

Saws down a reed and swims from his limber grove,

While the students stroll or sit,

Hands laced, in a moony indolence of love—

Black-gowned, but unaware

How in such mild air

The owl shall stoop from his turret, the rat cry out.

19 February 1959

97     A Winter Ship

At this wharf there are no grand landings to speak of.

Red and orange barges list and blister

Shackled to the dock, outmoded, gaudy,

And apparently indestructible.

The sea pulses under a skin of oil.

A gull holds his pose on a shanty ridgepole,

Riding the tide of the wind, steady

As wood and formal, in a jacket of ashes,

The whole flat harbor anchored in

The round of his yellow eye-button.

A blimp swims up like a day-moon or tin

Cigar over his rink of fishes.

The prospect is dull as an old etching.

They are unloading three barrels of little crabs.

The pier pilings seem about to collapse

And with them that rickety edifice

Of warehouses, derricks, smokestacks and bridges

In the distance. All around us the water slips

And gossips in its loose vernacular,

Ferrying the smells of dead cod and tar.

Farther out, the waves will be mouthing icecakes—

A poor month for park-sleepers and lovers.

Even our shadows are blue with cold.

We wanted to see the sun come up

And are met, instead, by this iceribbed ship,

Bearded and blown, an albatross of frost,

Relic of tough weather, every winch and stay

Encased in a glassy pellicle.

The sun will diminish it soon enough:

Each wave-tip glitters like a knife.

98     Aftermath

Compelled by calamity’s magnet

They loiter and stare as if the house

Burnt-out were theirs, or as if they thought

Some scandal might any minute ooze

From a smoke-choked closet into light;

No deaths, no prodigious injuries

Glut these hunters after an old meat,

Blood-spoor of the austere tragedies.

Mother Medea in a green smock

Moves humbly as any housewife through

Her ruined apartments, taking stock

Of charred shoes, the sodden upholstery:

Cheated of the pyre and the rack,

The crowd sucks her last tear and turns away.

99     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.

100     Suicide off Egg Rock

Behind him the hotdogs split and drizzled

On the public grills, and the ochreous salt flats,

Gas tanks, factory stacks—that landscape

Of imperfections his bowels were part of—

Rippled and pulsed in the glassy updraught.

Sun struck the water like a damnation.

No pit of shadow to crawl into,

And his blood beating the old tattoo

I am, I am, I am. Children

Were squealing where combers broke and the spindrift

Raveled wind-ripped from the crest of the wave.

A mongrel working his legs to a gallop

Hustled a gull flock to flap off the sandspit.

He smoldered, as if stone-deaf, blindfold,

His body beached with the sea’s garbage,

A machine to breathe and beat forever.

Flies filing in through a dead skate’s eyehole

Buzzed and assailed the vaulted brainchamber.

The words in his book wormed off the pages.

Everything glittered like blank paper.

Everything shrank in the sun’s corrosive

Ray but Egg Rock on the blue wastage.

He heard when he walked into the water

The forgetful surf creaming on those ledges.

101     The Ravaged Face

Outlandish as a circus, the ravaged face

Parades the marketplace, lurid and stricken

By some unutterable chagrin,

Maudlin from leaky eye to swollen nose.

Two pinlegs stagger underneath the mass.

Grievously purpled, mouth skewered on a groan,

Past keeping to the house, past all discretion—

Myself, myself!—obscene, lugubrious.

Better the flat leer of the idiot,

The stone face of the man who doesn’t feel,

The velvet dodges of the hypocrite:

Better, better, and more acceptable

To timorous children, to the lady on the street.

O Oedipus. O Christ. You use me ill.

19 March 1959

102     Metaphors

I’m a riddle in nine syllables,

An elephant, a ponderous house,

A melon strolling on two tendrils.

O red fruit, ivory, fine timbers!

This loaf’s big with its yeasty rising.

Money’s new-minted in this fat purse.

I’m a means, a stage, a cow in calf.

I’ve eaten a bag of green apples,

Boarded the train there’s no getting off.

20 March 1959

103     Electra on Azalea Path

The day you died I went into the dirt,

Into the lightless hibernaculum

Where bees, striped black and gold, sleep out the blizzard

Like hieratic stones, and the ground is hard.

It was good for twenty years, that wintering—

As if you had never existed, as if I came

God-fathered into the world from my mother’s belly:

Her wide bed wore the stain of divinity.

I had nothing to do with guilt or anything

When I wormed back under my mother’s heart.

Small as a doll in my dress of innocence

I lay dreaming your epic, image by image.

Nobody died or withered on that stage.

Everything took place in a durable whiteness.

The day I woke, I woke on Churchyard Hill.

I found your name, I found your bones and all

Enlisted in a cramped necropolis,

Your speckled stone askew by an iron fence.

In this charity ward, this poorhouse, where the dead

Crowd foot to foot, head to head, no flower

Breaks the soil. This is Azalea Path.

A field of burdock opens to the south.

Six feet of yellow gravel cover you.

The artificial red sage does not stir

In the basket of plastic evergreens they put

At the headstone next to yours, nor does it rot,

Although the rains dissolve a bloody dye:

The ersatz petals drip, and they drip red.

Another kind of redness bothers me:

The day your slack sail drank my sister’s breath

The flat sea purpled like that evil cloth

My mother unrolled at your last homecoming.

I borrow the stilts of an old tragedy.

The truth is, one late October, at my birth-cry

A scorpion stung its head, an ill-starred thing;

My mother dreamed you face down in the sea.

The stony actors poise and pause for breath.

I brought my love to bear, and then you died.

It was the gangrene ate you to the bone

My mother said; you died like any man.

How shall I age into that state of mind?

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.

104     The Beekeeper’s Daughter

A garden of mouthings. Purple, scarlet-speckled, black

The great corollas dilate, peeling back their silks.

Their musk encroaches, circle after circle,

A well of scents almost too dense to breathe in.

Hieratical in your frock coat, maestro of the bees,

You move among the many-breasted hives,

My heart under your foot, sister of a stone.

Trumpet-throats open to the beaks of birds.

The Golden Rain Tree drips its powders down.

In these little boudoirs streaked with orange and red

The anthers nod their heads, potent as kings

To father dynasties. The air is rich.

Here is a queenship no mother can contest—

A fruit that’s death to taste: dark flesh, dark parings.

In burrows narrow as a finger, solitary bees

Keep house among the grasses. Kneeling down

I set my eye to a hole-mouth and meet an eye

Round, green, disconsolate as a tear.

Father, bridegroom, in this Easter egg

Under the coronal of sugar roses

The queen bee marries the winter of your year.

105     The Hermit at Outermost House

Sky and sea, horizon-hinged

Tablets of blank blue, couldn’t,

Clapped shut, flatten this man out.

The great gods, Stone-Head, Claw-Foot,

Winded by much rock-bumping

And claw-threat, realized that.

For what, then, had they endured

Dourly the long hots and colds,

Those old despots, if he sat

Laugh-shaken on his doorsill,

Backbone unbendable as

Timbers of his upright hut?

Hard gods were there, nothing else.

Still he thumbed out something else.

Thumbed no stony, horny pot,

But a certain meaning green.

He withstood them, that hermit.

Rock-face, crab-claw verged on green.

Gulls mulled in the greenest light.

106     Man in Black

Where the three magenta

Breakwaters take the shove

And suck of the gray sea

To the left, and the wave

Unfists against the dun

Barb-wired headland of

The Deer Island prison

With its trim piggeries,

Hen huts and cattle green

To the right, and March ice

Glazes the rock pools yet,

Snuff-colored sand cliffs rise

Over a great stone spit

Bared by each falling tide,

And you, across those white

Stones, strode out in your dead

Black coat, black shoes, and your

Black hair till there you stood,

Fixed vortex on the far

Tip, riveting stones, air,

All of it, together.

107     Old Ladies’ Home

Sharded in black, like beetles,

Frail as antique earthenware

One breath might shiver to bits,

The old women creep out here

To sun on the rocks or prop

Themselves up against the wall

Whose stones keep a little heat.

Needles knit in a bird-beaked

Counterpoint to their voices:

Sons, daughters, daughters and sons,

Distant and cold as photos,

Grandchildren nobody knows.

Age wears the best black fabric

Rust-red or green as lichens.

At owl-call the old ghosts flock

To hustle them off the lawn.

From beds boxed-in like coffins

The bonneted ladies grin.

And Death, that bald-head buzzard,

Stalls in halls where the lamp wick

Shortens with each breath drawn.

108     The Net-Menders

Halfway up from the little harbor of sardine boats,

Halfway down from groves where the thin, bitter almond pips

Fatten in green-pocked pods, the three net-menders sit out,

Dressed in black, everybody in mourning for someone.

They set their stout chairs back to the road and face the dark

Dominoes of their doorways.

Sun grains their crow-colors,

Purples the fig in the leafs shadow, turns the dust pink.

On the road named for Tomas Ortunio, mica

Winks like money under the ringed toes of the chickens.

The houses are white as sea-salt goats lick from the rocks.

While their fingers work with the coarse mesh and the fine

Their eyes revolve the whole town like a blue and green ball.

Nobody dies or is born without their knowing it.

They talk of bride-lace, of lovers spunky as gamecocks.

The moon leans, a stone madonna, over the lead sea

And the iron hills that enclose them. Earthen fingers

Twist old words into the web-threads:

Tonight may the fish

Be a harvest of silver in the nets, and the lamps

Of our husbands and sons move sure among the low stars.

109     Magnolia Shoals

Up here among the gull cries

we stroll through a maze of pale

red-mottled relics, shells, claws

as if it were summer still.

That season has turned its back.

Though the green sea gardens stall,

bow, and recover their look

of the imperishable

gardens in an antique book

or tapestries on a wall,

leaves behind us warp and lapse.

The late month withers, as well.

Below us a white gull keeps

the weed-slicked shelf for his own,

hustles other gulls off. Crabs

rove over his field of stone;

mussels cluster blue as grapes:

his beak brings the harvest in.

The watercolorist grips

his brush in the stringent air.

The horizon’s bare of ships,

the beach and the rocks are bare.

He paints a blizzard of gulls,

wings drumming in the winter.

October 1959

110     The Sleepers

No map traces the street

Where those two sleepers are.

We have lost track of it.

They lie as if under water

In a blue, unchanging light,

The French window ajar

Curtained with yellow lace.

Through the narrow crack

Odors of wet earth rise.

The snail leaves a silver track;

Dark thickets hedge the house.

We take a backward look.

Among petals pale as death

And leaves steadfast in shape

They sleep on, mouth to mouth.

A white mist is going up.

The small green nostrils breathe,

And they turn in their sleep.

Ousted from that warm bed

We are a dream they dream.

Their eyelids keep the shade.

No harm can come to them.

We cast our skins and slide

Into another time.

111     Yaddo: The Grand Manor

Woodsmoke and a distant loudspeaker

Filter into this clear

Air, and blur.

The red tomato’s in, the green bean;

The cook lugs a pumpkin

From the vine

For pies. The fir tree’s thick with grackles.

Gold carp loom in the pools.

A wasp crawls

Over windfalls to sip cider-juice.

Guests in the studios

Muse, compose.

Indoors, Tiffany’s phoenix rises

Above the fireplace;

Two carved sleighs

Rest on orange plush near the newel post.

Wood stoves burn warm as toast.

The late guest

Wakens, mornings, to a cobalt sky,

A diamond-paned window,

Zinc-white snow.

112     Medallion

By the gate with star and moon

Worked into the peeled orange wood

The bronze snake lay in the sun

Inert as a shoelace; dead

But pliable still, his jaw

Unhinged and his grin crooked,

Tongue a rose-colored arrow.

Over my hand I hung him.

His little vermilion eye

Ignited with a glassed flame

As I turned him in the light;

When I split a rock one time

The garnet bits burned like that.

Dust dulled his back to ochre

The way sun ruins a trout.

Yet his belly kept its fire

Going under the chainmail,

The old jewels smoldering there

In each opaque belly-scale:

Sunset looked at through milk glass.

And I saw white maggots coil

Thin as pins in the dark bruise

Where his innards bulged as if

He were digesting a mouse.

Knifelike, he was chaste enough,

Pure death’s-metal. The yardman’s

Flung brick perfected his laugh.

113     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.

114     Blue Moles

(1)

They’re out of the dark’s ragbag, these two

Moles dead in the pebbled rut,

Shapeless as flung gloves, a few feet apart—

Blue suede a dog or fox has chewed.

One, by himself, seemed pitiable enough,

Little victim unearthed by some large creature

From his orbit under the elm root.

The second carcass makes a duel of the affair:

Blind twins bitten by bad nature.

The sky’s far dome is sane and clear.

Leaves, undoing their yellow caves

Between the road and the lake water,

Bare no sinister spaces. Already

The moles look neutral as the stones.

Their corkscrew noses, their white hands

Uplifted, stiffen in a family pose.

Difficult to imagine how fury struck—

Dissolved now, smoke of an old war.

(2)

Nightly the battle-shouts start up

In the ear of the veteran, and again

I enter the soft pelt of the mole.

Light’s death to them: they shrivel in it.

They move through their mute rooms while I sleep,

Palming the earth aside, grubbers

After the fat children of root and rock.

By day, only the topsoil heaves.

Down there one is alone.

Outsize hands prepare a path,

They go before: opening the veins,

Delving for the appendages

Of beetles, sweetbreads, shards—to be eaten

Over and over. And still the heaven

Of final surfeit is just as far

From the door as ever. What happens between us

Happens in darkness, vanishes

Easy and often as each breath.

115     Dark Wood, Dark Water

This wood burns a dark

Incense. Pale moss drips

In elbow-scarves, beards

From the archaic

Bones of the great trees.

Blue mists move over

A lake thick with fish.

Snails scroll the border

Of the glazed water

With coils of ram’s-horn.

Out in the open

Down there the late year

Hammers her rare and

Various metals.

Old pewter roots twist

Up from the jet-backed

Mirror of water

And while the air’s clear

Hourglass sifts a

Drift of goldpieces

Bright waterlights are

Sliding their quoits one

After the other

Down boles of the fir.

116     Polly’s Tree

A dream tree, Polly’s tree:

a thicket of sticks,

   each speckled twig

ending in a thin-paned

leaf unlike any

   other on it

or in a ghost flower

flat as paper and

   of a color

vaporish as frost-breath,

more finical than

   any silk fan

the Chinese ladies use

to stir robin’s egg

   air. The silver-

haired seed of the milkweed

comes to roost there, frail

   as the halo

rayed round a candle flame,

a will-o’-the-wisp

   nimbus, or puff

of cloud-stuff, tipping her

queer candelabrum.

   Palely lit by

snuff-ruffed dandelions,

white daisy wheels and

   a tiger-faced

pansy, it glows. O it’s

no family tree,

   Polly’s tree, nor

a tree of heaven, though

it marry quartz-flake,

   feather and rose.

It sprang from her pillow

whole as a cobweb,

   ribbed like a hand,

a dream tree. Polly’s tree

wears a valentine

   arc of tear-pearled

bleeding hearts on its sleeve

and, crowning it, one

   blue larkspur star.

117     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,

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.

118     Private Ground

First frost, and I walk among the rose-fruit, the marble toes

Of the Greek beauties you brought

Off Europe’s relic heap

To sweeten your neck of the New York woods.

Soon each white lady will be boarded up

Against the cracking climate.

All morning, with smoking breath, the handyman

Has been draining the goldfish ponds.

They collapse like lungs, the escaped water

Threading back, filament by filament, to the pure

Platonic table where it lives. The baby carp

Litter the mud like orangepeel.

Eleven weeks, and I know your estate so well

I need hardly go out at all.

A superhighway seals me off.

Trading their poisons, the north and south bound cars

Flatten the doped snakes to ribbon. In here, the grasses

Unload their griefs on my shoes,

The woods creak and ache, and the day forgets itself.

I bend over this drained basin where the small fish

Flex as the mud freezes.

They glitter like eyes, and I collect them all.

Morgue of old logs and old images, the lake

Opens and shuts, accepting them among its reflections.

119     Poem for a Birthday

1. Who

The month of flowering’s finished. The fruit’s in,

Eaten or rotten. I am all mouth.

October’s the month for storage.

This shed’s fusty as a mummy’s stomach:

Old tools, handles and rusty tusks.

I am at home here among the dead heads.

Let me sit in a flowerpot,

The spiders won’t notice.

My heart is a stopped geranium.

If only the wind would leave my lungs alone.

Dogbody noses the petals. They bloom upside down.

They rattle like hydrangea bushes.

Moldering heads console me,

Nailed to the rafters yesterday:

Inmates who don’t hibernate.

Cabbageheads: wormy purple, silver-glaze,

A dressing of mule ears, mothy pelts, but green-hearted,

Their veins white as porkfat.

O the beauty of usage!

The orange pumpkins have no eyes.

These halls are full of women who think they are birds.

This is a dull school.

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.

I said: I must remember this, being small.

There were such enormous flowers,

Purple and red mouths, utterly lovely.

The hoops of blackberry stems made me cry.

Now they light me up like an electric bulb.

For weeks I can remember nothing at all.

2. Dark House

This is a dark house, very big.

I made it myself,

Cell by cell from a quiet corner,

Chewing at the gray paper,

Oozing the glue drops,

Whistling, wiggling my ears,

Thinking of something else.

It has so many cellars,

Such eelish delvings!

I am round as an owl,

I see by my own light.

Any day I may litter puppies

Or mother a horse. My belly moves.

I must make more maps.

These marrowy tunnels!

Moley-handed, I eat my way.

All-mouth licks up the bushes

And the pots of meat.

He lives in an old well,

A stony hole. He’s to blame.

He’s a fat sort.

Pebble smells, turnipy chambers.

Small nostrils are breathing.

Little humble loves!

Footlings, boneless as noses,

It is warm and tolerable

In the bowel of the root.

Here’s a cuddly mother.

3. Maenad

Once I was ordinary:

Sat by my father’s bean tree

Eating the fingers of wisdom.

The birds made milk.

When it thundered I hid under a flat stone.

The mother of mouths didn’t love me.

The old man shrank to a doll.

O I am too big to go backward:

Birdmilk is feathers,

The bean leaves are dumb as hands.

This month is fit for little.

The dead ripen in the grapeleaves.

A red tongue is among us.

Mother, keep out of my barnyard,

I am becoming another.

Dog-head, devourer:

Feed me the berries of dark.

The lids won’t shut. Time

Unwinds from the great umbilicus of the sun

Its endless glitter.

I must swallow it all.

Lady, who are these others in the moon’s vat—

Sleepdrunk, their limbs at odds?

In this light the blood is black.

Tell me my name.

4. The Beast

He was bullman earlier,

King of the dish, my lucky animal.

Breathing was easy in his airy holding.

The sun sat in his armpit.

Nothing went moldy. The little invisibles

Waited on him hand and foot.

The blue sisters sent me to another school

Monkey lived under the dunce cap.

He kept blowing me kisses.

I hardly knew him.

He won’t be got rid of:

Mumblepaws, teary and sorry,

Fido Littlesoul, the bowel’s familiar.

A dustbin’s enough for him.

The dark’s his bone.

Call him any name, he’ll come to it.

Mud-sump, happy sty-face.

I’ve married a cupboard of rubbish.

I bed in a fish puddle.

Down here the sky is always falling.

Hogwallow’s at the window.

The star bugs won’t save me this month.

I housekeep in Time’s gut-end

Among emmets and mollusks,

Duchess of Nothing,

Hairtusk’s bride.

5. Flute Notes from a Reedy Pond

Now coldness comes sifting down, layer after layer,

To our bower at the lily root.

Overhead the old umbrellas of summer

Wither like pithless hands. There is little shelter.

Hourly the eye of the sky enlarges its blank

Dominion. The stars are no nearer.

Already frog-mouth and fish-mouth drink

The liquor of indolence, and all things sink

Into a soft caul of forgetfulness.

The fugitive colors die.

Caddis worms drowse in their silk cases,

The lamp-headed nymphs are nodding to sleep like statues.

Puppets, loosed from the strings of the puppet-master,

Wear masks of horn to bed.

This is not death, it is something safer.

The wingy myths won’t tug at us any more:

The molts are tongueless that sang from above the water

Of golgotha at the tip of a reed,

And how a god flimsy as a baby’s finger

Shall unhusk himself and steer into the air.

6. Witch Burning

In the marketplace they are piling the dry sticks.

A thicket of shadows is a poor coat. I inhabit

The wax image of myself, a doll’s body.

Sickness begins here: I am a dartboard for witches.

Only the devil can eat the devil out.

In the month of red leaves I climb to a bed of fire.

It is easy to blame the dark: the mouth of a door,

The cellar’s belly. They’ve blown my sparkler out.

A black-sharded lady keeps me in a parrot cage.

What large eyes the dead have!

I am intimate with a hairy spirit.

Smoke wheels from the beak of this empty jar.

If I am a little one, I can do no harm.

If I don’t move about, I’ll knock nothing over. So I said,

Sitting under a potlid, tiny and inert as a rice grain.

They are turning the burners up, ring after ring.

We are full of starch, my small white fellows. We grow.

It hurts at first. The red tongues will teach the truth.

Mother of beetles, only unclench your hand:

I’ll fly through the candle’s mouth like a singeless moth.

Give me back my shape. I am ready to construe the days

I coupled with dust in the shadow of a stone.

My ankles brighten. Brightness ascends my thighs.

I am lost, I am lost, in the robes of all this light.

7. The Stones

This is the city where men are mended.

I lie on a great anvil.

The flat blue sky-circle

Flew off like the hat of a doll

When I fell out of the light. I entered

The stomach of indifference, the wordless cupboard.

The mother of pestles diminished me.

I became a still pebble.

The stones of the belly were peaceable,

The head-stone quiet, jostled by nothing.

Only the mouth-hole piped out,

Importunate cricket

In a quarry of silences.

The people of the city heard it.

They hunted the stones, taciturn and separate,

The mouth-hole crying their locations.

Drunk as a foetus

I suck at the paps of darkness.

The food tubes embrace me. Sponges kiss my lichens away.

The jewelmaster drives his chisel to pry

Open one stone eye.

This is the after-hell: I see the light.

A wind unstoppers the chamber

Of the ear, old worrier.

Water mollifies the flint lip,

And daylight lays its sameness on the wall.

The grafters are cheerful,

Heating the pincers, hoisting the delicate hammers.

A current agitates the wires

Volt upon volt. Catgut stitches my fissures.

A workman walks by carrying a pink torso.

The storerooms are full of hearts.

This is the city of spare parts.

My swaddled legs and arms smell sweet as rubber.

Here they can doctor heads, or any limb.

On Fridays the little children come

To trade their hooks for hands.

Dead men leave eyes for others.

Love is the uniform of my bald nurse.

Love is the bone and sinew of my curse.

The vase, reconstructed, houses

The elusive rose.

Ten fingers shape a bowl for shadows.

My mendings itch. There is nothing to do.

I shall be good as new.

4 November 1959

120     The Burnt-out Spa

An old beast ended in this place:

A monster of wood and rusty teeth.

Fire smelted his eyes to lumps

Of pale blue vitreous stuff, opaque

As resin drops oozed from pine bark.

The rafters and struts of his body wear

Their char of karakul still. I can’t tell

How long his carcass has foundered under

The rubbish of summers, the black-leaved falls.

Now little weeds insinuate

Soft suede tongues between his bones.

His armorplate, his toppled stones

Are an esplanade for crickets.

I pick and pry like a doctor or

Archaeologist among

Iron entrails, enamel bowls,

The coils and pipes that made him run.

The small dell eats what ate it once.

And yet the ichor of the spring

Proceeds clear as it ever did

From the broken throat, the marshy lip.

It flows off below the green and white

Balustrade of a sag-backed bridge.

Leaning over, I encounter one

Blue and improbable person

Framed in a basketwork of cat-tails.

O she is gracious and austere,

Seated beneath the toneless water!

It is not I, it is not I.

No animal spoils on her green doorstep.

And we shall never enter there

Where the durable ones keep house.

The stream that hustles us

Neither nourishes nor heals.

11 November 1959

121     Mushrooms

Overnight, very

Whitely, discreetly,

Very quietly

Our toes, our noses

Take hold on the loam,

Acquire the air.

Nobody sees us,

Stops us, betrays us;

The small grains make room.

Soft fists insist on

Heaving the needles,

The leafy bedding,

Even the paving.

Our hammers, our rams,

Earless and eyeless,

Perfectly voiceless,

Widen the crannies,

Shoulder through holes. We

Diet on water,

On crumbs of shadow,

Bland-mannered, asking

Little or nothing.

So many of us!

So many of us!

We are shelves, we are

Tables, we are meek,

We are edible,

Nudgers and shovers

In spite of ourselves.

Our kind multiplies:

We shall by morning

Inherit the earth.

Our foot’s in the door.

13 November 1959

1960

122     You’re

Clownlike, happiest on your hands,

Feet to the stars, and moon-skulled,

Gilled like a fish. A common-sense

Thumbs-down on the dodo’s mode.

Wrapped up in yourself like a spool,

Trawling your dark as owls do.

Mute as a turnip from the Fourth

Of July to All Fools’ Day,

O high-riser, my little loaf.

Vague as fog and looked for like mail.

Farther off than Australia.

Bent-backed Atlas, our traveled prawn.

Snug as a bud and at home

Like a sprat in a pickle jug.

A creel of eels, all ripples.

Jumpy as a Mexican bean.

Right, like a well-done sum.

A clean slate, with your own face on.

January/February 1960

123     The Hanging Man

By the roots of my hair some god got hold of me.

I sizzled in his blue volts like a desert prophet.

The nights snapped out of sight like a lizard’s eyelid:

A world of bald white days in a shadeless socket.

A vulturous boredom pinned me in this tree.

If he were I, he would do what I did.

27 June 1960

124     Stillborn

These poems do not live: it’s a sad diagnosis.

They grew their toes and fingers well enough,

Their little foreheads bulged with concentration.

If they missed out on walking about like people

It wasn’t for any lack of mother-love.

O I cannot understand what happened to them!

They are proper in shape and number and every part.

They sit so nicely in the pickling fluid!

They smile and smile and smile and smile at me.

And still the lungs won’t fill and the heart won’t start.

They are not pigs, they are not even fish,

Though they have a piggy and a fishy air—

It would be better if they were alive, and that’s what they were.

But they are dead, and their mother near dead with distraction,

And they stupidly stare, and do not speak of her.

125     On Deck

Midnight in the mid-Atlantic. On deck.

Wrapped up in themselves as in thick veiling

And mute as mannequins in a dress shop,

Some few passengers keep track

Of the old star-map on the ceiling.

Tiny and far, a single ship

Lit like a two-tiered wedding cake

Carries its candles slowly off.

Now there is nothing much to look at.

Still nobody will move or speak—

The bingo players, the players at love

On a square no bigger than a carpet

Are hustled over the crests and troughs,

Each stalled in his particular minute

And castled in it like a king.

Small drops spot their coats, their gloves:

They fly too fast to feel the wet.

Anything can happen where they are going.

The untidy lady revivalist

For whom the good Lord provides (He gave

Her a pocketbook, a pearl hatpin

And seven winter coats last August)

Prays under her breath that she may save

The art students in West Berlin.

The astrologer at her elbow (a Leo)

Picked his trip-date by the stars.

He is gratified by the absence of icecakes.

He’ll be rich in a year (and he should know)

Selling the Welsh and English mothers

Nativities at two-and-six.

And the white-haired jeweler from Denmark is

    carving

A perfectly faceted wife to wait

On him hand and foot, quiet as a diamond.

Moony balloons tied by a string

To their owners’ wrists, the light dreams float

To be let loose at news of land.

July 1960

126     Sleep in the Mojave Desert

Out here there are no hearthstones,

Hot grains, simply. It is dry, dry.

And the air dangerous. Noonday acts queerly

On the mind’s eye, erecting a line

Of poplars in the middle distance, the only

Object beside the mad, straight road

One can remember men and houses by.

A cool wind should inhabit those leaves

And a dew collect on them, dearer than money,

In the blue hour before sunup.

Yet they recede, untouchable as tomorrow,

Or those glittery fictions of spilt water

That glide ahead of the very thirsty.

I think of the lizards airing their tongues

In the crevice of an extremely small shadow

And the toad guarding his heart’s droplet.

The desert is white as a blind man’s eye,

Comfortless as salt. Snake and bird

Doze behind the old masks of fury.

We swelter like firedogs in the wind.

The sun puts its cinder out. Where we lie

The heat-cracked crickets congregate

In their black armorplate and cry.

The day-moon lights up like a sorry mother,

And the crickets come creeping into our hair

To fiddle the short night away.

5 July 1960

127     Two Campers in Cloud Country

(Rock Lake, Canada)

In this country there is neither measure nor balance

To redress the dominance of rocks and woods,

The passage, say, of these man-shaming clouds.

No gesture of yours or mine could catch their attention,

No word make them carry water or fire the kindling

Like local trolls in the spell of a superior being.

Well, one wearies of the Public Gardens: one wants a vacation

Where trees and clouds and animals pay no notice;

Away from the labeled elms, the tame tea-roses.

It took three days driving north to find a cloud

The polite skies over Boston couldn’t possibly accommodate.

Here on the last frontier of the big, brash spirit

The horizons are too far off to be chummy as uncles;

The colors assert themselves with a sort of vengeance.

Each day concludes in a huge splurge of vermilions

And night arrives in one gigantic step.

It is comfortable, for a change, to mean so little.

These rocks offer no purchase to herbage or people:

They are conceiving a dynasty of perfect cold.

In a month we’ll wonder what plates and forks are for.

I lean to you, numb as a fossil. Tell me I’m here.

The Pilgrims and Indians might never have happened.

Planets pulse in the lake like bright amoebas;

The pines blot our voices up in their lightest sighs.

Around our tent the old simplicities sough

Sleepily as Lethe, trying to get in.

We’ll wake blank-brained as water in the dawn.

July 1960

128     Leaving Early

Lady, your room is lousy with flowers.

When you kick me out, that’s what I’ll remember,

Me, sitting here bored as a leopard

In your jungle of wine-bottle lamps,

Velvet pillows the colour of blood pudding

And the white china flying fish from Italy.

I forget you, hearing the cut flowers

Sipping their liquids from assorted pots,

Pitchers and Coronation goblets

Like Monday drunkards. The milky berries

Bow down, a local constellation,

Toward their admirers in the tabletop:

Mobs of eyeballs looking up.

Are those petals or leaves you’ve paired them with—

Those green-striped ovals of silver tissue?

The red geraniums I know.

Friends, friends. They stink of armpits

And the involved maladies of autumn,

Musky as a lovebed the morning after.

My nostrils prickle with nostalgia.

Henna hags: cloth of your cloth.

They toe old water thick as fog.

The roses in the toby jug

Gave up the ghost last night. High time.

Their yellow corsets were ready to split.

You snored, and I heard the petals unlatch,

Tapping and ticking like nervous fingers.

You should have junked them before they died.

Daybreak discovered the bureau lid

Littered with Chinese hands. Now I’m stared at

By chrysanthemums the size

Of Holofernes’ head, dipped in the same

Magenta as this fubsy sofa.

In the mirror their doubles back them up.

Listen: your tenant mice

Are rattling the cracker packets. Fine flour

Muffles their bird-feet: they whistle for joy.

And you doze on, nose to the wall.

This mizzle fits me like a sad jacket.

How did we make it up to your attic?

You handed me gin in a glass bud vase.

We slept like stones. Lady, what am I doing

With a lung full of dust and a tongue of wood,

Knee-deep in the cold and swamped by flowers?

25 September 1960

129     Love Letter

Not easy to state the change you made.

If I’m alive now, then I was dead,

Though, like a stone, unbothered by it,

Staying put according to habit.

You didn’t just toe me an inch, no—

Nor leave me to set my small bald eye

Skyward again, without hope, of course,

Of apprehending blueness, or stars.

That wasn’t it. I slept, say: a snake

Masked among black rocks as a black rock

In the white hiatus of winter—

Like my neighbors, taking no pleasure

In the million perfectly-chiseled

Cheeks alighting each moment to melt

My cheek of basalt. They turned to tears,

Angels weeping over dull natures,

But didn’t convince me. Those tears froze.

Each dead head had a visor of ice.

And I slept on like a bent finger.

The first thing I saw was sheer air

And the locked drops rising in a dew

Limpid as spirits. Many stones lay

Dense and expressionless round about.

I didn’t know what to make of it.

I shone, mica-scaled, and unfolded

To pour myself out like a fluid

Among bird feet and the stems of plants.

I wasn’t fooled. I knew you at once.

Tree and stone glittered, without shadows.

My finger-length grew lucent as glass.

I started to bud like a March twig:

An arm and a leg, an arm, a leg.

From stone to cloud, so I ascended.

Now I resemble a sort of god

Floating through the air in my soul-shift

Pure as a pane of ice. It’s a gift.

16 October 1960

130     Magi

The abstracts hover like dull angels:

Nothing so vulgar as a nose or an eye

Bossing the ethereal blanks of their face-ovals.

Their whiteness bears no relation to laundry,

Snow, chalk or suchlike. They’re

The real thing, all right: the Good, the True—

Salutary and pure as boiled water,

Loveless as the multiplication table.

While the child smiles into thin air.

Six months in the world, and she is able

To rock on all fours like a padded hammock.

For her, the heavy notion of Evil

Attending her cot is less than a belly ache,

And Love the mother of milk, no theory.

They mistake their star, these papery godfolk.

They want the crib of some lamp-headed Plato.

Let them astound his heart with their merit.

What girl ever flourished in such company?

131     Candles

They are the last romantics, these candles:

Upside down hearts of light tipping wax fingers,

And the fingers, taken in by their own haloes,

Grown milky, almost clear, like the bodies of saints.

It is touching, the way they’ll ignore

A whole family of prominent objects

Simply to plumb the deeps of an eye

In its hollow of shadows, its fringe of reeds,

And the owner past thirty, no beauty at all.

Daylight would be more judicious,

Giving everybody a fair hearing.

They should have gone out with balloon flights and the stereopticon.

This is no time for the private point of view.

When I light them, my nostrils prickle.

Their pale, tentative yellows

Drag up false, Edwardian sentiments,

And I remember my maternal grandmother from Vienna.

As a schoolgirl she gave roses to Franz Josef.

The burghers sweated and wept. The children wore white.

And my grandfather moped in the Tyrol,

Imagining himself a headwaiter in America,

Floating in a high-church hush

Among ice buckets, frosty napkins.

These little globes of light are sweet as pears.

Kindly with invalids and mawkish women,

They mollify the bald moon.

Nun-souled, they burn heavenward and never marry.

The eyes of the child I nurse are scarcely open.

In twenty years I shall be retrograde

As these draughty ephemerids.

I watch their spilt tears cloud and dull to pearls.

How shall I tell anything at all

To this infant still in a birth-drowse?

Tonight, like a shawl, the mild light enfolds her,

The shadows stoop over like guests at a christening.

17 October 1960

132     A Life

Touch it: it won’t shrink like an eyeball,

This egg-shaped bailiwick, clear as a tear.

Here’s yesterday, last year—

Palm-spear and lily distinct as flora in the vast

Windless threadwork of a tapestry.

Flick the glass with your fingernail:

It will ping like a Chinese chime in the slightest air stir

Though nobody in there looks up or bothers to answer.

The inhabitants are light as cork,

Every one of them permanently busy.

At their feet, the sea waves bow in single file,

Never trespassing in bad temper:

Stalling in midair,

Short-reined, pawing like paradeground horses.

Overhead, the clouds sit tasseled and fancy

As Victorian cushions. This family

Of valentine-faces might please a collector:

They ring true, like good china.

Elsewhere the landscape is more frank.

The light falls without letup, blindingly.

A woman is dragging her shadow in a circle

About a bald, hospital saucer.

It resembles the moon, or a sheet of blank paper

And appears to have suffered a sort of private blitzkrieg.

She lives quietly

With no attachments, like a foetus in a bottle,

The obsolete house, the sea, flattened to a picture

She has one too many dimensions to enter.

Grief and anger, exorcized,

Leave her alone now.

The future is a gray seagull

Tattling in its cat-voice of departure, departure.

Age and terror, like nurses, attend her,

And a drowned man, complaining of the great cold,

Crawls up out of the sea.

18 November 1960

133     Waking in Winter

I can taste the tin of the sky—the real tin thing.

Winter dawn is the color of metal,

The trees stiffen into place like burnt nerves.

All night I have dreamed of destruction, annihilations—

An assembly-line of cut throats, and you and I

Inching off in the gray Chevrolet, drinking the green

Poison of stilled lawns, the little clapboard gravestones,

Noiseless, on rubber wheels, on the way to the sea resort.

How the balconies echoed! How the sun lit up

The skulls, the unbuckled bones facing the view!

Space! Space! The bed linen was giving out entirely.

Cot legs melted in terrible attitudes, and the nurses—

Each nurse patched her soul to a wound and disappeared.

The deathly guests had not been satisfied

With the rooms, or the smiles, or the beautiful rubber plants,

Or the sea, hushing their peeled sense like Old Mother Morphia.

1961

134     Parliament Hill Fields

On this bald hill the new year hones its edge.

Faceless and pale as china

The round sky goes on minding its business.

Your absence is inconspicuous;

Nobody can tell what I lack.

Gulls have threaded the river’s mud bed back

To this crest of grass. Inland, they argue,

Settling and stirring like blown paper

Or the hands of an invalid. The wan

Sun manages to strike such tin glints

From the linked ponds that my eyes wince

And brim; the city melts like sugar.

A crocodile of small girls

Knotting and stopping, ill-assorted, in blue uniforms,

Opens to swallow me. I’m a stone, a stick,

One child drops a barrette of pink plastic;

None of them seem to notice.

Their shrill, gravelly gossip’s funneled off.

Now silence after silence offers itself.

The wind stops my breath like a bandage.

Southward, over Kentish Town, an ashen smudge

Swaddles roof and tree.

It could be a snowfield or a cloudbank.

1 suppose it’s pointless to think of you at all.

Already your doll grip lets go.

The tumulus, even at noon, guards its black shadow:

You know me less constant,

Ghost of a leaf, ghost of a bird.

I circle the writhen trees. I am too happy.

These faithful dark-boughed cypresses

Brood, rooted in their heaped losses.

Your cry fades like the cry of a gnat.

I lose sight of you on your blind journey,

While the heath grass glitters and the spindling rivulets

Unspool and spend themselves. My mind runs with them,

Pooling in heel-prints, fumbling pebble and stem.

The day empties its images

Like a cup or a room. The moon’s crook whitens,

Thin as the skin seaming a scar.

Now, on the nursery wall,

The blue night plants, the little pale blue hill

In your sister’s birthday picture start to glow.

The orange pompons, the Egyptian papyrus

Light up. Each rabbit-eared

Blue shrub behind the glass

Exhales an indigo nimbus,

A sort of cellophane balloon.

The old dregs, the old difficulties take me to wife.

Gulls stiffen to their chill vigil in the drafty half-light;

I enter the lit house.

11 February 1961

135     Whitsun

This is not what I meant:

Stucco arches, the banked rocks sunning in rows,

Bald eyes or petrified eggs,

Grownups coffined in stockings and jackets,

Lard-pale, sipping the thin

Air like a medicine.

The stopped horse on his chromium pole

Stares through us; his hooves chew the breeze.

Your shirt of crisp linen

Bloats like a spinnaker. Hat-brims

Deflect the watery dazzle; the people idle

As if in hospital.

I can smell the salt, all right.

At our feet, the weed-mustachioed sea

Exhibits its glaucous silks,

Bowing and truckling like an old-school Oriental.

You’re no happier than I about it.

A policeman points out a vacant cliff

Green as a pool table, where cabbage butterflies

Peel off to sea as gulls do,

And we picnic in the death-stench of a hawthorn.

The waves pulse and pulse like hearts.

Beached under the spumy blooms, we lie

Seasick and fever-dry.

14 February 1961

136     Zoo Keeper’s Wife

I can stay awake all night, if need be —

Cold as an eel, without eyelids.

Like a dead lake the dark envelops me,

Blueblack, a spectacular plum fruit.

No airbubbles start from my heart, I am lungless

And ugly, my belly a silk stocking

Where the heads and tails of my sisters decompose.

Look, they are melting like coins in the powerful juices —

The spidery jaws, the spine bones bared for a moment

Like the white lines on a blueprint.

Should I stir, I think this pink and purple plastic

Guts bag would clack like a child’s rattle,

Old grievances jostling each other, so many loose teeth.

But what do you know about that

My fat pork, my marrowy sweetheart, face-to-the-wall?

Some things of this world are indigestible.

You wooed me with the wolf-headed fruit bats

Hanging from their scorched hooks in the moist

Fug of the Small Mammal House.

The armadillo dozed in his sandbin

Obscene and bald as a pig, the white mice

Multiplied to infinity like angels on a pinhead

Out of sheer boredom. Tangled in the sweat-wet sheets

I remember the bloodied chicks and the quartered rabbits.

You checked the diet charts and took me to play

With the boa constrictor in the Fellows’ Garden.

I pretended I was the Tree of Knowledge.

I entered your bible, I boarded your ark

With the sacred baboon in his wig and wax ears

And the bear-furred, bird-eating spider

Clambering round its glass box like an eight-fingered hand.

I can’t get it out of my mind

How our courtship lit the tindery cages —

Your two-horned rhinoceros opened a mouth

Dirty as a bootsole and big as a hospital sink

For my cube of sugar: its bog breath

Gloved my arm to the elbow.

The snails blew kisses like black apples.

Nightly now I flog apes owls bears sheep

Over their iron stile. And still don’t sleep.

14 February 1961

137     Face Lift

You bring me good news from the clinic,

Whipping off your silk scarf, exhibiting the tight white

Mummy-cloths, smiling: I’m all right.

When I was nine, a lime-green anesthetist

Fed me banana gas through a frog-mask. The nauseous vault

Boomed with bad dreams and the Jovian voices of surgeons.

Then mother swam up, holding a tin basin.

O I was sick.

They’ve changed all that. Traveling

Nude as Cleopatra in my well-boiled hospital shift,

Fizzy with sedatives and unusually humorous,

I roll to an anteroom where a kind man

Fists my fingers for me. He makes me feel something precious

Is leaking from the finger-vents. At the count of two

Darkness wipes me out like chalk on a blackboard. . .

I don’t know a thing.

For five days I lie in secret,

Tapped like a cask, the years draining into my pillow.

Even my best friend thinks I’m in the country.

Skin doesn’t have roots, it peels away easy as paper.

When I grin, the stitches tauten. I grow backward. I’m twenty,

Broody and in long skirts on my first husband’s sofa, my fingers

Buried in the lambswool of the dead poodle;

I hadn’t a cat yet.

Now she’s done for, the dewlapped lady

I watched settle, line by line, in my mirror—

Old sock-face, sagged on a darning egg.

They’ve trapped her in some laboratory jar.

Let her die there, or wither incessantly for the next fifty years,

Nodding and rocking and fingering her thin hair.

Mother to myself, I wake swaddled in gauze,

Pink and smooth as a baby.

15 February 1961

138     Morning Song

Love set you going like a fat gold watch.

The midwife slapped your footsoles, and your bald cry

Took its place among the elements.

Our voices echo, magnifying your arrival. New statue.

In a drafty museum, your nakedness

Shadows our safety. We stand round blankly as walls.

I’m no more your mother

Than the cloud that distills a mirror to reflect its own slow

Effacement at the wind’s hand.

All night your moth-breath

Flickers among the flat pink roses. I wake to listen:

A far sea moves in my ear.

One cry, and I stumble from bed, cow-heavy and floral

In my Victorian nightgown.

Your mouth opens clean as a cat’s. The window square

Whitens and swallows its dull stars. And now you try

Your handful of notes;

The clear vowels rise like balloons.

19 February 1961

139     Barren Woman

Empty, I echo to the least footfall,

Museum without statues, grand with pillars, porticoes, rotundas.

In my courtyard a fountain leaps and sinks back into itself,

Nun-hearted and blind to the world. Marble lilies

Exhale their pallor like scent.

I imagine myself with a great public,

Mother of a white Nike and several bald-eyed Apollos.

Instead, the dead injure me with attentions, and nothing can happen.

The moon lays a hand on my forehead,

Blank-faced and mum as a nurse.

21 February 1961

140     Heavy Women

Irrefutable, beautifully smug

As Venus, pedestaled on a half-shell

Shawled in blond hair and the salt

Scrim of a sea breeze, the women

Settle in their belling dresses.

Over each weighty stomach a face

Floats calm as a moon or a cloud.

Smiling to themselves, they meditate

Devoutly as the Dutch bulb

Forming its twenty petals.

The dark still nurses its secret.

On the green hill, under the thorn trees,

They listen for the millennium,

The knock of the small, new heart.

Pink-buttocked infants attend them.

Looping wool, doing nothing in particular,

They step among the archetypes.

Dusk hoods them in Mary-blue

While far off, the axle of winter

Grinds round, bearing down with the straw,

The star, the wise gray men.

26 February 1961

141     In Plaster

I shall never get out of this! There are two of me now:

This new absolutely white person and the old yellow one,

And the white person is certainly the superior one.

She doesn’t need food, she is one of the real saints.

At the beginning I hated her, she had no personality—

She lay in bed with me like a dead body

And I was scared, because she was shaped just the way I was

Only much whiter and unbreakable and with no complaints.

I couldn’t sleep for a week, she was so cold.

I blamed her for everything, but she didn’t answer.

I couldn’t understand her stupid behavior!

When I hit her she held still, like a true pacifist.

Then I realized what she wanted was for me to love her:

She began to warm up, and I saw her advantages.

Without me, she wouldn’t exist, so of course she was grateful.

I gave her a soul, I bloomed out of her as a rose

Blooms out of a vase of not very valuable porcelain,

And it was I who attracted everybody’s attention,

Not her whiteness and beauty, as I had at first supposed.

I patronized her a little, and she lapped it up —

You could tell almost at once she had a slave mentality.

I didn’t mind her waiting on me, and she adored it.

In the morning she woke me early, reflecting the sun

From her amazingly white torso, and I couldn’t help but notice

Her tidiness and her calmness and her patience:

She humored my weakness like the best of nurses,

Holding my bones in place so they would mend properly.

In time our relationship grew more intense.

She stopped fitting me so closely and seemed offish.

I felt her criticizing me in spite of herself,

As if my habits offended her in some way.

She let in the drafts and became more and more absent-minded.

And my skin itched and flaked away in soft pieces

Simply because she looked after me so badly.

Then I saw what the trouble was: she thought she was immortal.

She wanted to leave me, she thought she was superior,

And I’d been keeping her in the dark, and she was resentful—

Wasting her days waiting on a half-corpse!

And secretly she began to hope I’d die.

Then she could cover my mouth and eyes, cover me entirely,

And wear my painted face the way a mummy-case

Wears the face of a pharaoh, though it’s made of mud and water.

I wasn’t in any position to get rid of her.

She’d supported me for so long I was quite limp—

I had even forgotten how to walk or sit,

So I was careful not to upset her in any way

Or brag ahead of time how I’d avenge myself.

Living with her was like living with my own coffin:

Yet I still depended on her, though I did it regretfully.

I used to think we might make a go of it together—

After all, it was a kind of marriage, being so close.

Now I see it must be one or the other of us.

She may be a saint, and I may be ugly and hairy,

But she’ll soon find out that that doesn’t matter a bit.

I’m collecting my strength; one day I shall manage without her,

And she’ll perish with emptiness then, and begin to miss me.

18 March 1961

142     Tulips

The tulips are too excitable, it is winter here.

Look how white everything is, how quiet, how snowed-in.

I am learning peacefulness, lying by myself quietly

As the light lies on these white walls, this bed, these hands.

I am nobody; I have nothing to do with explosions.

I have given my name and my day-clothes up to the nurses

And my history to the anesthetist and my body to surgeons.

They have propped my head between the pillow and the sheet-cuff

Like an eye between two white lids that will not shut.

Stupid pupil, it has to take everything in.

The nurses pass and pass, they are no trouble,

They pass the way gulls pass inland in their white caps,

Doing things with their hands, one just the same as another,

So it is impossible to tell how many there are.

My body is a pebble to them, they tend it as water

Tends to the pebbles it must run over, smoothing them gently.

They bring me numbness in their bright needles, they bring me sleep.

Now I have lost myself I am sick of baggage———

My patent leather overnight case like a black pillbox,

My husband and child smiling out of the family photo;

Their smiles catch onto my skin, little smiling hooks.

I have let things slip, a thirty-year-old cargo boat

Stubbornly hanging on to my name and address.

They have swabbed me clear of my loving associations.

Scared and bare on the green plastic-pillowed trolley

I watched my teaset, my bureaus of linen, my books

Sink out of sight, and the water went over my head.

I am a nun now, I have never been so pure.

I didn’t want any flowers, I only wanted

To lie with my hands turned up and be utterly empty.

How free it is, you have no idea how free———

The peacefulness is so big it dazes you,

And it asks nothing, a name tag, a few trinkets.

It is what the dead close on, finally; I imagine them

Shutting their mouths on it, like a Communion tablet.

The tulips are too red in the first place, they hurt me.

Even through the gift paper I could hear them breathe

Lightly, through their white swaddlings, like an awful baby.

Their redness talks to my wound, it corresponds.

They are subtle: they seem to float, though they weigh me down,

Upsetting me with their sudden tongues and their color,

A dozen red lead sinkers round my neck.

Nobody watched me before, now I am watched.

The tulips turn to me, and the window behind me

Where once a day the light slowly widens and slowly thins,

And I see myself, flat, ridiculous, a cut-paper shadow

Between the eye of the sun and the eyes of the tulips,

And I have no face, I have wanted to efface myself.

The vivid tulips eat my oxygen.

Before they came the air was calm enough,

Coming and going, breath by breath, without any fuss.

Then the tulips filled it up like a loud noise.

Now the air snags and eddies round them the way a river

Snags and eddies round a sunken rust-red engine.

They concentrate my attention, that was happy

Playing and resting without committing itself.

The walls, also, seem to be warming themselves.

The tulips should be behind bars like dangerous animals;

They are opening like the mouth of some great African cat,

And I am aware of my heart: it opens and closes

Its bowl of red blooms out of sheer love of me.

The water I taste is warm and salt, like the sea,

And comes from a country far away as health.

18 March 1961

143     I Am Vertical

But I would rather be horizontal.

I am not a tree with my root in the soil

Sucking up minerals and motherly love

So that each March I may gleam into leaf,

Nor am I the beauty of a garden bed

Attracting my share of Ahs and spectacularly painted,

Unknowing I must soon unpetal.

Compared with me, a tree is immortal

And a flower-head not tall, but more startling,

And I want the one’s longevity and the other’s daring.

Tonight, in the infinitesimal light of the stars,

The trees and flowers have been strewing their cool odors.

I walk among them, but none of them are noticing.

Sometimes I think that when I am sleeping

I must most perfectly resemble them —

Thoughts gone dim.

It is more natural to me, lying down.

Then the sky and I are in open conversation,

And I shall be useful when I lie down finally:

Then the trees may touch me for once, and the flowers have time for me.

28 March 1961

144     Insomniac

The night sky is only a sort of carbon paper,

Blueblack, with the much-poked periods of stars

Letting in the light, peephole after peephole —

A bonewhite light, like death, behind all things.

Under the eyes of the stars and the moon’s rictus

He suffers his desert pillow, sleeplessness

Stretching its fine, irritating sand in all directions.

Over and over the old, granular movie

Exposes embarrassments—the mizzling days

Of childhood and adolescence, sticky with dreams,

Parental faces on tall stalks, alternately stern and tearful,

A garden of buggy roses that made him cry.

His forehead is bumpy as a sack of rocks.

Memories jostle each other for face-room like obsolete film stars.

He is immune to pills: red, purple, blue—

How they lit the tedium of the protracted evening!

Those sugary planets whose influence won for him

A life baptized in no-life for a while,

And the sweet, drugged waking of a forgetful baby.

Now the pills are worn-out and silly, like classical gods.

Their poppy-sleepy colors do him no good.

His head is a little interior of gray mirrors.

Each gesture flees immediately down an alley

Of diminishing perspectives, and its significance

Drains like water out the hole at the far end.

He lives without privacy in a lidless room,

The bald slots of his eyes stiffened wide-open

On the incessant heat-lightning flicker of situations.

Nightlong, in the granite yard, invisible cats

Have been howling like women, or damaged instruments.

Already he can feel daylight, his white disease,

Creeping up with her hatful of trivial repetitions.

The city is a map of cheerful twitters now,

And everywhere people, eyes mica-silver and blank,

Are riding to work in rows, as if recently brainwashed.

May 1961

145     Widow

Widow. The word consumes itself—

Body, a sheet of newsprint on the fire

Levitating a numb minute in the updraft

Over the scalding, red topography

That will put her heart out like an only eye.

Widow. The dead syllable, with its shadow

Of an echo, exposes the panel in the wall

Behind which the secret passage lies—stale air,

Fusty remembrances, the coiled-spring stair

That opens at the top onto nothing at all. . . .

Widow. The bitter spider sits

And sits in the center of her loveless spokes.

Death is the dress she wears, her hat and collar.

The moth-face of her husband, moonwhite and ill,

Circles her like a prey she’d love to kill

A second time, to have him near again—

A paper image to lay against her heart

The way she laid his letters, till they grew warm

And seemed to give her warmth, like a live skin.

But it is she who is paper now, warmed by no one.

Widow: that great, vacant estate!

The voice of God is full of draftiness,

Promising simply the hard stars, the space

Of immortal blankness between stars

And no bodies, singing like arrows up to heaven.

Widow, the compassionate trees bend in,

The trees of loneliness, the trees of mourning.

They stand like shadows about the green landscape—

Or even like black holes cut out of it.

A widow resembles them, a shadow-thing,

Hand folding hand, and nothing in between.

A bodiless soul could pass another soul

In this clear air and never notice it —

One soul pass through the other, frail as smoke

And utterly ignorant of the way it took.

That is the fear she has—the fear

His soul may beat and be beating at her dull sense

Like blue Mary’s angel, dovelike against a pane

Blinded to all but the gray, spiritless room

It looks in on, and must go on looking in on.

16 May 1961

146     Stars Over the Dordogne

Stars are dropping thick as stones into the twiggy

Picket of trees whose silhouette is darker

Than the dark of the sky because it is quite starless.

The woods are a well. The stars drop silently.

They seem large, yet they drop, and no gap is visible.

Nor do they send up fires where they fall

Or any signal of distress or anxiousness.

They are eaten immediately by the pines.

Where I am at home, only the sparsest stars

Arrive at twilight, and then after some effort.

And they are wan, dulled by much travelling.

The smaller and more timid never arrive at all

But stay, sitting far out, in their own dust.

They are orphans. I cannot see them. They are lost.

But tonight they have discovered this river with no trouble,

They are scrubbed and self-assured as the great planets.

The Big Dipper is my only familiar.

I miss Orion and Cassiopeia’s Chair. Maybe they are

Hanging shyly under the studded horizon

Like a child’s too-simple mathematical problem.

Infinite number seems to be the issue up there.

Or else they are present, and their disguise so bright

I am overlooking them by looking too hard.

Perhaps it is the season that is not right.

And what if the sky here is no different,

And it is my eyes that have been sharpening themselves ?

Such a luxury of stars would embarrass me.

The few I am used to are plain and durable;

I think they would not wish for this dressy backcloth

Or much company, or the mildness of the south.

They are too puritan and solitary for that —

When one of them falls it leaves a space,

A sense of absence in its old shining place.

And where I lie now, back to my own dark star,

I see those constellations in my head,

Unwarmed by the sweet air of this peach orchard.

There is too much ease here; these stars treat me too well.

On this hill, with its view of lit castles, each swung bell

Is accounting for its cow. I shut my eyes

And drink the small night chill like news of home.

147     The Rival

If the moon smiled, she would resemble you.

You leave the same impression

Of something beautiful, but annihilating.

Both of you are great light borrowers.

Her O-mouth grieves at the world; yours is unaffected,

And your first gift is making stone out of everything.

I wake to a mausoleum; you are here,

Ticking your fingers on the marble table, looking for cigarettes,

Spiteful as a woman, but not so nervous,

And dying to say something unanswerable.

The moon, too, abases her subjects,

But in the daytime she is ridiculous.

Your dissatisfactions, on the other hand,

Arrive through the mailslot with loving regularity,

White and blank, expansive as carbon monoxide.

No day is safe from news of you,

Walking about in Africa maybe, but thinking of me.

July 1961

148     Wuthering Heights

The horizons ring me like faggots,

Tilted and disparate, and always unstable.

Touched by a match, they might warm me,

And their fine lines singe

The air to orange

Before the distances they pin evaporate,

Weighting the pale sky with a solider color.

But they only dissolve and dissolve

Like a series of promises, as I step forward.

There is no life higher than the grasstops

Or the hearts of sheep, and the wind

Pours by like destiny, bending

Everything in one direction.

I can feel it trying

To funnel my heat away.

If I pay the roots of the heather

Too close attention, they will invite me

To whiten my bones among them.

The sheep know where they are,

Browsing in their dirty wool-clouds,

Gray as the weather.

The black slots of their pupils take me in.

It is like being mailed into space,

A thin, silly message.

They stand about in grandmotherly disguise,

All wig curls and yellow teeth

And hard, marbly baas.

I come to wheel ruts, and water

Limpid as the solitudes

That flee through my fingers.

Hollow doorsteps go from grass to grass;

Lintel and sill have unhinged themselves.

Of people the air only

Remembers a few odd syllables.

It rehearses them moaningly:

Black stone, black stone.

The sky leans on me, me, the one upright

Among all horizontals.

The grass is beating its head distractedly.

It is too delicate

For a life in such company;

Darkness terrifies it.

Now, in valleys narrow

And black as purses, the house lights

Gleam like small change.

September 1961

149     Blackberrying

Nobody in the lane, and nothing, nothing but blackberries,

Blackberries on either side, though on the right mainly,

A blackberry alley, going down in hooks, and a sea

Somewhere at the end of it, heaving. Blackberries

Big as the ball of my thumb, and dumb as eyes

Ebon in the hedges, fat

With blue-red juices. These they squander on my fingers.

I had not asked for such a blood sisterhood; they must love me.

They accommodate themselves to my milkbottle, flattening their sides.

Overhead go the choughs in black, cacophonous flocks —

Bits of burnt paper wheeling in a blown sky.

Theirs is the only voice, protesting, protesting.

I do not think the sea will appear at all.

The high, green meadows are glowing, as if lit from within.

I come to one bush of berries so ripe it is a bush of flies,

Hanging their bluegreen bellies and their wing panes in a Chinese screen.

The honey-feast of the berries has stunned them; they believe in heaven.

One more hook, and the berries and bushes end.

The only thing to come now is the sea.

From between two hills a sudden wind funnels at me,

Slapping its phantom laundry in my face.

These hills are too green and sweet to have tasted salt.

I follow the sheep path between them. A last hook brings me

To the hills’ northern face, and the face is orange rock

That looks out on nothing, nothing but a great space

Of white and pewter lights, and a din like silversmiths

Beating and beating at an intractable metal.

23 September 1961

150     Finisterre

This was the land’s end: the last fingers, knuckled and rheumatic,

Cramped on nothing. Black

Admonitory cliffs, and the sea exploding

With no bottom, or anything on the other side of it,

Whitened by the faces of the drowned.

Now it is only gloomy, a dump of rocks —

Leftover soldiers from old, messy wars.

The sea cannons into their ear, but they don’t budge.

Other rocks hide their grudges under the water.

The cliffs are edged with trefoils, stars and bells

Such as fingers might embroider, close to death,

Almost too small for the mists to bother with.

The mists are part of the ancient paraphernalia —

Souls, rolled in the doom-noise of the sea.

They bruise the rocks out of existence, then resurrect them.

They go up without hope, like sighs.

I walk among them, and they stuff my mouth with cotton.

When they free me, I am beaded with tears.

Our Lady of the Shipwrecked is striding toward the horizon,

Her marble skirts blown back in two pink wings.

A marble sailor kneels at her foot distractedly, and at his foot

A peasant woman in black

Is praying to the monument of the sailor praying.

Our Lady of the Shipwrecked is three times life size,

Her lips sweet with divinity.

She does not hear what the sailor or the peasant is saying—

She is in love with the beautiful formlessness of the sea.

Gull-colored laces flap in the sea drafts

Beside the postcard stalls.

The peasants anchor them with conches. One is told:

‘These are the pretty trinkets the sea hides,

Little shells made up into necklaces and toy ladies.

They do not come from the Bay of the Dead down there,

But from another place, tropical and blue,

We have never been to.

These are our crêpes. Eat them before they blow cold.’

29 September 1961

151     The Surgeon at 2 a.m.

The white light is artificial, and hygienic as heaven.

The microbes cannot survive it.

They are departing in their transparent garments, turned aside

From the scalpels and the rubber hands.

The scalded sheet is a snowfield, frozen and peaceful.

The body under it is in my hands.

As usual there is no face. A lump of Chinese white

With seven holes thumbed in. The soul is another light.

I have not seen it; it does not fly up.

Tonight it has receded like a ship’s light.

It is a garden I have to do with—tubers and fruits

Oozing their jammy substances,

A mat of roots. My assistants hook them back.

Stenches and colors assail me.

This is the lung-tree.

These orchids are splendid. They spot and coil like snakes.

The heart is a red-bell-bloom, in distress.

I am so small

In comparison to these organs!

I worm and hack in a purple wilderness.

The blood is a sunset. I admire it.

I am up to my elbows in it, red and squeaking.

Still it seeps up, it is not exhausted.

So magical! A hot spring

I must seal off and let fill

The intricate, blue piping under this pale marble.

How I admire the Romans —

Aqueducts, the Baths of Caracalla, the eagle nose!

The body is a Roman thing.

It has shut its mouth on the stone pill of repose.

It is a statue the orderlies are wheeling off.

I have perfected it.

I am left with an arm or a leg,

A set of teeth, or stones

To rattle in a bottle and take home,

And tissue in slices—a pathological salami.

Tonight the parts are entombed in an icebox.

Tomorrow they will swim

In vinegar like saints’ relics.

Tomorrow the patient will have a clean, pink plastic limb.

Over one bed in the ward, a small blue light

Announces a new soul. The bed is blue.

Tonight, for this person, blue is a beautiful color.

The angels of morphia have borne him up.

He floats an inch from the ceiling,

Smelling the dawn drafts.

I walk among sleepers in gauze sarcophagi.

The red night lights are flat moons. They are dull with blood.

I am the sun, in my white coat,

Gray faces, shuttered by drugs, follow me like flowers.

29 September 1961

152     Last Words

I do not want a plain box, I want a sarcophagus

With tigery stripes, and a face on it

Round as the moon, to stare up.

I want to be looking at them when they come

Picking among the dumb minerals, the roots.

I see them already—the pale, star-distance faces.

Now they are nothing, they are not even babies.

I imagine them without fathers or mothers, like the first gods.

They will wonder if I was important.

I should sugar and preserve my days like fruit!

My mirror is clouding over —

A few more breaths, and it will reflect nothing at all.

The flowers and the faces whiten to a sheet.

I do not trust the spirit. It escapes like steam

In dreams, through mouth-hole or eye-hole. I can’t stop it.

One day it won’t come back. Things aren’t like that.

They stay, their little particular lusters

Warmed by much handling. They almost purr.

When the soles of my feet grow cold,

The blue eye of my turquoise will comfort me.

Let me have my copper cooking pots, let my rouge pots

Bloom about me like night flowers, with a good smell.

They will roll me up in bandages, they will store my heart

Under my feet in a neat parcel.

I shall hardly know myself It will be dark,

And the shine of these small things sweeter than the face of Ishtar.

21 October 1961i

153     The Moon and the Yew Tree

This is the light of the mind, cold and planetary.

The trees of the mind are black. The light is blue.

The grasses unload their griefs on my feet as if I were God,

Prickling my ankles and murmuring of their humility.

Fumy, spiritous mists inhabit this place

Separated from my house by a row of headstones.

I simply cannot see where there is to get to.

The moon is no door. It is a face in its own right,

White as a knuckle and terribly upset.

It drags the sea after it like a dark crime; it is quiet

With the O-gape of complete despair. I live here.

Twice on Sunday, the bells startle the sky———

Eight great tongues affirming the Resurrection.

At the end, they soberly bong out their names.

The yew tree points up. It has a Gothic shape.

The eyes lift after it and find the moon.

The moon is my mother. She is not sweet like Mary.

Her blue garments unloose small bats and owls.

How I would like to believe in tenderness———

The face of the effigy, gentled by candles,

Bending, on me in particular, its mild eyes.

I have fallen a long way. Clouds are flowering

Blue and mystical over the face of the stars.

Inside the church, the saints will be all blue,

Floating on their delicate feet over the cold pews,

Their hands and faces stiff with holiness.

The moon sees nothing of this. She is bald and wild.

And the message of the yew tree is blackness—blackness and silence.

22 October 1961

154     Mirror

I am silver and exact. I have no preconceptions.

Whatever I see I swallow immediately

Just as it is, unmisted by love or dislike.

I am not cruel, only truthful —

The eye of a little god, four-cornered.

Most of the time I meditate on the opposite wall.

It is pink, with speckles. I have looked at it so long

I think it is a part of my heart. But it flickers.

Faces and darkness separate us over and over.

Now I am a lake. A woman bends over me,

Searching my reaches for what she really is.

Then she turns to those liars, the candles or the moon.

I see her back, and reflect it faithfully.

She rewards me with tears and an agitation of hands.

I am important to her. She comes and goes.

Each morning it is her face that replaces the darkness.

In me she has drowned a young girl, and in me an old woman

Rises toward her day after day, like a terrible fish.

23 October 1961

155     The Babysitters

It is ten years, now, since we rowed to Children’s Island.

The sun flamed straight down that noon on the water off Marblehead.

That summer we wore black glasses to hide our eyes.

We were always crying, in our spare rooms, little put-upon sisters,

In the two huge, white, handsome houses in Swampscott.

When the sweetheart from England appeared, with her cream skin and

Yardley cosmetics,

I had to sleep in the same room with the baby on a too-short cot,

And the seven-year-old wouldn’t go out unless his jersey stripes

Matched the stripes of his socks.

O it was richness!—eleven rooms and a yacht

With a polished mahogany stair to let into the water

And a cabin boy who could decorate cakes in six-colored frosting.

But I didn’t know how to cook, and babies depressed me.

Nights, I wrote in my diary spitefully, my fingers red

With triangular scorch marks from ironing tiny ruchings and puffed

sleeves.

When the sporty wife and her doctor husband went on one of their

cruises

They left me a borrowed maid named Ellen, ‘for protection’,

And a small Dalmatian.

In your house, the main house, you were better off.

You had a rose garden and a guest cottage and a model apothecary shop

And a cook and a maid, and knew about the key to the bourbon.

I remember you playing ‘Ja Da’ in a pink piqué dress

On the gameroom piano, when the ‘big people’ were out,

And the maid smoked and shot pool under a green-shaded lamp.

The cook had one wall eye and couldn’t sleep, she was so nervous.

On trial, from Ireland, she burned batch after batch of cookies

Till she was fired.

O what has come over us, my sister!

On that day-off the two of us cried so hard to get

We lifted a sugared ham and a pineapple from the grownups’ icebox

And rented an old green boat. I rowed. You read

Aloud, crosslegged on the stern seat, from the Generation of Vipers.

So we bobbed out to the island. It was deserted —

A gallery of creaking porches and still interiors,

Stopped and awful as a photograph of somebody laughing,

But ten years dead.

The bold gulls dove as if they owned it all.

We picked up sticks of driftwood and beat them off,

Then stepped down the steep beach shelf and into the water.

We kicked and talked. The thick salt kept us up.

I see us floating there yet, inseparable—two cork dolls.

What keyhole have we slipped through, what door has shut ?

The shadows of the grasses inched round like hands of a clock,

And from our opposite continents we wave and call.

Everything has happened.

29 October 1961

1962

156     New Year on Dartmoor

This is newness: every little tawdry

Obstacle glass-wrapped and peculiar,

Glinting and clinking in a saint’s falsetto. Only you

Don’t know what to make of the sudden slippiness,

The blind, white, awful, inaccessible slant.

There’s no getting up it by the words you know.

No getting up by elephant or wheel or shoe.

We have only come to look. You are too new

To want the world in a glass hat.

157     Three Women

A Poem for Three Voices

Setting: A Maternity Ward and round about

FIRST VOICE:

I am slow as the world. I am very patient,

Turning through my time, the suns and stars

Regarding me with attention.

The moon’s concern is more personal:

She passes and repasses, luminous as a nurse.

Is she sorry for what will happen? I do not think so.

She is simply astonished at fertility.

When I walk out, I am a great event.

I do not have to think, or even rehearse.

What happens in me will happen without attention.

The pheasant stands on the hill;

He is arranging his brown feathers.

I cannot help smiling at what it is I know.

Leaves and petals attend me. I am ready.

SECOND VOICE:

When I first saw it, the small red seep, I did not believe it.

I watched the men walk about me in the office. They were so flat!

There was something about them like cardboard, and now I had caught it,

That flat, flat, flatness from which ideas, destructions,

Bulldozers, guillotines, white chambers of shrieks proceed,

Endlessly proceed—and the cold angels, the abstractions.

I sat at my desk in my stockings, my high heels,

And the man I work for laughed: ‘Have you seen something awful?

You are so white, suddenly.’ And I said nothing.

I saw death in the bare trees, a deprivation.

I could not believe it. Is it so difficult

For the spirit to conceive a face, a mouth?

The letters proceed from these black keys, and these black keys proceed

From my alphabetical fingers, ordering parts,

Parts, bits, cogs, the shining multiples.

I am dying as I sit. I lose a dimension.

Trains roar in my ears, departures, departures!

The silver track of time empties into the distance,

The white sky empties of its promise, like a cup.

These are my feet, these mechanical echoes.

Tap, tap, tap, steel pegs. I am found wanting.

This is a disease I carry home, this is a death.

Again, this is a death. Is it the air,

The particles of destruction I suck up ? Am I a pulse

That wanes and wanes, facing the cold angel ?

Is this my lover then? This death, this death ?

As a child I loved a lichen-bitten name.

Is this the one sin then, this old dead love of death ?

THIRD VOICE:

I remember the minute when I knew for sure.

The willows were chilling,

The face in the pool was beautiful, but not mine—

It had a consequential look, like everything else,

And all I could see was dangers: doves and words,

Stars and showers of gold—conceptions, conceptions!

I remember a white, cold wing

And the great swan, with its terrible look,

Coming at me, like a castle, from the top of the river.

There is a snake in swans.

He glided by; his eye had a black meaning.

I saw the world in it—small, mean and black,

Every little word hooked to every little word, and act to act.

A hot blue day had budded into something.

I wasn’t ready. The white clouds rearing

Aside were dragging me in four directions.

I wasn’t ready.

I had no reverence.

I thought I could deny the consequence—

But it was too late for that. It was too late, and the face

Went on shaping itself with love, as if I was ready.

SECOND VOICE:

It is a world of snow now. I am not at home.

How white these sheets are. The faces have no features.

They are bald and impossible, like the faces of my children,

Those little sick ones that elude my arms.

Other children do not touch me: they are terrible.

They have too many colors, too much life. They are not quiet,

Quiet, like the little emptinesses I carry.

I have had my chances. I have tried and tried.

I have stitched life into me like a rare organ,

And walked carefully, precariously, like something rare.

I have tried not to think too hard. I have tried to be natural.

I have tried to be blind in love, like other women,

Blind in my bed, with my dear blind sweet one,

Not looking, through the thick dark, for the face of another.

I did not look. But still the face was there,

The face of the unborn one that loved its perfections,

The face of the dead one that could only be perfect

In its easy peace, could only keep holy so.

And then there were other faces. The faces of nations,

Governments, parliaments, societies,

The faceless faces of important men.

It is these men I mind:

They are so jealous of anything that is not flat! They are jealous gods

That would have the whole world flat because they are.

I see the Father conversing with the Son.

Such flatness cannot but be holy.

‘Let us make a heaven,’ they say.

‘Let us flatten and launder the grossness from these souls.’

FIRST VOICE:

I am calm. I am calm. It is the calm before something awful:

The yellow minute before the wind walks, when the leaves

Turn up their hands, their pallors. It is so quiet here.

The sheets, the faces, are white and stopped, like clocks.

Voices stand back and flatten. Their visible hieroglyphs

Flatten to parchment screens to keep the wind off.

They paint such secrets in Arabic, Chinese!

I am dumb and brown. I am a seed about to break.

The brownness is my dead self, and it is sullen:

It does not wish to be more, or different.

Dusk hoods me in blue now, like a Mary.

O color of distance and forgetfulness! —

When will it be, the second when Time breaks

And eternity engulfs it, and I drown utterly?

I talk to myself, myself only, set apart —

Swabbed and lurid with disinfectants, sacrificial.

Waiting lies heavy on my lids. It lies like sleep,

Like a big sea. Far off, far off, I feel the first wave tug

Its cargo of agony toward me, inescapable, tidal.

And I, a shell, echoing on this white beach

Face the voices that overwhelm, the terrible element.

THIRD VOICE:

I am a mountain now, among mountainy women.

The doctors move among us as if our bigness

Frightened the mind. They smile like fools.

They are to blame for what I am, and they know it.

They hug their flatness like a kind of health.

And what if they found themselves surprised, as I did?

They would go mad with it.

And what if two lives leaked between my thighs?

I have seen the white clean chamber with its instruments.

It is a place of shrieks. It is not happy.

‘This is where you will come when you are ready.’

The night lights are flat red moons. They are dull with blood.

I am not ready for anything to happen.

I should have murdered this, that murders me.

FIRST VOICE:

There is no miracle more cruel than this.

I am dragged by the horses, the iron hooves.

I last. I last it out. I accomplish a work.

Dark tunnel, through which hurtle the visitations,

The visitations, the manifestations, the startled faces.

I am the center of an atrocity.

What pains, what sorrows must I be mothering?

Can such innocence kill and kill? It milks my life.

The trees wither in the street. The rain is corrosive.

I taste it on my tongue, and the workable horrors,

The horrors that stand and idle, the slighted godmothers

With their hearts that tick and tick, with their satchels of instruments.

I shall be a wall and a roof, protecting.

I shall be a sky and a hill of good: O let me be!

A power is growing on me, an old tenacity.

I am breaking apart like the world. There is this blackness,

This ram of blackness. I fold my hands on a mountain.

The air is thick. It is thick with this working.

I am used. I am drummed into use.

My eyes are squeezed by this blackness.

I see nothing.

SECOND VOICE:

I am accused. I dream of massacres.

I am a garden of black and red agonies. I drink them,

Hating myself, hating and fearing. And now the world conceives

Its end and runs toward it, arms held out in love.

It is a love of death that sickens everything.

A dead sun stains the newsprint. It is red.

I lose life after life. The dark earth drinks them.

She is the vampire of us all. So she supports us,

Fattens us, is kind. Her mouth is red.

I know her. I know her intimately —

Old winter-face, old barren one, old time bomb.

Men have used her meanly. She will eat them.

Eat them, eat them, eat them in the end.

The sun is down. I die. I make a death.

FIRST VOICE:

Who is he, this blue, furious boy,

Shiny and strange, as if he had hurtled from a star ?

He is looking so angrily!

He flew into the room, a shriek at his heel.

The blue color pales. He is human after all.

A red lotus opens in its bowl of blood;

They are stitching me up with silk, as if I were a material.

What did my fingers do before they held him?

What did my heart do, with its love?

I have never seen a thing so clear.

His lids are like the lilac-flower

And soft as a moth, his breath.

I shall not let go.

There is no guile or warp in him. May he keep so.

SECOND VOICE:

There is the moon in the high window. It is over.

How winter fills my soul! And that chalk light

Laying its scales on the windows, the windows of empty offices,

Empty schoolrooms, empty churches. O so much emptiness!

There is this cessation. This terrible cessation of everything.

These bodies mounded around me now, these polar sleepers —

What blue, moony ray ices their dreams?

I feel it enter me, cold, alien, like an instrument.

And that mad, hard face at the end of it, that O-mouth

Open in its gape of perpetual grieving.

It is she that drags the blood-black sea around

Month after month, with its voices of failure.

I am helpless as the sea at the end of her string.

I am restless. Restless and useless. I, too, create corpses.

I shall move north. I shall move into a long blackness.

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.

I shall be a heroine of the peripheral.

I shall not be accused by isolate buttons,

Holes in the heels of socks, the white mute faces

Of unanswered letters, coffined in a letter case.

I shall not be accused, I shall not be accused.

The clock shall not find me wanting, nor these stars

That rivet in place abyss after abyss.

THIRD VOICE:

I see her in my sleep, my red, terrible girl.

She is crying through the glass that separates us.

She is crying, and she is furious.

Her cries are hooks that catch and grate like cats.

It is by these hooks she climbs to my notice.

She is crying at the dark, or at the stars

That at such a distance from us shine and whirl.

I think her little head is carved in wood,

A red, hard wood, eyes shut and mouth wide open.

And from the open mouth issue sharp cries

Scratching at my sleep like arrows,

Scratching at my sleep, and entering my side.

My daughter has no teeth. Her mouth is wide.

It utters such dark sounds it cannot be good.

FIRST VOICE:

What is it that flings these innocent souls at us ?

Look, they are so exhausted, they are all flat out

In their canvas-sided cots, names tied to their wrists,

The little silver trophies they’ve come so far for.

There are some with thick black hair, there are some bald.

Their skin tints are pink or sallow, brown or red;

They are beginning to remember their differences.

I think they are made of water; they have no expression.

Their features are sleeping, like light on quiet water.

They are the real monks and nuns in their identical garments.

I see them showering like stars on to the world —

On India, Africa, America, these miraculous ones,

These pure, small images. They smell of milk.

Their footsoles are untouched. They are walkers of air.

Can nothingness be so prodigal ?

Here is my son.

His wide eye is that general, flat blue.

He is turning to me like a little, blind, bright plant.

One cry. It is the hook I hang on.

And I am a river of milk.

I am a warm hill.

SECOND VOICE:

I am not ugly. I am even beautiful.

The mirror gives back a woman without deformity.

The nurses give back my clothes, and an identity.

It is usual, they say, for such a thing to happen.

It is usual in my life, and the lives of others.

I am one in five, something like that. I am not hopeless.

I am beautiful as a statistic. Here is my lipstick.

I draw on the old mouth.

The red mouth I put by with my identity

A day ago, two days, three days ago. It was a Friday.

I do not even need a holiday; I can go to work today.

I can love my husband, who will understand.

Who will love me through the blur of my deformity

As if I had lost an eye, a leg, a tongue.

And so I stand, a little sightless. So I walk

Away on wheels, instead of legs, they serve as well.

And learn to speak with fingers, not a tongue.

The body is resourceful.

The body of a starfish can grow back its arms

And newts are prodigal in legs. And may I be

As prodigal in what lacks me.

THIRD VOICE:

She is a small island, asleep and peaceful,

And I am a white ship hooting: Goodbye, goodbye.

The day is blazing. It is very mournful.

The flowers in this room are red and tropical.

They have lived behind glass all their lives, they have been cared for

tenderly.

Now they face a winter of white sheets, white faces.

There is very little to go into my suitcase.

There are the clothes of a fat woman I do not know.

There is my comb and brush. There is an emptiness.

I am so vulnerable suddenly.

I am a wound walking out of hospital.

I am a wound that they are letting go.

I leave my health behind. I leave someone

Who would adhere to me: I undo her fingers like bandages: I go.

SECOND VOICE:

I am myself again. There are no loose ends.

I am bled white as wax, I have no attachments.

I am flat and virginal, which means nothing has happened,

Nothing that cannot be erased, ripped up and scrapped, begun again.

These little black twigs do not think to bud,

Nor do these dry, dry gutters dream of rain.

This woman who meets me in windows—she is neat.

So neat she is transparent, like a spirit.

How shyly she superimposes her neat self

On the inferno of African oranges, the heel-hung pigs.

She is deferring to reality.

It is I. It is I —

Tasting the bitterness between my teeth.

The incalculable malice of the everyday.

FIRST VOICE:

How long can I be a wall, keeping the wind off?

How long can I be

Gentling the sun with the shade of my hand,

Intercepting the blue bolts of a cold moon ?

The voices of loneliness, the voices of sorrow

Lap at my back ineluctably.

How shall it soften them, this little lullaby?

How long can I be a wall around my green property?

How long can my hands

Be a bandage to his hurt, and my words

Bright birds in the sky, consoling, consoling?

It is a terrible thing

To be so open: it is as if my heart

Put on a face and walked into the world.

THIRD VOICE:

Today the colleges are drunk with spring.

My black gown is a little funeral:

It shows I am serious.

The books I carry wedge into my side.

I had an old wound once, but it is healing.

I had a dream of an island, red with cries.

It was a dream, and did not mean a thing.

FIRST VOICE:

Dawn flowers in the great elm outside the house.

The swifts are back. They are shrieking like paper rockets.

I hear the sound of the hours

Widen and die in the hedgerows. I hear the moo of cows.

The colors replenish themselves, and the wet

Thatch smokes in the sun.

The narcissi open white faces in the orchard.

I am reassured. I am reassured.

These are the clear bright colors of the nursery,

The talking ducks, the happy lambs.

I am simple again. I believe in miracles.

I do not believe in those terrible children

Who injure my sleep with their white eyes, their fingerless hands.

They are not mine. They do not belong to me.

I shall meditate upon normality.

I shall meditate upon my little son.

He does not walk. He does not speak a word.

He is still swaddled in white bands.

But he is pink and perfect. He smiles so frequently.

I have papered his room with big roses,

I have painted little hearts on everything.

I do not will him to be exceptional.

It is the exception that interests the devil.

It is the exception that climbs the sorrowful hill

Or sits in the desert and hurts his mother’s heart.

I will him to be common,

To love me as I love him,

And to marry what he wants and where he will.

THIRD VOICE:

Hot noon in the meadows. The buttercups

Swelter and melt, and the lovers

Pass by, pass by.

They are black and flat as shadows.

It is so beautiful to have no attachments!

I am solitary as grass. What is it I miss?

Shall I ever find it, whatever it is ?

The swans are gone. Still the river

Remembers how white they were.

It strives after them with its lights.

It finds their shapes in a cloud.

What is that bird that cries

With such sorrow in its voice ?

I am young as ever, it says. What is it I miss.’

SECOND VOICE:

I am at home in the lamplight. The evenings are lengthening.

I am mending a silk slip: my husband is reading.

How beautifully the light includes these things.

There is a kind of smoke in the spring air,

A smoke that takes the parks, the little statues

With pinkness, as if a tenderness awoke,

A tenderness that did not tire, something healing.

I wait and ache. I think I have been healing.

There is a great deal else to do. My hands

Can stitch lace neatly on to this material. My husband

Can turn and turn the pages of a book.

And so we are at home together, after hours.

It is only time that weighs upon our hands.

It is only time, and that is not material.

The streets may turn to paper suddenly, but I recover

From the long fall, and find myself in bed,

Safe on the mattress, hands braced, as for a fall.

I find myself again. I am no shadow

Though there is a shadow starting from my feet. I am a wife.

The city waits and aches. The little grasses

Crack through stone, and they are green with life.

March 1962

158     Little Fugue

The yew’s black fingers wag;

Cold clouds go over.

So the deaf and dumb

Signal the blind, and are ignored.

I like black statements.

The featurelessness of that cloud, now!

White as an eye all over!

The eye of the blind pianist

At my table on the ship.

He felt for his food.

His fingers had the noses of weasels.

I couldn’t stop looking.

He could hear Beethoven:

Black yew, white cloud,

The horrific complications.

Finger-traps—a tumult of keys.

Empty and silly as plates,

So the blind smile.

I envy the big noises,

The yew hedge of the Grosse Fuge.

Deafness is something else.

Such a dark funnel, my father!

I see your voice

Black and leafy, as in my childhood,

A yew hedge of orders,

Gothic and barbarous, pure German.

Dead men cry from it.

I am guilty of nothing.

The yew my Christ, then.

Is it not as tortured?

And you, during the Great War

In the California delicatessen

Lopping the sausages!

They color my sleep,

Red, mottled, like cut necks.

There was a silence!

Great silence of another order.

I was seven, I knew nothing.

The world occurred.

You had one leg, and a Prussian mind.

Now similar clouds

Are spreading their vacuous sheets.

Do you say nothing?

I am lame in the memory.

I remember a blue eye,

A briefcase of tangerines.

This was a man, then!

Death opened, like a black tree, blackly.

I survive the while,

Arranging my morning.

These are my fingers, this my baby.

The clouds are a marriage dress, of that pallor.

2 April 1962

159     An Appearance

The smile of iceboxes annihilates me.

Such blue currents in the veins of my loved one!

I hear her great heart purr.

From her lips ampersands and percent signs

Exit like kisses.

It is Monday in her mind: morals

Launder and present themselves.

What am I to make of these contradictions ?

I wear white cuffs, I bow.

Is this love then, this red material

Issuing from the steel needle that flies so blindingly ?

It will make little dresses and coats,

It will cover a dynasty.

How her body opens and shuts —

A Swiss watch, jeweled in the hinges!

O heart, such disorganization!

The stars are flashing like terrible numerals.

ABC, her eyelids say.

4 April 1962

160     Crossing the Water

Black lake, black boat, two black, cut-paper people.

Where do the black trees go that drink here ?

Their shadows must cover Canada.

A little light is filtering from the water flowers.

Their leaves do not wish us to hurry:

They are round and flat and full of dark advice.

Cold worlds shake from the oar.

The spirit of blackness is in us, it is in the fishes.

A snag is lifting a valedictory, pale hand;

Stars open among the lilies.

Are you not blinded by such expressionless sirens ?

This is the silence of astounded souls.

4 April 1962

161     Among the Narcissi

Spry, wry, and gray as these March sticks,

Percy bows, in his blue peajacket, among the narcissi.

He is recuperating from something on the lung.

The narcissi, too, are bowing to some big thing:

It rattles their stars on the green hill where Percy

Nurses the hardship of his stitches, and walks and walks.

There is a dignity to this; there is a formality—

The flowers vivid as bandages, and the man mending.

They bow and stand: they suffer such attacks!

And the octogenarian loves the little flocks.

He is quite blue; the terrible wind tries his breathing.

The narcissi look up like children, quickly and whitely.

5 April 1962

162     Pheasant

You said you would kill it this morning.

Do not kill it. It startles me still,

The jut of that odd, dark head, pacing

Through the uncut grass on the elm’s hill.

It is something to own a pheasant,

Or just to be visited at all.

I am not mystical: it isn’t

As if I thought it had a spirit.

It is simply in its element.

That gives it a kingliness, a right.

The print of its big foot last winter,

The tail-track, on the snow in our court —

The wonder of it, in that pallor,

Through Crosshatch of sparrow and starling.

Is it its rareness, then ? It is rare.

But a dozen would be worth having,

A hundred, on that hill—green and red,

Crossing and recrossing: a fine thing!

It is such a good shape, so vivid.

It’s a little cornucopia.

It unclaps, brown as a leaf, and loud,

Settles in the elm, and is easy.

It was sunning in the narcissi.

I trespass stupidly. Let be, let be.

7 April 1962

163     Elm

For Ruth Fainlight

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 your 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 gallop 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, this 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.

19 April 1962

164     The Rabbit Catcher

It was a place of force—

The wind gagging my mouth with my own blown hair,

Tearing off my voice, and the sea

Blinding me with its lights, the lives of the dead

Unreeling in it, spreading like oil.

I tasted the malignity of the gorse,

Its black spikes,

The extreme unction of its yellow candle-flowers.

They had an efficiency, a great beauty,

And were extravagant, like torture.

There was only one place to get to.

Simmering, perfumed,

The paths narrowed into the hollow.

And the snares almost effaced themselves —

Zeros, shutting on nothing,

Set close, like birth pangs.

The absence of shrieks

Made a hole in the hot day, a vacancy.

The glassy light was a clear wall,

The thickets quiet.

I felt a still busyness, an intent.

I felt hands round a tea mug, dull, blunt,

Ringing the white china.

How they awaited him, those little deaths!

They waited like sweethearts. They excited him.

And we, too, had a relationship —

Tight wires between us,

Pegs too deep to uproot, and a mind like a ring

Sliding shut on some quick thing,

The constriction killing me also.

21 May 1962

165     Event

How the elements solidify! —

The moonlight, that chalk cliff

In whose rift we lie

Back to back. I hear an owl cry

From its cold indigo.

Intolerable vowels enter my heart.

The child in the white crib revolves and sighs,

Opens its mouth now, demanding.

His little face is carved in pained, red wood.

Then there are the stars—ineradicable, hard.

One touch: it burns and sickens.

I cannot see your eyes.

Where apple bloom ices the night

I walk in a ring,

A groove of old faults, deep and bitter.

Love cannot come here.

A black gap discloses itself.

On the opposite lip

A small white soul is waving, a small white maggot.

My limbs, also, have left me.

Who has dismembered us ?

The dark is melting. We touch like cripples.

21 May 1962

166     Apprehensions

There is this white wall, above which the sky creates itself—

Infinite, green, utterly untouchable.

Angels swim in it, and the stars, in indifference also.

They are my medium.

The sun dissolves on this wall, bleeding its lights.

A gray wall now, clawed and bloody.

Is there no way out of the mind?

Steps at my back spiral into a well.

There are no trees or birds in this world,

There is only a sourness.

This red wall winces continually:

A red fist, opening and closing,

Two gray, papery bags —

This is what I am made of, this and a terror

Of being wheeled off under crosses and a rain of pietas.

On a black wall, unidentifiable birds

Swivel their heads and cry.

There is no talk of immortality among these!

Cold blanks approach us:

They move in a hurry.

28 May 1962

167     Berck-Plage

(1)

This is the sea, then, this great abeyance.

How the sun’s poultice draws on my inflammation.

Electrifyingly-colored sherbets, scooped from the freeze

By pale girls, travel the air in scorched hands.

Why is it so quiet, what are they hiding ?

I have two legs, and I move smilingly.

A sandy damper kills the vibrations;

It stretches for miles, the shrunk voices

Waving and crutchless, half their old size.

The lines of the eye, scalded by these bald surfaces,

Boomerang like anchored elastics, hurting the owner.

Is it any wonder he puts on dark glasses ?

Is it any wonder he affects a black cassock?

Here he comes now, among the mackerel gatherers

Who wall up their backs against him.

They are handling the black and green lozenges like the parts of a body.

The sea, that crystallized these,

Creeps away, many-snaked, with a long hiss of distress.

(2)

This black boot has no mercy for anybody.

Why should it, it is the hearse of a dead foot,

The high, dead, toeless foot of this priest

Who plumbs the well of his book,

The bent print bulging before him like scenery.

Obscene bikinis hide in the dunes,

Breasts and hips a confectioner’s sugar

Of little crystals, titillating the light,

While a green pool opens its eye,

Sick with what it has swallowed----------

Limbs, images, shrieks. Behind the concrete bunkers

Two lovers unstick themselves.

O white sea-crockery,

What cupped sighs, what salt in the throat. . . .

And the onlooker, trembling,

Drawn like a long material

Through a still virulence,

And a weed, hairy as privates.

(3)

On the balconies of the hotel, things are glittering.

Things, things———

Tubular steel wheelchairs, aluminum crutches.

Such salt-sweetness. Why should I walk

Beyond the breakwater, spotty with barnacles ?

I am not a nurse, white and attendant,

I am not a smile.

These children are after something, with hooks and cries,

And my heart too small to bandage their terrible faults.

This is the side of a man: his red ribs,

The nerves bursting like trees, and this is the surgeon:

One mirrory eve———

A facet of knowledge.

On a striped mattress in one room

An old man is vanishing.

There is no help in his weeping wife.

Where are the eye-stones, yellow and valuable,

And the tongue, sapphire of ash.

(4)

A wedding-cake face in a paper frill.

How superior he is now.

It is like possessing a saint.

The nurses in their wing-caps are no longer so beautiful;

They are browning, like touched gardenias.

The bed is rolled from the wall.

This is what it is to be complete. It is horrible.

Is he wearing pajamas or an evening suit

Under the glued sheet from which his powdery beak

Rises so whitely unbuffeted ?

They propped his jaw with a book until it stiffened

And folded his hands, that were shaking: goodbye, goodbye.

Now the washed sheets fly in the sun,

The pillow cases are sweetening.

It is a blessing, it is a blessing:

The long coffin of soap-colored oak,

The curious bearers and the raw date

Engraving itself in silver with marvelous calm.

(5)

The gray sky lowers, the hills like a green sea

Run fold upon fold far off, concealing their hollows,

The hollows in which rock the thoughts of the wife-------

Blunt, practical boats

Full of dresses and hats and china and married daughters.

In the parlor of the stone house

One curtain is flickering from the open window,

Flickering and pouring, a pitiful candle.

This is the tongue of the dead man: remember, remember.

How far he is now, his actions

Around him like livingroom furniture, like a décor.

As the pallors gather———

The pallors of hands and neighborly faces,

The elate pallors of flying iris.

They are flying off into nothing: remember us.

The empty benches of memory look over stones,

Marble façades with blue veins, and jelly-glassfuls of daffodils.

It is so beautiful up here: it is a stopping place.

(6)

The natural fatness of these lime leaves!-------

Pollarded green balls, the trees march to church.

The voice of the priest, in thin air,

Meets the corpse at the gate,

Addressing it, while the hills roll the notes of the dead bell;

A glitter of wheat and crude earth.

What is the name of that color ?-------

Old blood of caked walls the sun heals,

Old blood of limb stumps, burnt hearts.

The widow with her black pocketbook and three daughters,

Necessary among the flowers,

Enfolds her face like fine linen,

Not to be spread again.

While a sky, wormy with put-by smiles,

Passes cloud after cloud.

And the bride flowers expend a freshness,

And the soul is a bride

In a still place, and the groom is red and forgetful, he is featureless.

(7)

Behind the glass of this car

The world purrs, shut-off and gentle.

And I am dark-suited and still, a member of the party,

Gliding up in low gear behind the cart.

And the priest is a vessel,

A tarred fabric, sorry and dull,

Following the coffin on its flowery cart like a beautiful woman,

A crest of breasts, eyelids and lips

Storming the hilltop.

Then, from the barred yard, the children

Smell the melt of shoe-blacking,

Their faces turning, wordless and slow,

Their eyes opening

On a wonderful thing-------

Six round black hats in the grass and a lozenge of wood,

And a naked mouth, red and awkward.

For a minute the sky pours into the hole like plasma.

There is no hope, it is given up.

30 June 1962

168     The Other

You come in late, wiping your lips.

What did I leave untouched on the doorstep —

White Nike,

Streaming between my walls ?

Smilingly, blue lightning

Assumes, like a meathook, the burden of his parts.

The police love you, you confess everything.

Bright hair, shoe-black, old plastic,

Is my life so intriguing ?

Is it for this you widen your eye-rings ?

Is it for this the air motes depart ?

They are not air motes, they are corpuscles.

Open your handbag. What is that bad smell ?

It is your knitting, busily

Hooking itself to itself,

It is your sticky candies.

I have your head on my wall.

Navel cords, blue-red and lucent,

Shriek from my belly like arrows, and these I ride.

O moon-glow, o sick one,

The stolen horses, the fornications

Circle a womb of marble.

Where are you going

That you suck breath like mileage?

Sulfurous adulteries grieve in a dream.

Cold glass, how you insert yourself

Between myself and myself.

I scratch like a cat.

The blood that runs is dark fruit —

An effect, a cosmetic.

You smile.

No, it is not fatal.

2 July 1962

169     Words heard, by accident, over the phone

O mud, mud, how fluid! —

Thick as foreign coffee, and with a sluggy pulse.

Speak, speak! Who is it ?

It is the bowel-pulse, lover of digestibles.

It is he who has achieved these syllables.

What are these words, these words ?

They are plopping like mud.

O god, how shall I ever clean the phone table?

They are pressing out of the many-holed earpiece, they are looking for a

listener.

Is he here?

Now the room is ahiss. The instrument

Withdraws its tentacle.

But the spawn percolate in my heart. They are fertile.

Muck funnel, muck funnel —

You are too big. They must take you back!

11 July 1962

170     Poppies in July

Little poppies, little hell flames,

Do you do no harm ?

You flicker. I cannot touch you.

I put my hands among the flames. Nothing burns.

And it exhausts me to watch you

Flickering like that, wrinkly and clear red, like the skin of a mouth.

A mouth just bloodied.

Little bloody skirts!

There are fumes that I cannot touch.

Where are your opiates, your nauseous capsules ?

If I could bleed, or sleep!———

If my mouth could marry a hurt like that!

Or your liquors seep to me, in this glass capsule,

Dulling and stilling.

But colorless. Colorless.

20 July 1962

171     Burning the Letters

I made a fire; being tired

Of the white fists of old

Letters and their death rattle

When I came too close to the wastebasket.

What did they know that I didn’t ?

Grain by grain, they unrolled

Sands where a dream of clear water

Grinned like a getaway car.

I am not subtle

Love, love, and well, I was tired

Of cardboard cartons the color of cement or a dog pack

Holding in its hate

Dully, under a pack of men in red jackets,

And the eyes and times of the postmarks.

This fire may lick and fawn, but it is merciless:

A glass case

My fingers would enter although

They melt and sag, they are told

Do not touch.

And here is an end to the writing,

The spry hooks that bend and cringe, and the smiles, the smiles.

And at least it will be a good place now, the attic.

At least I won’t be strung just under the surface,

Dumb fish

With one tin eye,

Watching for glints,

Riding my Arctic

Between this wish and that wish.

So I poke at the carbon birds in my housedress.

They are more beautiful than my bodiless owl,

They console me —

Rising and flying, but blinded.

They would flutter off, black and glittering, they would be coal angels

Only they have nothing to say to anybody.

I have seen to that.

With the butt of a rake

I flake up papers that breathe like people,

I fan them out

Between the yellow lettuces and the German cabbage

Involved in its weird blue dreams,

Involved as a foetus.

And a name with black edges

Wilts at my foot,

Sinuous orchis

In a nest of root-hairs and boredom —

Pale eyes, patent-leather gutturals!

Warm rain greases my hair, extinguishes nothing.

My veins glow like trees.

The dogs are tearing a fox. This is what it is like —

A red burst and a cry

That splits from its ripped bag and does not stop

With the dead eye

And the stuffed expression, but goes on

Dyeing the air,

Telling the particles of the clouds, the leaves, the water

What immortality is. That it is immortal.

13 August 1962

172     For a Fatherless Son

You will be aware of an absence, presently,

Growing beside you, like a tree,

A death tree, color gone, an Australian gum tree —

Balding, gelded by lightning—an illusion,

And a sky like a pig’s backside, an utter lack of attention.

But right now you are dumb.

And I love your stupidity,

The blind mirror of it. I look in

And find no face but my own, and you think that’s funny.

It is good for me

To have you grab my nose, a ladder rung.

One day you may touch what’s wrong

The small skulls, the smashed blue hills, the godawful hush.

Till then your smiles are found money.

26 September 1962

173     A Birthday Present

What is this, behind this veil, is it ugly, is it beautiful ?

It is shimmering, has it breasts, has it edges ?

I am sure it is unique, I am sure it is just what I want.

When I am quiet at my cooking I feel it looking, I feel it thinking

‘Is this the one I am to appear for,

Is this the elect one, the one with black eye-pits and a scar?

Measuring the flour, cutting off the surplus,

Adhering to rules, to rules, to rules.

Is this the one for the annunciation ?

My god, what a laugh!’

But it shimmers, it does not stop, and I think it wants me.

I would not mind if it was bones, or a pearl button.

I do not want much of a present, anyway, this year.

After all I am alive only by accident.

I would have killed myself gladly that time any possible way.

Now there are these veils, shimmering like curtains,

The diaphanous satins of a January window

White as babies’ bedding and glittering with dead breath. O ivory!

It must be a tusk there, a ghost-column.

Can you not see I do not mind what it is.

Can you not give it to me ?

Do not be ashamed — I do not mind if it is small.

Do not be mean, I am ready for enormity.

Let us sit down to it, one on either side, admiring the gleam,

The glaze, the mirrory variety of it.

Let us eat our last supper at it, like a hospital plate.

I know why you will not give it to me,

You are terrified

The world will go up in a shriek, and your head with it,

Bossed, brazen, an antique shield,

A marvel to your great-grandchildren.

Do not be afraid, it is not so.

I will only take it and go aside quietly.

You will not even hear me opening it, no paper crackle,

No falling ribbons, no scream at the end.

I do not think you credit me with this discretion.

If you only knew how the veils were killing my days.

To you they are only transparencies, clear air.

But my god, the clouds are like cotton.

Armies of them. They are carbon monoxide.

Sweetly, sweetly I breathe in,

Filling my veins with invisibles, with the million

Probable motes that tick the years off my life.

You are silver-suited for the occasion. O adding machine———

Is it impossible for you to let something go and have it go whole ?

Must you stamp each piece in purple,

Must you kill what you can ?

There is this one thing I want today, and only you can give it to me.

It stands at my window, big as the sky.

It breathes from my sheets, the cold dead center

Where spilt lives congeal and stiffen to history.

Let it not come by the mail, finger by finger.

Let it not come by word of mouth, I should be sixty

By the time the whole of it was delivered, and too numb to use it.

Only let down the veil, the veil, the veil.

If it were death

I would admire the deep gravity of it, its timeless eyes.

I would know you were serious.

There would be a nobility then, there would be a birthday.

And the knife not carve, but enter

Pure and clean as the cry of a baby,

And the universe slide from my side.

30 September 1962

174     The Detective

What was she doing when it blew in

Over the seven hills, the red furrow, the blue mountain ?

Was she arranging cups? It is important.

Was she at the window, listening?

In that valley the train shrieks echo like souls on hooks.

That is the valley of death, though the cows thrive.

In her garden the lies were shaking out their moist silks

And the eyes of the killer moving sluglike and sidelong,

Unable to face the fingers, those egotists.

The fingers were tamping a woman into a wall,

A body into a pipe, and the smoke rising.

This is the smell of years burning, here in the kitchen,

These are the deceits, tacked up like family photographs,

And this is a man, look at his smile,

The death weapon? No one is dead.

There is no body in the house at all.

There is the smell of polish, there are plush carpets.

There is the sunlight, playing its blades,

Bored hoodlum in a red room

Where the wireless talks to itself like an elderly relative.

Did it come like an arrow, did it come like a knife ?

Which of the poisons is it ?

Which of the nerve-curlers, the convulsors ? Did it electrify ?

This is a case without a body.

The body does not come into it at all.

It is a case of vaporization.

The mouth first, its absence reported

In the second year. It had been insatiable

And in punishment was hung out like brown fruit

To wrinkle and dry.

The breasts next.

These were harder, two white stones.

The milk came yellow, then blue and sweet as water.

There was no absence of lips, there were two children,

But their bones showed, and the moon smiled.

Then the dry wood, the gates,

The brown motherly furrows, the whole estate.

We walk on air, Watson.

There is only the moon, embalmed in phosphorus.

There is only a crow in a tree. Make notes.

1 October 1962

175     The Courage of Shutting-Up

The courage of the shut mouth, in spite of artillery!

The line pink and quiet, a worm, basking.

There are black disks behind it, the disks of outrage,

And the outrage of a sky, the lined brain of it.

The disks revolve, they ask to be heard —

Loaded, as they are, with accounts of bastardies.

Bastardies, usages, desertions and doubleness,

The needle journeying in its groove,

Silver beast between two dark canyons,

A great surgeon, now a tattooist,

Tattooing over and over the same blue grievances,

The snakes, the babies, the tits

On mermaids and two-legged dreamgirls.

The surgeon is quiet, he does not speak.

He has seen too much death, his hands are full of it.

So the disks of the brain revolve, like the muzzles of cannon.

Then there is that antique billhook, the tongue,

Indefatigable, purple. Must it be cut out?

It has nine tails, it is dangerous.

And the noise it flays from the air, once it gets going!

No, the tongue, too, has been put by,

Hung up in the library with the engravings of Rangoon

And the fox heads, the otter heads, the heads of dead rabbits.

It is a marvelous object —

The things it has pierced in its time.

But how about the eyes, the eyes, the eyes?

Mirrors can kill and talk, they are terrible rooms

In which a torture goes on one can only watch.

The face that lived in this mirror is the face of a dead man.

Do not worry about the eyes —

They may be white and shy, they are no stool pigeons,

Their death rays folded like flags

Of a country no longer heard of,

An obstinate independency

Insolvent among the mountains.

2 October 1962

176     The Bee Meeting

Who are these people at the bridge to meet me ? They are the

villagers———

The rector, the midwife, the sexton, the agent for bees.

In my sleeveless summery dress I have no protection,

And they are all gloved and covered, why did nobody tell me?

They are smiling and taking out veils tacked to ancient hats.

I am nude as a chicken neck, does nobody love me ?

Yes, here is the secretary of bees with her white shop smock,

Buttoning the cuffs at my wrists and the slit from my neck to my knees.

Now I am milkweed silk, the bees will not notice.

They will not smell my fear, my fear, my fear.

Which is the rector now, is it that man in black ?

Which is the midwife, is that her blue coat ?

Everybody is nodding a square black head, they are knights in visors,

Breastplates of cheesecloth knotted under the armpits.

Their smiles and their voices are changing. I am led through a beanfield.

Strips of tinfoil winking like people,

Feather dusters fanning their hands in a sea of bean flowers,

Creamy bean flowers with black eyes and leaves like bored hearts.

Is it blood clots the tendrils are dragging up that string ?

No, no, it is scarlet flowers that will one day be edible.

Now they are giving me a fashionable white straw Italian hat

And a black veil that molds to my face, they are making me one of them.

They are leading me to the shorn grove, the circle of hives.

Is it the hawthorn that smells so sick ?

The barren body of hawthorn, etherizing its children.

Is it some operation that is taking place ?

It is the surgeon my neighbors are waiting for,

This apparition in a green helmet,

Shining gloves and white suit.

Is it the butcher, the grocer, the postman, someone I know ?

I cannot run, I am rooted, and the gorse hurts me

With its yellow purses, its spiky armory.

I could not run without having to run forever.

The white hive is snug as a virgin,

Sealing off her brood cells, her honey, and quietly humming.

Smoke rolls and scarves in the grove.

The mind of the hive thinks this is the end of everything.

Here they come, the outriders, on their hysterical elastics.

If I stand very still, they will think I am cow-parsley,

A gullible head untouched by their animosity,

Not even nodding, a personage in a hedgerow.

The villagers open the chambers, they are hunting the queen.

Is she hiding, is she eating honey ? She is very clever.

She is old, old, old, she must live another year, and she knows it.

While in their fingerjoint cells the new virgins

Dream of a duel they will win inevitably,

A curtain of wax dividing them from the bride flight,

The upflight of the murderess into a heaven that loves her.

The villagers are moving the virgins, there will be no killing.

The old queen does not show herself, is she so ungrateful ?

I am exhausted, I am exhausted———

Pillar of white in a blackout of knives.

I am the magician’s girl who does not flinch.

The villagers are untying their disguises, they are shaking hands.

Whose is that long white box in the grove, what have they accomplished,

why am I cold.

3 October 1962

177     The Arrival of the Bee Box

I ordered this, this clean wood box

Square as a chair and almost too heavy to lift.

I would say it was the coffin of a midget

Or a square baby

Were there not such a din in it.

The box is locked, it is dangerous.

I have to live with it overnight

And I can’t keep away from it.

There are no windows, so I can’t see what is in there.

There is only a little grid, no exit.

I put my eye to the grid.

It is dark, dark,

With the swarmy feeling of African hands

Minute and shrunk for export,

Black on black, angrily clambering.

How can I let them out ?

It is the noise that appalls me most of all,

The unintelligible syllables.

It is like a Roman mob,

Small, taken one by one, but my god, together!

I lay my ear to furious Latin.

I am not a Caesar.

I have simply ordered a box of maniacs.

They can be sent back.

They can die, I need feed them nothing, I am the owner.

I wonder how hungry they are.

I wonder if they would forget me

If I just undid the locks and stood back and turned into a tree.

There is the laburnum, its blond colonnades,

And the petticoats of the cherry.

They might ignore me immediately

In my moon suit and funeral veil.

I am no source of honey

So why should they turn on me ?

Tomorrow I will be sweet God, I will set them free.

The box is only temporary.

4 October 1962

178     Stings

Bare-handed, I hand the combs.

The man in white smiles, bare-handed,

Our cheesecloth gauntlets neat and sweet,

The throats of our wrists brave lilies.

He and I

Have a thousand clean cells between us,

Eight combs of yellow cups,

And the hive itself a teacup,

White with pink flowers on it,

With excessive love I enameled it

Thinking ‘Sweetness, sweetness’.

Brood cells gray as the fossils of shells

Terrify me, they seem so old.

What am I buying, wormy mahogany ?

Is there any queen at all in it ?

If there is, she is old,

Her wings torn shawls, her long body

Rubbed of its plush———

Poor and bare and unqueenly and even shameful.

I stand in a column

Of winged, unmiraculous women,

Honey-drudgers.

I am no drudge

Though for years I have eaten dust

And dried plates with my dense hair.

And seen my strangeness evaporate,

Blue dew from dangerous skin.

Will they hate me,

These women who only scurry,

Whose news is the open cherry, the open clover ?

It is almost over.

I am in control.

Here is my honey-machine,

It will work without thinking,

Opening, in spring, like an industrious virgin

To scour the creaming crests

As the moon, for its ivory powders, scours the sea.

A third person is watching.

He has nothing to do with the bee-seller or with me.

Now he is gone

In eight great bounds, a great scapegoat.

Here is his slipper, here is another,

And here the square of white linen

He wore instead of a hat.

He was sweet,

The sweat of his efforts a rain

Tugging the world to fruit.

The bees found him out,

Molding onto his lips like lies,

Complicating his features.

They thought death was worth it, but I

Have a self to recover, a queen.

Is she dead, is she sleeping ?

Where has she been,

With her lion-red body, her wings of glass ?

Now she is flying

More terrible than she ever was, red

Scar in the sky, red comet

Over the engine that killed her———

The mausoleum, the wax house.

6 October 1962

179     The Swarm

Somebody is shooting at something in our town —

A dull pom, pom in the Sunday street.

Jealousy can open the blood,

It can make black roses.

Who are they shooting at ?

It is you the knives are out for

At Waterloo, Waterloo, Napoleon,

The hump of Elba on your short back,

And the snow, marshaling its brilliant cutlery

Mass after mass, saying Shh!

Shh! These are chess people you play with,

Still figures of ivory.

The mud squirms with throats,

Stepping stones for French bootsoles.

The gilt and pink domes of Russia melt and float off

In the furnace of greed. Clouds, clouds.

So the swarm balls and deserts

Seventy feet up, in a black pine tree.

It must be shot down. Pom! Pom!

So dumb it thinks bullets are thunder.

It thinks they are the voice of God

Condoning the beak, the claw, the grin of the dog

Yellow-haunched, a pack-dog,

Grinning over its bone of ivory

Like the pack, the pack, like everybody.

The bees have got so far. Seventy feet high!

Russia, Poland and Germany!

The mild hills, the same old magenta

Fields shrunk to a penny

Spun into a river, the river crossed.

The bees argue, in their black ball,

A flying hedgehog, all prickles.

The man with gray hands stands under the honeycomb

Of their dream, the hived station

Where trains, faithful to their steel arcs,

Leave and arrive, and there is no end to the country.

Pom! Pom! They fall

Dismembered, to a tod of ivy.

So much for the charioteers, the outriders, the Grand Army!

A red tatter, Napoleon!

The last badge of victory.

The swarm is knocked into a cocked straw hat.

Elba, Elba, bleb on the sea!

The white busts of marshals, admirals, generals

Worming themselves into niches.

How instructive this is!

The dumb, banded bodies

Walking the plank draped with Mother France’s upholstery

Into a new mausoleum,

An ivory palace, a crotch pine.

The man with gray hands smiles —

The smile of a man of business, intensely practical.

They are not hands at all

But asbestos receptacles.

Pom! Pom! ‘They would have killed me?’

Stings big as drawing pins!

It seems bees have a notion of honor,

A black intractable mind.

Napoleon is pleased, he is pleased with everything.

O Europe! O ton of honey!

7 October 1962

180     Wintering

This is the easy time, there is nothing doing.

I have whirled the midwife’s extractor,

I have my honey,

Six jars of it,

Six cat’s eyes in the wine cellar,

Wintering in a dark without window

At the heart of the house

Next to the last tenant’s rancid jam

And the bottles of empty glitters———

Sir So-and-so’s gin.

This is the room I have never been in.

This is the room I could never breathe in.

The black bunched in there like a bat,

No light

But the torch and its faint

Chinese yellow on appalling objects———

Black asininity. Decay.

Possession.

It is they who own me.

Neither cruel nor indifferent,

Only ignorant.

This is the time of hanging on for the bees—the bees

So slow I hardly know them,

Filing like soldiers

To the syrup tin

To make up for the honey I’ve taken.

Tate and Lyle keeps them going,

The refined snow.

It is Tate and Lyle they live on, instead of flowers.

They take it. The cold sets in.

Now they ball in a mass,

Black

Mind against all that white.

The smile of the snow is white.

It spreads itself out, a mile-long body of Meissen,

Into which, on warm days,

They can only carry their dead.

The bees are all women,

Maids and the long royal lady.

They have got rid of the men,

The blunt, clumsy stumblers, the boors.

Winter is for women———

The woman, still at her knitting,

At the cradle of Spanish walnut,

Her body a bulb in the cold and too dumb to think.

Will the hive survive, will the gladiolas

Succeed in banking their fires

To enter another year ?

What will they taste of, the Christmas roses?

The bees are flying. They taste the spring.

9 October 1962

181     A Secret

A secret! A secret!

How superior.

You are blue and huge, a traffic policeman,

Holding up one palm —

A difference between us ?

I have one eye, you have two.

The secret is stamped on you,

Faint, undulant watermark.

Will it show in the black detector ?

Will it come out

Wavery, indelible, true

Through the African giraffe in its Edeny greenery,

The Moroccan hippopotamus ?

They stare from a square, stiff frill.

They are for export,

One a fool, the other a fool.

A secret . . . An extra amber

Brandy finger

Roosting and cooing ‘You, you’

Behind two eyes in which nothing is reflected but monkeys.

A knife that can be taken out

To pare nails,

To lever the dirt.

‘It won’t hurt.’

An illegitimate baby —

That big blue head —

How it breathes in the bureau drawer!

‘Is that lingerie, pet?

‘It smells of salt cod, you had better

Stab a few cloves in an apple,

Make a sachet or

Do away with the bastard.

‘Do away with it altogether.’

‘No, no, it is happy there.’

‘But it wants to get out!

Look, look! It is wanting to crawl.’

My god, there goes the stopper!

The cars in the Place de la Concorde—

Watch out!

A stampede, a stampede!

Horns twirling and jungle gutturals!

An exploded bottle of stout,

Slack foam in the lap.

You stumble out,

Dwarf baby,

The knife in your back.

‘I feel weak.’

The secret is out.

10 October 1962

182     The Applicant

First, are you our sort of a person ?

Do you wear

A glass eye, false teeth or a crutch,

A brace or a hook,

Rubber breasts or a rubber crotch,

Stitches to show something’s missing ? No, no ? Then

How can we give you a thing ?

Stop crying.

Open your hand.

Empty? Empty. Here is a hand

To fill it and willing

To bring teacups and roll away headaches

And do whatever you tell it.

Will you marry it ?

It is guaranteed

To thumb shut your eyes at the end

And dissolve of sorrow.

We make new stock from the salt.

I notice you are stark naked.

How about this suit———

Black and stiff, but not a bad fit.

Will you marry it?

It is waterproof, shatterproof, proof

Against fire and bombs through the roof.

Believe me, they’ll bury you in it.

Now your head, excuse me, is empty.

I have the ticket for that.

Come here, sweetie, out of the closet.

Well, what do you think of that?

Naked as paper to start

But in twenty-five years she’ll be silver,

In fifty, gold.

A living doll, everywhere you look.

It can sew, it can cook,

It can talk, talk, talk.

It works, there is nothing wrong with it.

You have a hole, it’s a poultice.

You have an eye, it’s an image.

My boy, it’s your last resort.

Will you marry it, marry it, marry it.

11 October 1962

183     Daddy

You do not do, you do not do

Any more, black shoe

In which I have lived like a foot

For thirty years, poor and white,

Barely daring to breathe or Achoo.

Daddy, I have had to kill you.

You died before I had time———

Marble-heavy, a bag full of God,

Ghastly statue with one gray toe

Big as a Frisco seal

And a head in the freakish Atlantic

Where it pours bean green over blue

In the waters off beautiful Nauset.

I used to pray to recover you.

Ach, du.

In the German tongue, in the Polish town

Scraped flat by the roller

Of wars, wars, wars.

But the name of the town is common.

My Polack friend

Says there are a dozen or two.

So I never could tell where you

Put your foot, your root,

I never could talk to you.

The tongue stuck in my jaw.

It stuck in a barb wire snare.

Ich, ich, ich, ich,

I could hardly speak.

I thought every German was you.

And the language obscene

An engine, an engine

Chuffing me off like a Jew.

A Jew to Dachau, Auschwitz, Belsen.

I began to talk like a Jew.

I think I may well be a Jew.

The snows of the Tyrol, the clear beer of Vienna

Are not very pure or true.

With my gipsy ancestress and my weird luck

And my Taroc pack and my Taroc pack

I may be a bit of a Jew.

I have always been scared of you,

With your Luftwaffe, your gobbledygoo.

And your neat mustache

And your Aryan eye, bright blue.

Panzer-man, panzer-man, O You———

Not God but a swastika

So black no sky could squeak through.

Every woman adores a Fascist,

The boot in the face, the brute

Brute heart of a brute like you.

You stand at the blackboard, daddy,

In the picture I have of you,

A cleft in your chin instead of your foot

But no less a devil for that, no not

Any less the black man who

Bit my pretty red heart in two.

I was ten when they buried you.

At twenty I tried to die

And get back, back, back to you.

I thought even the bones would do.

But they pulled me out of the sack,

And they stuck me together with glue.

And then I knew what to do.

I made a model of you,

A man in black with a Meinkampf look

And a love of the rack and the screw.

And I said I do, I do.

So daddy, I’m finally through.

The black telephone’s off at the root,

The voices just can’t worm through.

If I’ve killed one man, I’ve killed two———

The vampire who said he was you

And drank my blood for a year,

Seven years, if you want to know.

Daddy, you can lie back now.

There’s a stake in your fat black heart

And the villagers never liked you.

They are dancing and stamping on you.

They always knew it was you.

Daddy, daddy, you bastard, I’m through.

12 October 1962

184     Medusa

Off that landspit of stony mouth-plugs,

Eyes rolled by white sticks,

Ears cupping the sea’s incoherences,

You house your unnerving head—God-ball,

Lens of mercies,

Your stooges

Plying their wild cells in my keel’s shadow,

Pushing by like hearts,

Red stigmata at the very center,

Riding the rip tide to the nearest point of departure,

Dragging their Jesus hair.

Did I escape, I wonder?

My mind winds to you

Old barnacled umbilicus, Atlantic cable,

Keeping itself, it seems, in a state of miraculous repair.

In any case, you are always there,

Tremulous breath at the end of my line,

Curve of water upleaping

To my water rod, dazzling and grateful,

Touching and sucking.

I didn’t call you.

I didn’t call you at all.

Nevertheless, nevertheless

You steamed to me over the sea,

Fat and red, a placenta

Paralysing the kicking lovers.

Cobra light

Squeezing the breath from the blood bells

Of the fuchsia. I could draw no breath,

Dead and moneyless,

Overexposed, like an X-ray.

Who do you think you are ?

A Communion wafer ? Blubbery Mary ?

I shall take no bite of your body,

Bottle in which I live,

Ghastly Vatican.

I am sick to death of hot salt.

Green as eunuchs, your wishes

Hiss at my sins.

Off, off, eely tentacle!

There is nothing between us.

16 October 1962

185     The Jailer

My night sweats grease his breakfast plate.

The same placard of blue fog is wheeled into position

With the same trees and headstones.

Is that all he can come up with,

The rattler of keys ?

I have been drugged and raped.

Seven hours knocked out of my right mind

Into a black sack

Where I relax, foetus or cat,

Lever of his wet dreams.

Something is gone.

My sleeping capsule, my red and blue zeppelin

Drops me from a terrible altitude.

Carapace smashed,

I spread to the beaks of birds.

O little gimlets —

What holes this papery day is already full of!

He has been burning me with cigarettes,

Pretending I am a negress with pink paws.

I am myself. That is not enough.

The fever trickles and stiffens in my hair.

My ribs show. What have I eaten ?

Lies and smiles.

Surely the sky is not that color,

Surely the grass should be rippling.

All day, gluing my church of burnt matchsticks,

I dream of someone else entirely.

And he, for this subversion,

Hurts me, he

With his armor of fakery,

His high cold masks of amnesia.

How did I get here ?

Indeterminate criminal,

I die with variety —

Hung, starved, burned, hooked.

I imagine him

Impotent as distant thunder,

In whose shadow I have eaten my ghost ration.

I wish him dead or away.

That, it seems, is the impossibility.

That being free. What would the dark

Do without fevers to eat ?

What would the light

Do without eyes to knife, what would he

Do, do, do without me?

17 October 1962

186     Lesbos

Viciousness in the kitchen!

The potatoes hiss.

It is all Hollywood, windowless,

The fluorescent light wincing on and off like a terrible migraine,

Coy paper strips for doors —

Stage curtains, a widow’s frizz.

And I, love, am a pathological liar,

And my child—look at her, face down on the floor,

Little unstrung puppet, kicking to disappear—

Why she is schizophrenic,

Her face red and white, a panic,

You have stuck her kittens outside your window

In a sort of cement well

Where they crap and puke and cry and she can’t hear.

You say you can’t stand her,

The bastard’s a girl.

You who have blown your tubes like a bad radio

Clear of voices and history, the staticky

Noise of the new.

You say I should drown the kittens. Their smell!

You say I should drown my girl.

She’ll cut her throat at ten if she’s mad at two.

The baby smiles, fat snail,

From the polished lozenges of orange linoleum.

You could eat him. He’s a boy.

You say your husband is just no good to you.

His Jew-Mama guards his sweet sex like a pearl.

You have one baby, I have two.

I should sit on a rock off Cornwall and comb my hair.

I should wear tiger pants, I should have an affair.

We should meet in another life, we should meet in air,

Me and you.

Meanwhile there’s a stink of fat and baby crap.

I’m doped and thick from my last sleeping pill.

The smog of cooking, the smog of hell

Floats our heads, two venomous opposites,

Our bones, our hair.

I call you Orphan, orphan. You are ill.

The sun gives you ulcers, the wind gives you T.B.

Once you were beautiful.

In New York, in Hollywood, the men said: ‘Through?

Gee baby, you are rare.’

You acted, acted, acted for the thrill.

The impotent husband slumps out for a coffee.

I try to keep him in,

An old pole for the lightning,

The acid baths, the skyfuls off of you.

He lumps it down the plastic cobbled hill,

Flogged trolley. The sparks are blue.

The blue sparks spill,

Splitting like quartz into a million bits.

O jewel! O valuable!

That night the moon

Dragged its blood bag, sick

Animal

Up over the harbor lights.

And then grew normal,

Hard and apart and white.

The scale-sheen on the sand scared me to death.

We kept picking up handfuls, loving it,

Working it like dough, a mulatto body,

The silk grits.

A dog picked up your doggy husband. He went on.

Now I am silent, hate

Up to my neck,

Thick, thick.

I do not speak.

I am packing the hard potatoes like good clothes,

I am packing the babies,

I am packing the sick cats.

O vase of acid,

It is love you are full of. You know who you hate.

He is hugging his ball and chain down by the gate

That opens to the sea

Where it drives in, white and black,

Then spews it back.

Every day you fill him with soul-stuff, like a pitcher.

You are so exhausted.

Your voice my ear-ring,

Flapping and sucking, blood-loving bat.

That is that. That is that.

You peer from the door,

Sad hag. ‘Every woman’s a whore.

I can’t communicate.’

I see your cute décor

Close on you like the fist of a baby

Or an anemone, that sea

Sweetheart, that kleptomaniac.

I am still raw.

I say I may be back.

You know what lies are for.

Even in your Zen heaven we shan’t meet.

18 October 1962

187     Stopped Dead

A squeal of brakes.

Or is it a birth cry?

And here we are, hung out over the dead drop

Uncle, pants factory Fatso, millionaire.

And you out cold beside me in your chair.

The wheels, two rubber grubs, bite their sweet tails.

Is that Spain down there?

Red and yellow, two passionate hot metals

Writhing and sighing, what sort of a scenery is it?

It isn’t England, it isn’t France, it isn’t Ireland.

It’s violent. We’re here on a visit,

With a goddam baby screaming off somewhere.

There’s always a bloody baby in the air.

I’d call it a sunset, but

Whoever heard a sunset yowl like that?

You are sunk in your seven chins, still as a ham.

Who do you think I am,

Uncle, uncle?

Sad Hamlet, with a knife?

Where do you stash your life?

Is it a penny, a pearl—

Your soul, your soul?

I’ll carry it off like a rich pretty girl,

Simply open the door and step out of the car

And live in Gibraltar on air, on air.

19 October 1962

188     Fever 103°

Pure ? What does it mean ?

The tongues of hell

Are dull, dull as the triple

Tongues of dull, fat Cerberus

Who wheezes at the gate. Incapable

Of licking clean

The aguey tendon, the sin, the sin.

The tinder cries.

The indelible smell

Of a snuffed candle!

Love, love, the low smokes roll

From me like Isadora’s scarves, I’m in a fright

One scarf will catch and anchor in the wheel.

Such yellow sullen smokes

Make their own element. They will not rise,

But trundle round the globe

Choking the aged and the meek,

The weak

Hothouse baby in its crib,

The ghastly orchid

Hanging its hanging garden in the air,

Devilish leopard!

Radiation turned it white

And killed it in an hour.

Greasing the bodies of adulterers

Like Hiroshima ash and eating in.

The sin. The sin.

Darling, all night

I have been flickering, off, on, off, on.

The sheets grow heavy as a lecher’s kiss.

Three days. Three nights.

Lemon water, chicken

Water, water make me retch.

I am too pure for you or anyone.

Your body

Hurts me as the world hurts God. I am a lantern———

My head a moon

Of Japanese paper, my gold beaten skin

Infinitely delicate and infinitely expensive.

Does not my heat astound you. And my light.

All by myself I am a huge camellia

Glowing and coming and going, flush on flush.

I think I am going up,

I think I may rise———

The beads of hot metal fly, and I, love, I

Am a pure acetylene

Virgin

Attended by roses,

By kisses, by cherubim,

By whatever these pink things mean.

Not you, nor him

Not him, nor him

(My selves dissolving, old whore petticoats)———

To Paradise.

20 October 1962

189     Amnesiac

No use, no use, now, begging Recognize!

There is nothing to do with such a beautiful blank but smooth it.

Name, house, car keys,

The little toy wife —

Erased, sigh, sigh.

Four babies and a cooker!

Nurses the size of worms and a minute doctor

Tuck him in.

Old happenings

Peel from his skin.

Down the drain with all of it!

Hugging his pillow

Like the red-headed sister he never dared to touch,

He dreams of a new one —

Barren, the lot are barren!

And of another color.

How they’ll travel, travel, travel, scenery

Sparking off their brother-sister rears

A comet tail!

And money the sperm fluid of it all.

One nurse brings in

A green drink, one a blue.

They rise on either side of him like stars.

The two drinks flame and foam.

O sister, mother, wife,

Sweet Lethe is my life.

I am never, never, never coming home!

21 October 1962

190     Lyonnesse

No use whistling for Lyonnesse!

Sea-cold, sea-cold it certainly is.

Take a look at the white, high berg on his forehead —

There’s where it sunk.

The blue, green,

Gray, indeterminate gilt

Sea of his eyes washing over it

And a round bubble

Popping upward from the mouths of bells

People and cows.

The Lyonians had always thought

Heaven would be something else,

But with the same faces,

The same places. . .

It was not a shock —

The clear, green, quite breathable atmosphere,

Cold grits underfoot,

And the spidery water-dazzle on field and street.

It never occurred that they had been forgot,

That the big God

Had lazily closed one eye and let them slip

Over the English cliff and under so much history!

They did not see him smile,

Turn, like an animal,

In his cage of ether, his cage of stars.

He’d had so many wars!

The white gape of his mind was the real Tabula Rasa.

21 October 1962

191     Cut

For Susan O’Neill Roe

What a thrill———

My thumb instead of an onion.

The top quite gone

Except for a sort of a 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.

24 October 1962

192     By Candlelight

This is winter, this is night, small love—

A sort of black horsehair,

A rough, dumb country stuff

Steeled with the sheen

Of what green stars can make it to our gate.

I hold you on my arm.

It is very late.

The dull bells tongue the hour.

The mirror floats us at one candle power.

This is the fluid in which we meet each other,

This haloey radiance that seems to breathe

And lets our shadows wither

Only to blow

Them huge again, violent giants on the wall.

One match scratch makes you real.

At first the candle will not bloom at all —

It snuffs its bud

To almost nothing, to a dull blue dud.

I hold my breath until you creak to life,

Balled hedgehog,

Small and cross. The yellow knife

Grows tall. You clutch your bars.

My singing makes you roar.

I rock you like a boat

Across the Indian carpet, the cold floor,

While the brass man

Kneels, back bent, as best he can

Hefting his white pillar with the light

That keeps the sky at bay,

The sack of black! It is everywhere, tight, tight!

He is yours, the little brassy Atlas —

Poor heirloom, all you have,

At his heels a pile of five brass cannonballs,

No child, no wife.

Five balls! Five bright brass balls!

To juggle with, my love, when the sky falls.

24 October 1962

193     The Tour

O maiden aunt, you have come to call.

Do step into the hall!

With your bold

Gecko, the little flick!

All cogs, weird sparkle and every cog solid gold.

And I in slippers and housedress with no lipstick!

And you want to be shown about!

Yes, yes, this is my address.

Not a patch on your place, I guess, with the Javanese

Geese and the monkey trees.

It’s a bit burnt-out,

A bit of a wild machine, a bit of a mess!

O I shouldn’t put my finger in that

Auntie, it might bite!

That’s my frost box, no cat,

Though it looks like a cat, with its fluffy stuff, pure white.

You should see the objects it makes!

Millions of needly glass cakes!

Fine for the migraine or the bellyache. And this

Is where I kept the furnace,

Each coal a hot cross-stitch—a lovely light!

It simply exploded one night,

It went up in smoke.

And that’s why I have no hair, auntie, that’s why I choke

Off and on, as if I just had to retch.

Coal gas is ghastly stuff.

Here’s a spot I thought you’d love—

Morning Glory Pool!

The blue’s a jewel.

It boils for forty hours at a stretch.

O I shouldn’t dip my hankie in, it hurts!

Last summer, my God, last summer

It ate seven maids and a plumber

And returned them steamed and pressed and stiff as shirts.

I am bitter? I’m averse?

Here’s your specs, dear, here’s your purse.

Toddle on home to tea now in your flat hat.

It’ll be lemon tea for me,

Lemon tea and earwig biscuits—creepy-creepy.

You’d not want that.

Toddle on home, before the weather’s worse.

Toddle on home, and don’t trip on the nurse! —

She may be bald, she may have no eyes,

But auntie, she’s awfully nice.

She’s pink, she’s a born midwife —

She can bring the dead to life

With her wiggly fingers and for a very small fee.

Well I hope you’ve enjoyed it, auntie!

Toddle on home to tea!

25 October 1962

194     Ariel

Stasis in darkness.

Then the substanceless blue

Pour of tor and distances.

God’s lioness,

How one we grow,

Pivot of heels and knees!—The furrow

Splits and passes, sister to

The brown arc

Of the neck I cannot catch,

Nigger-eye

Berries cast dark

Hooks-------

Black sweet blood mouthfuls,

Shadows.

Something else

Hauls me through air-------

Thighs, hair;

Flakes from my heels.

White

Godiva, I unpeel-------

Dead hands, dead stringencies.

And now I

Foam to wheat, a glitter of seas.

The child’s cry

Melts in the wall.

And I

Am the arrow,

The dew that flies

Suicidal, at one with the drive

Into the red

Eye, the cauldron of morning.

27 October 1962

195     Poppies in October

Even the sun-clouds this morning cannot manage such skirts.

Nor the woman in the ambulance

Whose red heart blooms through her coat so astoundingly———

A gift, a love gift

Utterly unasked for

By a sky

Palely and flamily

Igniting its carbon monoxides, by eyes

Dulled to a halt under bowlers.

O my God, what am I

That these late mouths should cry open

In a forest of frost, in a dawn of cornflowers.

27 October 1962

196     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.

29 October 1962

197     Purdah

Jade —

Stone of the side,

The agonized

Side of green Adam, I

Smile, cross-legged,

Enigmatical,

Shifting my clarities.

So valuable!

How the sun polishes this shoulder!

And should

The moon, my

Indefatigable cousin

Rise, with her cancerous pallors,

Dragging trees —

Little bushy polyps,

Little nets,

My visibilities hide.

I gleam like a mirror.

At this facet the bridegroom arrives

Lord of the mirrors!

It is himself he guides

In among these silk

Screens, these rustling appurtenances.

I breathe, and the mouth

Veil stirs its curtain

My eye

Veil is

A concatenation of rainbows.

I am his.

Even in his

Absence, I

Revolve in my

Sheath of impossibles,

Priceless and quiet

Among these parakeets, macaws!

O chatterers

Attendants of the eyelash!

I shall unloose

One feather, like the peacock.

Attendants of the lip!

I shall unloose

One note

Shattering

The chandelier

Of air that all day flies

Its crystals

A million ignorants.

Attendants!

Attendants!

And at his next step

I shall unloose

I shall unloose —

From the small jeweled

Doll he guards like a heart —

The lioness,

The shriek in the bath,

The cloak of holes.

29 October 1962

198     Lady Lazarus

I have done it again.

One year in every ten

I manage it-------

A sort of walking miracle, my skin

Bright as a Nazi lampshade,

My right foot

A paperweight,

My face a featureless, fine

Jew linen.

Peel off the napkin

O my enemy.

Do I terrify?-------

The nose, the eye pits, the full set of teeth ?

The sour breath

Will vanish in a day.

Soon, soon the flesh

The grave cave ate will be

At home on me

And I a smiling woman.

I am only thirty.

And like the cat I have nine times to die.

This is Number Three.

What a trash

To annihilate each decade.

What a million filaments.

The peanut-crunching crowd

Shoves in to see

Them unwrap me hand and foot

The big strip tease.

Gentlemen, ladies

These are my hands

My knees.

I may be skin and bone,

Nevertheless, I am the same, identical woman.

The first time it happened I was ten.

It was an accident.

The second time I meant

To last it out and not come back at all.

I rocked shut

As a seashell.

They had to call and call

And pick the worms off me like sticky pearls.

Dying

Is an art, like everything else.

I do it exceptionally well.

I do it so it feels like hell.

I do it so it feels real.

I guess you could say I’ve a call.

It’s easy enough to do it in a cell.

It’s easy enough to do it and stay put.

It’s the theatrical

Comeback in broad day

To the same place, the same face, the same brute

Amused shout :

‘A miracle!’

That knocks me out.

There is a charge

For the eyeing of my scars, there is a charge

For the hearing of my heart-------

It really goes.

And there is a charge, a very large charge

For a word or a touch

Or a bit of blood

Or a piece of my hair or my clothes.

So, so, Herr Doktor.

So, Herr Enemy.

I am your opus,

I am your valuable,

The pure gold baby

That melts to a shriek.

I turn and burn.

Do not think I underestimate your great concern.

Ash, ash —

You poke and stir.

Flesh, bone, there is nothing there———

A cake of soap,

A wedding ring,

A gold filling.

Herr God, Herr Lucifer

Beware

Beware.

Out of the ash

I rise with my red hair

And I eat men like air.

23–29 October 1962

199     The Couriers

The word of a snail on the plate of a leaf?

It is not mine. Do not accept it.

Acetic acid in a sealed tin ?

Do not accept it. It is not genuine.

A ring of gold with the sun in it ?

Lies. Lies and a grief.

Frost on a leaf, the immaculate

Cauldron, talking and crackling

All to itself on the top of each

Of nine black Alps.

A disturbance in mirrors,

The sea shattering its gray one———

Love, love, my season.

4 November 1962

200     Getting There

How far is it ?

How far is it now ?

The gigantic gorilla interior

Of the wheels move, they appall me———

The terrible brains

Of Krupp, black muzzles

Revolving, the sound

Punching out Absence! like cannon.

It is Russia I have to get across, it is some war or other.

I am dragging my body

Quietly through the straw of the boxcars.

Now is the time for bribery.

What do wheels eat, these wheels

Fixed to their arcs like gods,

The silver leash of the will———

Inexorable. And their pride!

All the gods know is destinations.

I am a letter in this slot———

I fly to a name, two eyes.

Will there be fire, will there be bread ?

Here there is such mud.

It is a trainstop, the nurses

Undergoing the faucet water, its veils, veils in a nunnery,

Touching their wounded,

The men the blood still pumps forward,

Legs, arms piled outside

The tent of unending cries———

A hospital of dolls.

And the men, what is left of the men

Pumped ahead by these pistons, this blood

Into the next mile,

The next hour———

Dynasty of broken arrows!

How far is it ?

There is mud on my feet,

Thick, red and slipping. It is Adam’s side,

This earth I rise from, and I in agony.

I cannot undo myself, and the train is steaming.

Steaming and breathing, its teeth

Ready to roll, like a devil’s.

There is a minute at the end of it

A minute, a dewdrop.

How far is it ?

It is so small

The place I am getting to, why are there these obstacles———

The body of this woman,

Charred skirts and deathmask

Mourned by religious figures, by garlanded children.

And now detonations———

Thunder and guns.

The fire’s between us.

Is there no still place

Turning and turning in the middle air,

Untouched and untouchable.

The train is dragging itself, it is screaming———

An animal

Insane for the destination,

The bloodspot,

The face at the end of the flare.

I shall bury the wounded like pupas,

I shall count and bury the dead.

Let their souls writhe in a dew,

Incense in my track.

The carriages rock, they are cradles.

And I, stepping from this skin

Of old bandages, boredoms, old faces

Step to you from the black car of Lethe,

Pure as a baby.

6 November 1962

201     The Night Dances

A smile fell in the grass.

Irretrievable!

And how will your night dances

Lose themselves. In mathematics ?

Such pure leaps and spirals———

Surely they travel

The world forever, I shall not entirely

Sit emptied of beauties, the gift

Of your small breath, the drenched grass

Smell of your sleeps, lilies, lilies.

Their flesh bears no relation.

Cold folds of ego, the calla,

And the tiger, embellishing itself-------

Spots, and a spread of hot petals.

The comets

Have such a space to cross,

Such coldness, forgetfulness.

So your gestures flake off———

Warm and human, then their pink light

Bleeding and peeling

Through the black amnesias of heaven.

Why am I given

These lamps, these planets

Falling like blessings, like flakes

Six-sided, white

On my eyes, my lips, my hair

Touching and melting.

Nowhere.

6 November 1962

202     Gulliver

Over your body the clouds go

High, high and icily

And a little flat, as if they

Floated on a glass that was invisible.

Unlike swans,

Having no reflections;

Unlike you,

With no strings attached.

All cool, all blue. Unlike you———

You, there on your back,

Eyes to the sky.

The spider-men have caught you,

Winding and twining their petty fetters,

Their bribes———

So many silks.

How they hate you.

They converse in the valley of your fingers, they are inchworms.

They would have you sleep in their cabinets,

This toe and that toe, a relic.

Step off!

Step off seven leagues, like those distances

That revolve in Crivelli, untouchable.

Let this eye be an eagle,

The shadow of this lip, an abyss.

6 November 1962

203     Thalidomide

O half moon—

Half-brain, luminosity—

Negro, masked like a white,

Your dark

Amputations crawl and appall—

Spidery, unsafe.

What glove

What leatheriness

Has protected

Me from that shadow—

The indelible buds,

Knuckles at shoulder-blades, the

Faces that

Shove into being, dragging

The lopped

Blood-caul of absences.

All night I carpenter

A space for the thing I am given,

A love

Of two wet eyes and a screech.

White spit

Of indifference!

The dark fruits revolve and fall.

The glass cracks across,

The image

Flees and aborts like dropped mercury.

8 November 1962

204     Letter in November

Love, the world

Suddenly turns, turns color. The streetlight

Splits through the rat’s-tail

Pods of the laburnum at nine in the morning.

It is the Arctic,

This little black

Circle, with its tawn silk grasses—babies’ hair.

There is a green in the air,

Soft, delectable.

It cushions me lovingly.

I am flushed and warm.

I think I may be enormous,

I am so stupidly happy,

My Wellingtons

Squelching and squelching through the beautiful red.

This is my property.

Two times a day

I pace it, sniffing

The barbarous holly with its viridian

Scallops, pure iron,

And the wall of old corpses.

I love them.

I love them like history.

The apples are golden,

Imagine it

My seventy trees

Holding their gold-ruddy balls

In a thick gray death-soup,

Their million

Gold leaves metal and breathless.

O love, O celibate.

Nobody but me

Walks the waist-high wet.

The irreplaceable

Golds bleed and deepen, the mouths of Thermopylae.

11 November 1962

205     Death & Co.

Two, of course there are two.

It seems perfectly natural now———

The one who never looks up, whose eyes are lidded

And balled, like Blake’s,

Who exhibits

The birthmarks that are his trademark———

The scald scar of water,

The nude

Verdigris of the condor.

I am red meat. His beak

Claps sidewise: I am not his yet.

He tells me how badly I photograph.

He tells me how sweet

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.

14 November 1962

206     Years

They enter as animals from the outer

Space of holly where spikes

Are not the thoughts I turn on, like a Yogi,

But greenness, darkness so pure

They freeze and are.

O God, I am not like you

In your vacuous black,

Stars stuck all over, bright stupid confetti.

Eternity bores me,

1 never wanted it.

What I love is

The piston in motion———

My soul dies before it.

And the hooves of the horses,

Their merciless churn.

And you, great Stasis———

What is so great in that!

Is it a tiger this year, this roar at the door?

Is it a Christus,

The awful

God-bit in him

Dying to fly and be done with it ?

The blood berries are themselves, they are very still.

The hooves will not have it,

In blue distance the pistons hiss.

16 November 1962

207     The Fearful

This man makes a pseudonym

And crawls behind it like a worm.

This woman on the telephone

Says she is a man, not a woman.

The mask increases, eats the worm,

Stripes for mouth and eyes and nose,

The voice of the woman hollows —

More and more like a dead one,

Worms in the glottal stops.

She hates

The thought of a baby —

Stealer of cells, stealer of beauty —

She would rather be dead than fat,

Dead and perfect, like Nefertit,

Hearing the fierce mask magnify

The silver limbo of each eye

Where the child can never swim,

Where there is only him and him.

16 November 1962

208     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.

19 November 1962

209     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 casing nothing.

26 November 1962

210     Brasilia

Will they occur,

These people with torsos of steel

Winged elbows and eyeholes

Awaiting masses

Of cloud to give them expression,

These super-people! —

And my baby a nail

Driven, driven in.

He shrieks in his grease

Bones nosing for distances.

And I, nearly extinct,

His three teeth cutting

Themselves on my thumb —

And the star,

The old story.

In the lane I meet sheep and wagons,

Red earth, motherly blood.

O You who eat

People like light rays, leave

This one

Mirror safe, unredeemed

By the dove’s annihilation,

The glory

The power, the glory.

1 December 1962

211     Childless Woman

The womb

Rattles its pod, the moon

Discharges itself from the tree with nowhere to go.

My landscape is a hand with no lines,

The roads bunched to a knot,

The knot myself,

Myself the rose you achieve —

This body,

This ivory

Ungodly as a child’s shriek.

Spiderlike, I spin mirrors,

Loyal to my image,

Uttering nothing but blood —

Taste it, dark red!

And my forest

My funeral,

And this hill and this

Gleaming with the mouths of corpses.

1 December1962

212     Eavesdropper

Your brother will trim my hedges!

They darken your house,

Nosy grower,

Mole on my shoulder,

To be scratched absently,

To bleed, if it comes to that.

The stain of the tropics

Still urinous on you, a sin.

A kind of bush-stink.

You may be local,

But that yellow!

Godawful!

Your body one

Long nicotine-finger

On which I,

White cigarette,

Burn, for your inhalation,

Driving the dull cells wild.

Let me roost in you!

My distractions, my pallors.

Let them start the queer alchemy

That melts the skin

Gray tallow, from bone and bone.

So I saw your much sicker

Predecessor wrapped up,

A six and a half foot wedding-cake.

And he was not even malicious.

Do not think I don’t notice your curtain—

Midnight, four o’clock,

Lit (you are reading),

Tarting with the drafts that pass,

Little whore tongue,

Chenille beckoner,

Beckoning my words in —

The zoo yowl, the mad soft

Mirror talk you love to catch me at.

How you jumped when I jumped on you!

Arms folded, ear cocked,

Toad-yellow under the drop

That would not, would not drop

In a desert of cow people

Trundling their udders home

To the electric milker, the wifey, the big blue eye

That watches, like God, or the sky

The ciphers that watch it.

I called.

You crawled out,

A weather figure, boggling,

Beige troll, the low

Church smile

Spreading itself, like butter.

This is what I am in for —

Flea body!

Eyes like mice

Flicking over my property,

Levering letter flaps,

Scrutinizing the fly

Of the man’s pants

Dead on the chair back,

Opening the fat smiles, the eyes

Of two babies

Just to make sure —

Toad-stone! Sister-bitch! Sweet neighbor!

15 October 1962, 31 December 1962

1963

213     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.

2 December 1962, 28 January 1963

214     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.

28 January 1963

215     Totem

The engine is killing the track, the track is silver,

It stretches into the distance. It will be eaten nevertheless.

Its running is useless.

At nightfall there is the beauty of drowned fields,

Dawn gilds the farmers like pigs,

Swaying slightly in their thick suits,

White towers of Smithfield ahead,

Fat haunches and blood on their minds.

There is no mercy in the glitter of cleavers,

The butcher’s guillotine that whispers: ‘How’s this, how’s this?’

In the bowl the hare is aborted,

Its baby head out of the way, embalmed in spice,

Flayed of fur and humanity.

Let us eat it like Plato’s afterbirth,

Let us eat it like Christ.

These are the people that were important———

Their round eyes, their teeth, their grimaces

On a stick that rattles and clicks, a counterfeit snake.

Shall the hood of the cobra appall me———

The loneliness of its eye, the eye of the mountains

Through which the sky eternally threads itself?

The world is blood-hot and personal

Dawn says, with its blood-flush.

There is no terminus, only suitcases

Out of which the same self unfolds like a suit

Bald and shiny, with pockets of wishes,

Notions and tickets, short circuits and folding mirrors.

I am mad, calls the spider, waving its many arms.

And in truth it is terrible,

Multiplied in the eyes of the flies.

They buzz like blue children

In nets of the infinite,

Roped in at the end by the one

Death with its many sticks.

28 January 1963

216     Child

Your clear eye is the one absolutely beautiful thing.

I want to fill it with color and ducks,

The zoo of the new

Whose names you meditate —

April snowdrop, Indian pipe,

Little

Stalk without wrinkle,

Pool in which images

Should be grand and classical

Not this troublous

Wringing of hands, this dark

Ceiling without a star.

28 January 1963

217     Paralytic

It happens. Will it go on?———

My mind a rock,

No fingers to grip, no tongue,

My god the iron lung

That loves me, pumps

My two

Dust bags in and out,

Will not

Let me relapse

While the day outside glides by like ticker tape.

The night brings violets,

Tapestries of eyes,

Lights,

The soft anonymous

Talkers: ‘You all right?’

The starched, inaccessible breast.

Dead egg, I lie

Whole

On a whole world I cannot touch,

At the white, tight

Drum of my sleeping couch

Photographs visit me———

My wife, dead and flat, in 1920 furs,

Mouth full of pearls,

Two girls

As flat as she, who whisper ‘We’re your daughters.’

The still waters

Wrap my lips,

Eyes, nose and ears,

A clear

Cellophane I cannot crack.

On my bare back

I smile, a buddha, all

Wants, desire

Falling from me like rings

Hugging their lights.

The claw

Of the magnolia,

Drunk on its own scents,

Asks nothing of life.

29 January 1963

218     Gigolo

Pocket watch, I tick well.

The streets are lizardy crevices

Sheer-sided, with holes where to hide.

It is best to meet in a cul-de-sac,

A palace of velvet

With windows of mirrors.

There one is safe,

There are no family photographs,

No rings through the nose, no cries.

Bright fish hooks, the smiles of women

Gulp at my bulk

And I, in my snazzy blacks,

Mill a litter of breasts like jellyfish.

To nourish

The cellos of moans I eat eggs —

Eggs and fish, the essentials,

The aphrodisiac squid.

My mouth sags,

The mouth of Christ

When my engine reaches the end of it.

The tattle of my

Gold joints, my way of turning

Bitches to ripples of silver

Rolls out a carpet, a hush.

And there is no end, no end of it.

I shall never grow old. New oysters

Shriek in the sea and I

Glitter like Fontainebleau

Gratified,

All the fall of water an eye

Over whose pool I tenderly

Lean and see me.

29 January 1963

219     Mystic

The air is a mill of hooks —

Questions without answer,

Glittering and drunk as flies

Whose kiss stings unbearably

In the fetid wombs of black air under pines in summer.

I remember

The dead smell of sun on wood cabins,

The stiffness of sails, the long salt winding sheets.

Once one has seen God, what is the remedy?

Once one has been seized up

Without a part left over,

Not a toe, not a finger, and used,

Used utterly, in the sun’s conflagrations, the stains

That lengthen from ancient cathedrals

What is the remedy ?

The pill of the Communion tablet,

The walking beside still water ? Memory ?

Or picking up the bright pieces

Of Christ in the faces of rodents,

The tame flower-nibblers, the ones

Whose hopes are so low they are comfortable —

The humpback in his small, washed cottage

Under the spokes of the clematis.

Is there no great love, only tenderness ?

Does the sea

Remember the walker upon it ?

Meaning leaks from the molecules.

The chimneys of the city breathe, the window sweats,

The children leap in their cots.

The sun blooms, it is a geranium.

The heart has not stopped.

1 February 1963

220     Kindness

Kindness glides about my house.

Dame Kindness, she is so nice!

The blue and red jewels of her rings smoke

In the windows, the mirrors

Are filling with smiles.

What is so real as the cry of a child ?

A rabbit’s cry may be wilder

But it has no soul.

Sugar can cure everything, so Kindness says.

Sugar is a necessary fluid,

Its crystals a little poultice.

O kindness, kindness

Sweetly picking up pieces!

My Japanese silks, desperate butterflies,

May be pinned any minute, anesthetized.

And here you come, with a cup of tea

Wreathed in steam.

The blood jet is poetry,

There is no stopping it.

You hand me two children, two roses.

1 February 1963

221     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.

1 February 1963

222     Contusion

Color floods to the spot, dull purple.

The rest of the body is all washed out,

The color of pearl.

In a pit of rock

The sea sucks obsessively,

One hollow the whole sea’s pivot.

The size of a fly,

The doom mark

Crawls down the wall.

The heart shuts,

The sea slides back,

The mirrors are sheeted.

4 February 1963

223     Balloons

Since Christmas they have lived with us,

Guileless and clear,

Oval soul-animals,

Taking up half the space,

Moving and rubbing on the silk

Invisible air drifts,

Giving a shriek and pop

When attacked, then scooting to rest, barely trembling.

Yellow cathead, blue fish———

Such queer moons we live with

Instead of dead furniture!

Straw mats, white walls

And these traveling

Globes of thin air, red, green,

Delighting

The heart like wishes or free

Peacocks blessing

Old ground with a feather

Beaten in starry metals.

Your small

Brother is making

His balloon squeak like a cat.

Seeming to see

A funny pink world he might eat on the other side of it,

He bites,

Then sits

Back, fat jug

Contemplating a world clear as water.

A red

Shred in his little fist.

5 February 1963

224     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.

5 February 1963

Notes on Poems 1956-1963

The pagination of this electronic edition does not match the edition from which it was made. To locate a specific passage, please use the search feature on your e-book reader.

1956

In this year, Sylvia Plath (SP) began to write the poems of her first published collection.

At the beginning of the year she was in England, at Cambridge University, reading English on a Fulbright Fellowship and living in Whitstead, an annexe of Newnham College. In February she met her future husband, Ted Hughes (TH). In April, she was in Rome and Paris, touring alone.

On 16 June she married, and lived until September in Spain, mainly in the fishing village of Benidorm (at that time still undeveloped as a tourist resort).

Through September she was in West Yorkshire with her husband, returning to Cambridge in October to live again in Whitstead until December, when she and TH moved into a flat in the town. At Christmas they returned to West Yorkshire.

 1        CONVERSATION AMONG THE RUINS. On the painting by Giorgio de Chirico, a postcard reproduction of which was pinned to the door of the poet’s room.

 2        WINTER LANDSCAPE, WITH ROOKS. On 20 February 1956, SP noted: ‘Wrote one good poem: “Winter Landscape, with Rooks”: it moves, and is athletic: a psychic landscape.’

 5        TALE OF A TUB. On 20 February 1956, she had written: ‘Began another big one, more abstract [than ‘Winter Landscape, with Rooks’; cf. note on No. 2], written from the bathtub: take care it doesn’t get too general.’

 34      SPIDER. Anansi is the famous spider trickster hero of West African and Caribbean folklore. Towards the end of this year SP became interested in African folklore in general, with results that can be detected throughout the rest of her work.

 43      NOVEMBER GRAVEYARD. At Heptonstall, West Yorkshire, where the poet is buried.

1957

In this year SP completed her M.A. degree at Cambridge University.

In June, she and her husband moved to the United States, where she had been invited to teach at her old college. Smith, in Northampton, Massachusetts. They spent the summer on Cape Cod.

In October she took up her teaching post at Smith College.

 48      THE EVERLASTING MONDAY. Monday held an ominous symbolic significance for SP (cf. the poem ‘An Appearance’ [No. 159], and elsewhere).

 49      HARDCASTLE CRAGS. Valley of the Hebden River, a deep wooded gorge lying below the high road in the West Yorkshire moorland.

 54      THE LADY AND THE EARTHENWARE HEAD. The ‘head’ in question was lodged in a willow, on the banks of the Cam, and never reclaimed. (Cf. her later opinion of this poem, quoted in the Introduction, p. 13.)

 57      TWO VIEWS OF WITHENS. Top Withens is a ruinous farmhouse under the moor’s edge above Haworth, West Yorkshire—allegedly the model for Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights. SP approached it from the south, over some miles of moorland, on her first visit.

 58      THE GREAT CARBUNCLE. On an odd phenomenon sometimes observed on high moorland for half an hour or so at evening, when the hands and faces of people seem to become luminous.

 60      THE DISQUIETING MUSES. Reading this poem on a BBC radio programme, SP commented: ‘It borrows its title from the painting by Giorgio de Chirico—The Disquieting Muses. All through the poem I have in mind the enigmatic figures in this painting—three terrible faceless dressmaker’s dummies in classical gowns, seated and standing in a weird, clear light that casts the long strong shadows characteristic of de Chirico’s early work. The dummies suggest a twentieth-century version of other sinister trios of women—the Three Fates, the witches in Macbeth, de Quincey’s sisters of madness.’

 62      OUIJA. SP occasionally amused herself, with one or two others, by holding her finger on an upturned glass, in a ring of letters laid out on a smooth table, and questioning the ‘spirits’.

The following ‘Dialogue Over a Ouija Board’, which she never showed, though it must have been written some time in 1957–8, used the actual ‘spirit’ text of one of the ouija sessions. The spirit named here was the one regularly applied to. His news could be accurate. (The first time he was guided through Littlewood’s football coupon, he predicted all thirteen of the draws made on the following Saturday—but anticipated them, throughout, by just one match. The first dividend at that time, in 1956, was £75,000. The spirit’s later attempts were progressively less accurate and very soon no better than anyone else’s.) Usually his communications were gloomy and macabre, though not without wit.

DIALOGUE OVER A OUIJA BOARD

A VERSE DIALOGUE

Characters: SIBYL

                      LEROY

SIBYL:

Go get the glass, then. But I know tonight will be

In every respect like every other night:

While we’re sitting, face to face across the coffee-

Table, trying our luck, index fingers set

On the round base of the inverted wine-glass here,

They’ll go by, trundling like marble statues way out

In the wings somewhere, or like heirloom furniture

Moving, being moved. And we’ll imagine

A great frieze, Egyptian, perhaps, or Greek,

And their eyes looking out of it: keen,

With the cold burn dry ice has. Yet the clock

Has never failed to see our fabling sheared

Down to a circle of letters: twenty-six

In all. Plus Yes. Plus No. And this bare board.

LEROY:

That’s how you always talk before we start.

But I’ve brought brandy and built the fire up

So the artful glass won’t change its chill for heart’s

Blood and bank wrist, elbow, shoulder, lip

With winter as you claim it does. The coal

Cracks red.

SYBIL:     Nothing happens.

LEROY:     Wait. Its trip

Begins. A jerk. And now the first slow ramble

Around the ring. I think it must be making sure

The letters live in the same place. Or else

Each time must learn the letters new. Are

You to ask who’s home, or I?

SYBIL:     I will.

Is anybody there? It goes. It goes

Direct to Yes. I bet it’s Pan. Who’ll

Come on call like that but Pan? He’s

Signing in. Just P this time. And off,

And back to P, as if he knew us well

Enough for nicknames.

LEROY:     How are you, Pan?

SIBYL:     F-

I-N-E, he says. You feel him pull

Under your finger? I mean, you don’t push

Even a little?

LEROY:     You know I don’t, and still . . .

SIBYL:     And still I’m skeptic. I know. I’m being foolish

I suppose. If I didn’t trust you at this

I wouldn’t trust myself. The fault’s my faith

In Pan: it’s been ebbing ever since the mess

He made of the football pools—teasing us with

Near wins, week by week, waiting until

We thought we’d trained him, before going haywire. Truth

Isn’t in him.

LEROY:     Maybe. But maybe the pools

Bored him. He’s more philosopher, it seems,

Than financier.

SIBYL:     What good is he, if not

For fortune-telling? And where is it fortune comes

From, if not the pools?

LEROY:     Oh, from a lot

Of places: the oil well my uncle owns, for one;

Or your white-haired benefactress, who may see fit

To alter her will our way. Shall we go on

Asking about money?

SIBYL :     I’m sick of that.

LEROY:

Well what, then?

SIBYL; That’s the trouble. Let’s say he

Really can see into the future. What,

Pools aside, wills aside, do we

Really want to know about?

LEROY:     Everything.

Our work. Love. The after-life . . .

SIBYL:     Do you

Honestly want to find if you’ll have a fling

At fame or not? As for love, I figure when we’re

Out of it will be time and plenty for us

To court remorse. Or someone else. I’d rather

Sift him about the after-life than this:

It’s not so imminent. At least I feel

Less dread of the world beyond than ours.

LEROY:     That’s because

You don’t quite believe in it. You’re deaf to real

Dangers, but don’t mind hearing about the ones

In hell, since hell’s a fairytale.

SIBYL:     I would

Believe, if they could manage to convince

Me.

LEROY:     Ask, anyhow.

SIBYL:     I admit it: I’m afraid,

Always, the glass will blurt what I don’t want

To know at all. And yet I go ahead.

Pan, are you still there?

LEROY:     See, his sprint

To Yes says he is ready.

SIBYL:     Pan, is there

A life after this life? He shoots so swift

To Yes, his sureness must be his, not ours.

Do you know how my father is?

LEROY:     He’s left

For Yes, dragging our fingers after.

SIBYL:     HOW

Is he, then? He spells. I-N. He’ll lift

The glass yet as he glides. P-L-U-

M-A-G-E. In plumage. I’d never have thought

To say that. That must be his: his word.

LEROY:     You see,

You’re melting now, because you think he’s hit

An original note. If he’d said, however, merely:

Dead, you’d swear him a victim of our own vain

Ventriloquy. But wings neither you nor I

Would traffic in.

SIBYL:     Let him finish what he began.

Plumage of what, Pan? P . . . He starts again,

Tugging us through plumage. I almost feel

Feathers winnowing the room. A thin

Column of dazzle draws my eyes to the wall

As if the air were laboring to produce

An angel. Plumage. O-F-R. He’ll

Jog off in jabberwocky now and lose us,

Lapsing into Russian or Serbo-Croat.

A-W-W. He’s gone off: what English

Word wears two W’s? O-R. Or what?

M-S. Manuscript? He stops. I wish

Those letters separated into sense

Instead of brewing us such a balderdash

Of half-hints.

LEROY :     You persist in spelling half-hints

Out of a wholeness. Worms, not wings is what

Pan said. A plumage of raw worms.

SIBYL:     HOW

Tedious. That’s what we’d say. About rot

Feeding at the root of things. He stole that, too,

As he stole our perplexities about the pools

And tricked us to trust his vision, while night after night he

Palmed off our own hunches as oracles.

I was perfectly right: Pan’s a mere puppet

Of our two intuitions.

LEROY:     And if he is?

That’s something to study even if it’s not

The Faith-Maker, fisted in his cloud, or the chorus

Of mandatory voices you half expect

To fracture these four walls. Your faith flies

Like an olive-beaked dove above the engulfing fact:

Tables and chairs can elbow us with ease

Out of our very countenance by simply

Bulking more real than we think we are: we face

Obliteration hourly unless our eye

Can whipcrack the tables into tigers and foist

Castles upon the smug-shaped chairs.

SIBYL:     All this I

Know: which is why I, when the wondrous fist

Fails to appear, turn, and, turning, shrink

The size of my demand to magic: no more

Than against gravity’s grip, tables rising; the drink

Drunk, and tea-leaves candid; the clairvoyant seizure

Predicting three boys an hour hence will play

Some paltry scene on the soup-kitchen stair:

These gifts are given.

LEROY :     And when withheld, you’ll say

Gods grow too proud to practice doorman duties

At the whim of a wine-glass and let us into worlds

Saved for the acorn-stomached saint or eyes

Burning like knotholes from a nun’s shroud-circled

Smirk.

SIBYL:     Saints’ door apart, backdoor’s a door,

And I’d sooner be staked for a witch, kindled, and curled

To a cinder, than meet a poor upstart of our nether

Selves posing as prophet and slyly poaching

Pebbles we preserve in our own cupboards

To build his canting towers. While you, you long

To view how versatile we are: you’ve pampered

Pan as if he were our first-breached brat

Fusing two talents, a sort of psychic bastard

Sprung to being on our wedding night

Nine months too soon for comfort, but a bright

Boy, prone to compose queer poetry

In apt iambics, if prodded to recite

By scoldings, or by subtle praise. Only 1,

Even if you seem pacified, prefer

To picture some other party speaking through

Our separate veins and this glass mouth.

LEROY:     Oh you’re

Going to get Gabriel’s thumb into the pie

If you must butcher Mother Goose to do it.

Gabriel or Beelzebub: I see,

Now, you really don’t much care which, or what

Minor imps pipe up, so long as each

May testify to drive your doubting out.

I never knew such credulity to pitch

Such skeptic cracks. With sense sealed watertight

So, you’ll scoff, and yet you’d drop to kneel

If that elderberry bush beside the gate

Belched into blaze and, though red-hot, kept whole

And hale its green latticework of leaves. You need

Nothing short of a miracle to nail

Faith fast: a miracle and the smell of blood

To prove it genuine.

SIBYL:     You’d kneel, too,

If a bush borrowed tongues and spoke to you. You’d kneel

Until it finished, and then look furtively

For loudspeaker wires running like a logical

Argument to the house next door. Or if

Your Sherlock Holmesing steered to a blank wall

You’d presume your inner voice god-plumed enough

To people the boughs with talking birds.

LEROY:     I’d plant

Gods and rear them like beanstalks from out these ribs

Before one heaved himself through heaven’s tent

To contradict me.

SIBYL:     Your shouldering words outstrip

The stint of Sisyphus.

LEROY:     Ask Pan, then, where

He lives. His answer will put an end to gibes

And get us clear of this.

SIBYL :     Oh, he’ll go clever

Like all the others and swear that he’s a puma

In Tibet, or a llama in Zanzibar

As if tempting our gross gullibility

To give another inch.

LEROY:     If you prefer,

I’ll ask.

SIBYL:     DO. We’ve kept him waiting long

Enough. But be polite. You’re too severe

On him sometimes.

LEROY:     He’s lazy. Like any young

Boy, he needs a beating now and then

To quicken his sluggard’s blood.

SIBYL:     But he needn’t come

To collect his beatings. And if he’s a go-between

Our world and theirs we’d best play safe and groom

Our questions in humble habit to gain grace

And chance of a true answer.

LEROY:     You waste no time

Eating your words: you’ll revoke his godhood soon as

His drift endorses your inklings of a doom

Descended on your favorites, and yet

You’ll issue him his pass to angeldom

Before he spells again, should his next writ

Warrant him whelped in the wake of two shooting

Stars, not our cheeseparing psyches.

SIBYL:     It

Pays to be politic. Oh, I’m not one to hang

Bled white with briars by a busy conscience

If nothing comes of it. On the other hand,

What greenhorn vents his venom against giants

Outside the cave whose contours most remind

One of a giant’s ear?

LEROY:     I guess this glass

Might do as a god’s mouthpiece if a whirlwind

Did. It’s small, but the volume of the voice

Is small these days.

SIBYL:     Don’t be so smart.

LEROY:     I’ll ask,

And we’ll see who’s smartest. Pan, tell us now:

Where do you live?

SIBYL:     He moves.

LEROY:     He’s moving brisk

Like a good boy.

SIBYL:     Be careful. I’m not sure that he

Can spell sarcasm through our fingertips.

LEROY:

He goes . . .

SIBYL:     I-N-G-O-D-P-I-

E.

LEROY:

Godpie! That’s rich. The jackanapes

Is joking at the pie-in-the-sky mirage

Which props you through this desert like a dream

Of water.

SIBYL:     Wait.

LEROY:     Godpie I don’t begrudge

You: a priest-baked pasty stuffed to the brim

With blackbirds— twenty-four, and every one

A devil.

SIBYL:     Wait: he shifts. He hasn’t come

To the end of it. He starts again: I-N-

G-O-D-H-E-A-D. There, see!

I knew he’d got it mixed before: visions

Aren’t vouchsafed to antique virgins only:

It takes patience. If veronicas and fountains

Can once in a blue moon catch the shadows of

Their passing on a perishable screen

Of cambric or waterdrops, who knows what belief

Might work on this glass medium.

LEROY:     Belief, yes,

If either of us had it: but not the half-

Hearted gambling-game you warily practice

Under the guise of nonchalance. Pan’s laugh

Is on the two of us for lending heat

To propel his playfulness, but on you, above

All, if you’ll hide hopes of heaven in a hat

Of formal scorn, until the first sign of an

Angel’s eye in the audience, then whisk them out

Like live white rabbits, ready to begin

Running neck and neck with the most devout

Rabbits in the lot.

SIBYL:     You’re in a huff

Because Pan bluntly spelt out god’s head, not

Your head after all. It seems his laugh

Is on you now, for planning to dredge up

Pools, prophecies and such from the unfathomed

Bottom of your brain. By some mishap,

Instead of fat fish on the line, you’ve plumbed

Deeper than your own ocean floor, and got

A barnacle-pated, moss-wigged, lobster-limbed

Chimera on the hook, who claims he’s late

Of Davy’s locker, and the lord’s to home,

And not extinct, as everyone supposed.

LEROY:

If you can hang religion on the rim

Of one wine-glass, you’ll pin it like a prize

Tail on each toy donkey that will bray

God-pie.

SIBYL:     Why, then, did you deign to introduce

Pan as our evening guest if he’s so free

With fibs?

LEROY:     The fibs are ours, not his. Pan’s fine

For sounding syllables we haven’t yet

Surfaced in ourselves: he’ll spell a line

Of poetry from these letters, but the beat

Will be our beat, just as the gift is ours,

And tongue, and thought, as well as the blood-heat

He leeches by our lenience.

SIBYL:     He still bores

You to taunts though, when he reflects a face

Other than your own.

LEROY:     As he bores you

When he recites one of my similes

For rot.

SIBYL:     Don’t think you had me fooled. I knew

Where those worms came from.

LEROY:     I swear I didn’t expect

Them any more than you did.

SIBYL:     Oh, let it go.

You say he’s told two lies . . .

LEROY:     Call them two plucked

Fruits of your willful tree: god-head, god-pie

Feed your own wishful thinking.

SIBYL:     Try asking him

To name his home a third time. Give your will three

Chances to master mine. They say the third time

Counts.

LEROY:     Such duels infect best friendships.

SIBYL:     Pan

Tell us the truth this time: tell us the kingdom

You inhabit.

LEROY:     Plainly as you can,

Tell us the truth.

SIBYL:     Where do you live?

LEROY:     He Starts

As if bloodhounds bore him down.

SIBYL:     I-N-C-O . . .

Does he write C for G?

LEROY:     No. He darts

To R now. E.

SIBYL:     In core . . .

LEROY:     O-F-N-E-

V-E.

SIBYL:

     In core of nerve! I hope

You’re satisfied. My will has evidently

Curtseyed to yours.

LEROY:     Too bad you called Pan up

A third time.

SIBYL:     Don’t gloat. Your will misfired twice

Before it made the bull’s-eye.

LEROY:     Do we have to battle

Like rival parents over a precocious

Child to see which one of us can call

Pan’s prowess our own creation, and not the other’s

Work at all?

SIBYL:     How can we help but battle

If our nerves are the sole nourishers

Of Pan’s pronouncements, and our nerves are strung

To such cross-purposes?

LEROY:     At last you glimpse

Some light.

SIBYL:     I glimpse no light at all as long

As we two glower from our separate camps,

This board our battlefield. Let’s give Pan up

As a bad job.

LEROY:     Wait.

SIBYL:     He stirs.

LEROY:     He romps

Round to earn his pay: he’ll have us keep

Him yet, and give us good reason.

SIBYL:     NO, he’s on

A binge of jeers. Look. He’s running through

His book of insults.

LEROY:     Nerve or noumenon,

His manners are atrocious.

SIBYL:     A-P-E-

S.

LEROY:

He calls us apes.

SIBYL:     I’ll settle him!

(Breaking glass)

There! That shuts him up!

LEROY:     So. Better so,

My wish one with your aim.

SIBYL:     Once, in a dream,

I smashed a glass, and ever since that dream

I’ve dreamed of doing it again. And now

It’s done.

LEROY:     It’s done, and there’s no mending him.

SIBYL:

It was his tongue that wanted mending.

LEROY:     You know,

Those glass bits in the grate strike me chill:

As if I’d half-believed in him, and he,

Being not you, nor I, nor us at all,

Must have been wholly someone else.

SIBYL:     It’s absurd,

But now that anger cools, I’ve a sense of sorrow

Adrift in the guise of some great-taloned bird

Over my mind, casting a shadow. Sorrow

Settles in the room now. Its wings blacken the table.

The chairs belong to its darkness. I smell decay

Like the underside of mushrooms. Do you feel

Wiser for tonight’s wise words ?

LEROY:     I felt drawn

Deeper within the dark, and as I pitched further

Into myself and into my conviction

A rigor seized me: I saw cracks appear,

Dilating to craters in this livingroom,

And you, shackled ashen across the rift, a specter

Of one I loved.

SIBYL:     I saw division bloom

On darkness, more vivid and unnatural

Than any orchid.

LEROY:     You broke him then.

SIBYL:     I broke

The image of you, transfixed by roots, wax-pale,

Under a stone.

LEROY:     Those two dreamed deaths took

Us in: a third undid them.

SIBYL:     And we grew one

As the glass flew to its fragments.

LEROY:     Let us stake

Death’s two dreams down with the body that bled the vein,

As is the use with vampires, and resign our stand

At the unreal frontier.

SIBYL:     Let our backs, now bold,

Oppose what we faced earlier. Feel my hand.

LEROY:

Why, your hand’s cold as ice!

SIBYL:     Then chafe the cold

Out of it. There. The room returns

To normal. Let’s close the curtains.

LEROY:     It looks wild

Beyond the window-frame tonight.

SIBYL:     Wind warns

November’s done with. The blown leaves make bat-shapes,

Web-winged and furious.

LEROY:     The full moonlight

Strikes the tiles of the neighbors’ gable-tops

Blue as lizard-scales.

SIBYL:     Frost sheens the street.

LEROY:

I am resolved. No reason could untwist

That skein of voices.

SIBYL:     We promised to forget

The labyrinth and ignore what manner of beast

Might range in it.

LEROY:     I only shut the door

And bolt it up by taking oath no guess

Could grope its way to gospel through that welter

Of contending words.

SIBYL:     Some pythoness

In her prophetic fit heard what we heard,

Stuck to her tripod, over the fuming crevice,

Breathing the god’s word, or the devil’s word,

Or her own word, ambushed in an equivocal

Thicket of words.

LEROY:     The curtain’s drawn on that.

SIBYL:

The table looks as if it would stay a table

All night long, even should our eyes shut

In sleep.

LEROY:     The chairs won’t vanish or become

Castles when we glance aside.

SIBYL:     That’s that.

As sure as those coals burn, the livingroom

Is itself again, and ours.

LEROY:     The dream

Of dreamers is dispelled. Once more we cut

A solid shape on air.

SIBYL:     May the decorum

Of our days sustain us.

LEROY:     May each thought

And act bear witness, in the crux of time,

To our meaning well.

BOTH :     When lights go out

May two real people breathe in a real room.

ON THE DECLINE OF ORACLES. SP frequently mentioned flashes of prescience—always

about something unimportant.

I. 5 Old Böcklin: Arnold Böcklin, Swiss late-Romantic painter.

1958

In the early months of this year SP continued to teach at Smith College, while her husband taught at the University of Massachusetts. Some time in the spring they made the decision to leave teaching and attempt to live on their earnings as writers.

During the summer they were again on Cape Cod, and returned to a flat in Boston, at 9 Willow Street, where they remained until the following June.

Throughout this time SP found writing difficult. She resorted to set themes, and deliberate exercises in style, in her efforts to find release.

 66–8, 73 Art News had asked SP for poems based on paintings, VIRGIN IN A TREE (NO. 66) is on a drawing by Paul Klee, as is PERSEUS (NO 67); BATTLE-SCENE . . .(No. 68) and THE GHOST’S LEAVETAKING (NO. 73) are on paintings by Klee.

 69      YADWIGHA, ON A RED COUCH, AMONG LILIES. On a painting, The Dream, by the Douanier Rousseau. SP wrote of it, on 27 March 1958, ‘my first and only good sestina’.

 74      SCULPTOR. Bronze dead men lay in numbers around the house and studio of the sculptor Leonard Baskin.

 75      FULL FATHOM FIVE. Her first poem about her father in his mythic role as ‘father-sea god-muse’ (cf. Introduction, p. 13). She composed the poem while reading one of Cousteau’s books about the submarine world, alternating reading and writing without moving her position.

 76      LORELEI. On 3 July, SP and TH had a session with the ouija oracle (cf. note on No. 62), ‘for the first time in America’. She noted at the time: ‘Among other penetrating observations, Pan said I should write on the poem-subject “Lorelei” because they are “my own kin”. So today [4 July], for fun, I did so, remembering the plaintive German song Mother used to play and sing to us beginning “Ich weiss nicht was soll es bedeuten . . .”. The subject appealed to me doubly (or triply): the German legend of the Rhine Sirens, the sea–childhood symbol, and the death-wish involved in the song’s beauty. The poem devoured my day, but I feel it is a book poem and am pleased with it.’

1. 32 Drunkenness of the great depths: a phrase from the book of Cousteau’s she was reading as she wrote ‘Full Fathom Five’ (No. 75) some time earlier. It describes the euphoric visionary state of acute oxygen shortage in which divers blissfully forget all precautions and danger.

 77      MUSSEL HUNTER AT ROCK HARBOR. Rock Harbor on Cape Cod. On 4 July 1958 SP noted: ‘I suppose now my star piece is “Mussel Hunter at Rock Harbor”.’

 82      CHILD’S PARK STONES. Child’s Park, the setting of several poems from this period, lay next door to the house where SP lived in Elm Street, Northampton, Massachusetts. She wrote on 11 June 1958: ‘I have just written a good syllabic poem on the Child’s Park Stones as juxtaposed to the ephemeral orange and fuchsia azaleas and feel the park is my favorite place in America.’

 83      OWL. On 26 June 1958, she noted: ‘Wrote a brief poem this morning—“Owl over Main Street”—in “syllabic” verse. Could be better. The beginning is a bit lyrical for the subject and the last verse might be expanded.’ This poem eventually became ‘Owl’, and in Boston on 23 April 1959, looking back over her poems, she wrote: ‘I have forty unattackable poems. I think. And a joy about them of sorts. Although I would love more potent ones. All the Smith ones are miserable death-wishes. The ones here, however gray (“Companionable Ills” [No. 87], “Owl”), have a verve and life-joy.’

 84      WHITENESS I REMEMBER. On 9 July 1958, she noted: ‘I wrote what I consider a “book poem” about my runaway ride in Cambridge on the horse Sam: a “hard” subject for me, horses alien to me, yet the daredevil change in Sam and my hanging on God knows how is a kind of revelation: it worked well.’

 87      GREEN ROCK, WINTHROP BAY. SP spent her first years on the Winthrop peninsula, where her grandparents lived.

1959

SP and her husband lived in Boston until June 1959. During this period she worked as a secretary in the records office at the Massachusetts General Hospital. She also began to see her old psychiatrist Ruth Beutscher (cf. note on No. 101), and attended—along with Anne Sexton and George Starbuck—a writing course given by Robert Lowell.

Setting off in July, she and TH drove around the United States, from Canada to San Francisco to New Orleans and back, camping on the way—a journey of about nine weeks. In September they accepted an invitation to Yaddo, the artists’ colony near Saratoga Springs, in upstate New York.

In this year TH had received a Guggenheim Foundation award, and adding this cash to what they had saved from their teaching and other work, they sailed for Europe in December.

 92      THE BULL OF BENDYLAW. Cf. English and Scottish Popular Ballads, edited by F. J. Child (1883), where the following occurs as a ‘fragment’:

The great bull of Bendy-law

Has broken his band and run awa

And the King and a his court

Canna turn that bull about

 94      POINT SHIRLEY. The end of the Winthrop peninsula; cf. note on No. 86. On 20 January 1959 SP wrote: ‘Finished a poem this weekend, “Point Shirley”, revisited, on my grandmother. Oddly powerful and moving to me in spite of rigid formal structure. Evocative. Not so one-dimensional.’

 95      GOATSUCKER. Nightjar, fern-owl, etc.—nocturnal bird of many names. Esther Baskin was collecting material for a book about night creatures, and this poem was SP’s contribution. On 20 January she noted: ‘Spent a really pleasant afternoon, rainy, in the library looking up goatsuckers for a poem for Esther’s night creature book. Much more than on frogs and a much more congenial subject. I have eight lines of a sonnet on the bird, very alliterative and colored.’ She collected several pages of detailed notes.

 96      WATERCOLOR OF GRANTCHESTER MEADOWS. On 19 February, she noted: ‘Wrote a Grantchester poem of pure description . . . a fury of frustration. Some inhibition keeping me from writing what I really feel.’ Grantchester meadows lie along the river Cam, towards Grantchester, near Cambridge.

 99    TWO VIEWS OF A CADAVER ROOM. The Brueghel painting is The Triumph of Death.

 101    THE RAVAGED FACE. On 9 March, she wrote: ‘After a lugubrious session with RB [Ruth Beutscher, her psychiatrist] much freed. Good weather, good bits of news. If I don’t stop crying she’ll have me tied up. Got idea on trolley for a poem because of my ravaged face: called “The Ravaged Face”. A line came, too. Wrote it down and then the [other] five lines of a sestet. Wrote the first eight lines after coming back from a fine day in Winthrop yesterday. I rather like it—it has all the forthrightness of “Suicide off Egg Rock”.’ From her earlier suicide attempt SP carried a broad patch of scar tissue across her cheek.

 103    ELECTRA ON AZALEA PATH. Azalea Path was the name of the cemetery path beside which SP’s father’s grave lies. On 9 March she wrote: ‘A clear blue day in Winthrop. Went to my father’s grave, a very depressing sight. Three graveyards separated by streets, all made within the last fifty years or so, ugly crude black stones, headstones together, as if the dead were sleeping head to head in a poorhouse. In the third yard, on a flat grassy area looking across a sallow barren stretch to rows of wooden tenements I found the flat stone: Otto E. Plath: 1885–1940. Right beside the path, where it would be walked over. Felt cheated. My temptation to dig him up. To prove he existed and really was dead. How far gone would he be ? No trees, no peace, his headstone jammed up against the body on the other side. Left shortly. It is good to have the place in mind.’

On 20 March she wrote: ‘Finished . . . “Electra on Azalea Path”. They are never perfect but I think have goodnesses.’ And on 23 April: ‘Must do justice to my father’s grave. Have rejected the Electra poem from my book. Too forced and rhetorical.’

 104    THE BEEKEEPER’S DAUGHTER. The detail in the last verse is mentioned in her father’s book Bumblebees and Their Ways, and had been demonstrated to her by him.

 105    THE HERMIT AT OUTERMOST HOUSE. The Outermost House: a popular classic about Cape Cod.

 113    THE MANOR GARDEN. The Setting is the gardens of the manor at Yaddo. SP called this a poem ‘for Nicholas’, but her first child, born five months later, was a girl.

 119    POEM FOR A BIRTHDAY. In Boston, earlier in the year, she had tried for a way out through Robert Lowell’s earlier manner of writing (as in ‘Point Shirley’). She had always responded strongly to Theodore Roethke’s poems, but it was only at Yaddo, in October, that she realized how he could help her. This sequence began as a deliberate Roethke pastiche, a series of exercises which would be light and throwaway to begin with, but might lead to something else. On 22 October she wrote: ‘Ambitious seeds of a long poem made up of separate sections. Poem on her Birthday. [Her own birthday fell on 27 October.] To be a dwelling on madhouse, nature: meanings of tools, greenhouses, florists’ shops, tunnels vivid and disjointed. An adventure. Never over. Developing. Rebirth. Despair. Old women. Block it out.’ And then on 4 November: ‘Miraculously I wrote seven poems in my “Poem for a Birthday” sequence. . . .’

 120    THE BURNT-OUT SPA. The old health spa at Saratoga Springs remained only as a burned-out ruin.

 121    MUSHROOMS. On 14 November: ‘Wrote an exercise on Mushrooms yesterday which Ted likes. And I do too. My absolute lack of judgment when I’ve written something: whether it’s trash or genius.’

1960

Back in England before Christmas 1959, the poet and her husband found a flat at 3 Chalcot Square, near Primrose Hill, in London.

In February she signed a contract with Heinemann for the publication of her first collection of poems. The Colossus. On 1 April, her daughter Frieda was born at home. In October The Colossus was published in London.

 130    MAGI. ‘Abstractions, by definition, are withdrawn from life and formulated in despite of life’s minute and vital complexities. In this poem, “Magi”, I imagine the great absolutes of the philosophers gathered around the crib of a newborn baby girl who is nothing but life.’ So SP introduced this poem in a BBC radio broadcast reading.

 133    WAKING IN WINTER. This poem has been extracted from a tangle of heavily corrected manuscript lines, and must be regarded as unfinished.

Another poem from this same period which she seems to have finished but which she never included in her own file is the following:

QUEEN MARY’S ROSE GARDEN

In this day before the day nobody is about.

A sea of dreams washes the edge of my green island

In the center of the garden named after Queen Mary.

The great roses, many of them scentless,

Rule their beds like beheaded and resurrected and all silent royalty,

The only fare on my bare breakfast plate.

Such a waste of brightness I can’t understand.

It is six in the morning and finer than any Sunday—

Yet there is no walker and looker but myself.

The sky of the city is white; the light from the country.

Some ducks step down off their green-reeded shelf

And into the silver element of the pond.

I see them start to cruise and dip for food

Under the bell-jar of a wonderland.

Hedged in and evidently inviolate

Though hundreds of Londoners know it like the palm of their hand.

The roses are named after queens and people of note

Or after gay days, or colors the grower found good.

And I have no intention of disparaging them

For being too well-bred and smelless and liking the city.

I enjoy petticoats and velvets and gossip of court,

And a titled lady may frequently be a beauty.

A Devon meadow might offer a simpler sort

Of personage—single-skirted, perfumed, a gem—

But I am content with this more pompous lot.

1961

In the spring and early summer of this year SP wrote her autobiographical novel The Bell Jar.

During the summer, after a visit to the Dordogne, she and TH bought a house in a small town in Devon, and moved there in September.

 134    PARLIAMENT HILL FIELDS. Part of Hampstead Heath, in north London. Introducing this poem in a BBC broadcast, SP said: ‘This poem is a monologue. I imagine the landscape of Parliament Hill Fields in London seen by a person overwhelmed by an emotion so powerful as to color and distort the scenery. The speaker here is caught between the old and the new year, between the grief caused by the loss of a child (miscarriage) and the joy aroused by the knowledge of an older child safe at home. Gradually the first images of blankness and silence give way to images of convalescence and healing as the woman turns, a bit stiffly and with difficulty, from her sense of bereavement to the vital and demanding part of her world which still survives.’

 136    ZOO KEEPER’S WIFE. Chalcot Square is close to Regent’s Park Zoo, which she visited regularly.

 137    FACE LIFT. The experience of an acquaintance, requisitioned for the poet’s myth of self-renewal.

 141    IN PLASTER. In March of this year SP spent a week in hospital undergoing an appendectomy. The patient in complete plaster lay on a neighbouring bed. This and the next poem, ‘Tulips’ (No. 142), were written during this week.

 147    THE RIVAL. This poem originally had two further sections, as follows:

(2)

Compared to you, I am corruptible as a loaf of bread.

While I sleep, the black spores nod

Their magnified heads and plan to kill me as soon as possible.

The wrinkles creep up like waves,

One camouflaging itself behind another.

I should have a steel complexion like yours

In which the minutes could admire their reflections and forget about me.

(3)

I try to think of a place to hide you

As a desk drawer hides a poison pen letter,

But there is no drawer to hold you.

Blue sky or black

You preoccupy my horizon.

What good is all that space if it can’t draw you off?

You are the one eye out there.

The sea, also, is ineffectual.

It keeps washing you up like an old bone.

And I, on the sky-mirroring, bland sands

Find you over and over, lipped like a skate and smiling,

With the sound of the sea in your mouth.

Angel of coldness,

Surely it is not I you want so badly.

I thought Earth might use you.

She has a terrible way with minerals,

But even her tonnage doesn’t impress a diamond.

Your facets are indestructible;

Their lights whiten my heart.

Toad-stone! I see I must wear you in the centre of my forehead

And let the dead sleep as they deserve.

 149    BLACKBERRYING. In a cliff cove looking out on to the Atlantic.

 150    FINISTERRE. The Westernmost tip of Brittany: the same outlook as ‘Blackberrying’ (No. 149), but a different country.

 153    THE MOON AND THE YEW TREE. The yew tree stands in a churchyard to the west of the house in Devon, and visible from SP’s bedroom window. On this occasion, the full moon, just before dawn, was setting behind this yew tree and her husband assigned her to write a verse ‘exercise’ about it.

Speaking about this poem in a BBC radio broadcast, she said: ‘I do not like to think of all the things, familiar, useful and worthy things, I have never put into a poem. I did, once, put a yew tree in. And that yew tree began, with astounding egotism, to manage and order the whole affair. It was not a yew tree by a church on a road past a house in a town where a certain woman lived . . . and so on, as it might have been in a novel. Oh no. It stood squarely in the middle of my poem, manipulating its dark shades, the voices in the churchyard, the clouds, the birds, the tender melancholy with which I contemplated it—everything! I couldn’t subdue it. And, in the end, my poem was a poem about a yew tree. The yew tree was just too proud to be a passing black mark in a novel.’

1962

On 17 January, SP’s second child, a son, Nicholas, was born. In May The Colossus was published in the U.S. by Knopf.

In this year she signed a contract with Heinemann for the publication in England of her novel The Bell Jar. Both Harpers and Knopf in the U.S. rejected the novel.

She and her husband separated in October. Thereafter she was dependent on home help. In December she moved with her two children to London, to a flat at 23 Fitzroy Road, N.W.3, close to Chalcot Square.

 156    NEW YEAR ON DARTMOOR. A fragment extracted from a tangle of corrected manuscript, this poem must be regarded as unfinished.

 157    THREE WOMEN. This piece was Written for radio at the invitation of Douglas Cleverdon, who produced it with great effect on the BBC’s Third Programme, on 19 August 1962. The text was published by Turret Books in 1968, in a limited edition of 180 copies.

 158    LLLTLE FUGUE. Although never until now showing more than a general interest in music, about this time SP became keenly interested in Beethoven’s late quartets, the Grosse Fuge in particular.

 161    AMONG THE NARCISSI. Percy Key was the next-door neighbour whose eventual death is commemorated in ‘Berck-Plage’ (No. 167). The orchard in Devon was thick with daffodils and narcissi.

 163    ELM. The house in Devon was overshadowed by a giant wych-elm, flanked by two others in a single mass, growing on the shoulder of a moated prehistoric mound.

This poem grew (21 sheets of working drafts) from a slightly earlier fragment:

She is not easy, she is not peaceful;

She pulses like a heart on my hill.

The moon snags in her intricate nervous system.

I am excited, seeing it there.

It is like something she has caught for me.

The night is a blue pool; she is very still.

At the center she is still, very still with wisdom.

The moon is let go, like a dead thing.

Now she herself is darkening

Into a dark world I cannot see at all.

These lines were a premature crystallization out of four densely crowded pages of manuscript. In her next attempt, some days later, she took them up and developed out of them the final poem ‘Elm’.

 167    BERCK-PLAGE. A beach on the coast of Normandy, which SP visited in June 1961. Overlooking the sea there was a large hospital for mutilated war veterans and accident victims—who took their exercise along the sands. The funeral in the poem is that of Percy Key (cf. note on No. 161), who died in June 1962, exactly a year after her visit to Berck-Plage.

st. 7,1.7 flowery cart: The old-fashioned funeral hand-cart on which the coffin, piled with wreaths, was wheeled through the town, ahead of the mourning cars.

st. 7, 1. 16 mouth, red and awkward: The soil and subsoil of the graveyard is red.

 176    THE BEE MEETING. SP kept One hive of bees, and attended meetings of the local Beekeepers Association. This poem draws on her experience of the first meeting she attended.

 178    STINGS. The first stirring of this sequence of poems appeared on 2 August, when SP attempted to write a poem, which she never finalized in any way, titled ‘Stings’. The following can be extracted from a mass of corrected manuscript:

What honey summons these animalcules?

What fear? It has set them zinging

On envious strings, and you are the center.

They are assailing your brain like numerals,

They contort your hair

Beneath the flat handkerchief you wear instead of a hat.

They are making a cat’s cradle, they are suicidal.

Their death-pegs stud your gloves, it is no use running.

The black veil molds to your lips:

They are fools.

After, they stagger and weave, under no banner.

After, they crawl

Dispatched, into trenches of grass.

Ossifying like junked statues—

Gelded and wingless. Not heroes. Not heroes.

 179    THE SWARM. When bees swarm, they sometimes cluster in a ball high in a tree, while they make up their minds where to go. Any loud sudden noise, such as gunfire, can make them come down to a much lower level where the beekeeper can reach them, and collect them into a box or skip. He then shakes the whole lot out on to a broad surface that slopes up into a fresh empty hive. The bees obediently march up into the hive, as described towards the end of this poem.

The poet uses an incident she watched in a neighbouring beekeeper’s garden.

 182    THE APPLICANT. Introducing this poem in a reading prepared for BBC radio, SP commented: ‘In this poem, . . . the speaker is an executive, a sort of exacting supersalesman. He wants to be sure the applicant for his marvelous product really needs it and will treat it right.’

 183    DADDY. In a reading prepared for BBC radio, she said of this poem: ‘Here is a poem spoken by a girl with an Electra complex. Her father died while she thought he was God. Her case is complicated by the fact that her father was also a Nazi and her mother very possibly part Jewish. In the daughter the two strains marry and paralyse each other—she has to act out the awful little allegory once over before she is free of it.’

 188    FEVER 103°. In a BBC radio reading she prepared, SP introduced this poem as follows: ‘[It] is about two kinds of fire—the fires of hell, which merely agonize, and the fires of heaven, which purify. During the poem, the first sort of fire suffers itself into the second.’

She had made a somewhat earlier (but undated) attempt to break through to the substance of this poem. After several pages of what looks like feverish exploration of the theme, her earlier controls took over, and reduced the confusion to the following, which she left in manuscript, unfinalized:

Four o’clock, and the fever soaks from me like honey.

O ignorant heart!

All night I have heard

The meaningless cry of babies. Such a sea

Broods in the newsprint!

Fish-grease, fish-bones, refuse of atrocities.

Bleached and finished, I surface

Among the blanched, boiled instruments, the virginal curtains.

Here is a white sky. Here is the beauty

Of cool mouths and hands open and natural as roses.

My glass of water refracts the morning.

My baby is sleeping.

 192    BY CANDLELIGHT. The Candlestick was a small brass image of Hercules, in his lion’s pelt, kneeling under the candle. Behind his heels, five brass balls completed the design. (Cf. the poem ‘Nick and the Candlestick’, No. 196.)

 194    ARIEL. The name of a horse which she rode, at a riding school on Dartmoor, in Devonshire.

 196    NICK AND THE CANDLESTICK. ‘In this poem,’ she said in a reading prepared for BBC radio, ‘. . . a mother nurses her baby son by candlelight and finds in him a beauty which, while it may not ward off the world’s ill, does redeem her share of it.’

 198    LADY LAZARUS. In a reading prepared for BBC radio, SP introduced this poem: ‘The speaker is a woman who has the great and terrible gift of being reborn. The only trouble is, she has to die first. She is the Phoenix, the libertarian spirit, what you will. She is also just a good, plain, very resourceful woman.’

 201    THE NIGHT DANCES. A revolving dance which her baby son performed at night in his crib.

 203    THALIDOMIDE. By the time this poem was written, the connection between the tranquillizing drug thalidomide and the 1960-1 crop of deformed babies was well established.

 205    DEATH & CO. Introducing this poem in a reading prepared for BBC radio, she said:

‘This poem is about the double or schizophrenic nature of death—the marmoreal coldness of Blake’s death mask, say, hand in glove with the fearful softness of worms, water and other katabolists. I imagine these two aspects of death as two men, two business friends, who have come to call.’

The actual occasion was a visit by two well-meaning men who invited TH to live abroad at a tempting salary, and whom she therefore resented.

 208    MARY’S SONG.

1. 10 Over the cicatrix of Poland: In one of the final typescripts of this poem (a carbon), this line is corrected, in SP’s hand, to:

Over scoured Poland, burnt-out

Germany.

The earlier reading has been kept, as in all published versions.

 212    EAVESDROPPER. This poem was written in slightly longer form on 15 October 1962, but reduced to its present length, by simple deletions, on 31 December. No final copy was made.

1963

From the beginning of this year, in what was to be the coldest winter in England since 1947, SP lived at 23 Fitzroy Road.

On 23 January her novel The Bell Jar, published under the pseudonym Victoria Lucas, came out in London.

On 11 February she died by her own hand.

 213    SHEEP IN FOG. Introducing this poem in a reading prepared for BBC radio, SP said: ‘In this poem, the speaker’s horse is proceeding at a slow, cold walk down a hill of macadam to the stable at the bottom. It is December. It is foggy. In the fog there are sheep.’

It was first written on 2 December 1962. The last three lines of the original version were replaced by the present final three-line verse on 28 January 1963.

 215    TOTEM. She explained this poem in conversation as ‘a pile of interconnected images, like a totem pole’.

1.5 Dawn gilds the farmers . . .: She imagines the West country farmers in the early morning train, on their way up to London to the great meat market at Smithfield, whose ‘white towers’ she had been able to see from Primrose Hill during her first residence in London.

1. 11 In the bowl . . .: A pyrex bowl, used on different occasions both for her son’s afterbirth and the cleaned body of a hare.

1. 18 a counterfeit snake: an articulated toy snake of scorch-patterned bamboo joints.

The ‘Ariel’ Poems

Sylvia Plath’s own prepared collection of poems, titled Ariel, was ordered as follows:

  1 Morning Song

  2 The Couriers

  3 The Rabbit Catcher

  4 Thalidomide

  5 The Applicant

  6 Barren Woman

  7 Lady Lazarus

  8 Tulips

  9 A Secret

10 The Jailer

11 Cut

12 Elm

13 The Night Dances

14 The Detective

15 Ariel

16 Death & Co.

17 Magi

18 Lesbos

19 The Other

20 Stopped Dead

21 Poppies in October

22 The Courage of Shutting-Up

23 Nick and the Candlestick

24 Berck-Plage

25 Gulliver

26 Getting There

27 Medusa

28 Purdah

29 The Moon and the Yew Tree

30 A Birthday Present

31 Letter in November

32 Amnesiac

33 The Rival

34 Daddy

35 You’re

36 Fever 103°

37 The Bee Meeting

38 The Arrival of the Bee Box

39 Stings

40 The Swarm

41 Wintering

Translation

The only translations by Sylvia Plath that survive are four sonnets of Ronsard and one poem by Rilke, made in the course of studying French and German literature. Following is her literal rendering of Rilke’s ‘A Prophet’, made about 1954:

Dilated by immense visions

bright with the firelight from the outcome

of judgments, which never destroy him,

are his eyes, gazing out from under thick

brows. And in his inmost soul

already words are raising themselves again,

Not his words (for what would his be

and how indulgently would they be lavished?)

but others, severe: pieces of iron, stones,

which he must dissolve like a volcano

in order to cast them forth in the outburst

from his mouth, which curses and damns;

while his forehead, like the face of a hound

seeks to transmit that

which the Master chooses within his mind:

this One, this One, whom they all might find

if they followed the great pointing hand

which reveals him as he is: enraged.

A Concordance with Published Volumes

Following are the contents of the four previously published volumes of Sylvia Plath’s poetry, with the poems listed according to the numbers they have been given in the present collected edition:

The Colossus (London, 1960; New York, 1962): Nos. 13, 15, 17, 35, 37, 38, 44, 47, 49, 50, 55, 59, 60, 61, 63, 72, 73, 74, 75, 76, 77, 78, 87, 89, 91, 92, 93, 94, 96, 97, 98, 99, 100, 102, 104, 105, 106, 112, 113, 114, 117, 119, 120, 121

Ariel (London and New York, 1965): Nos. 122, 123, 138, 142, 147, 153, 158, 163, 167, 170, 173, 176, 177, 178, 180, 182, 183, 184, 188, 191, 194, 195, 196, 198, 199, 200, 201, 202, 204, 205, 206, 213, 214, 215, 217, 220, 221, 222, 223, 224

Crossing the Water (London and New York, 1971): Nos. 124, 125, 126, 127, 128, 129, 130, 131, 132, 134, 135, 136, 137, 140, 141, 143, 144, 145, 148, 149, 150, 151, 152, 154, 155, 159, 160, 161, 162, 165, 166, 193

Winter Trees (London, 1971; New York, 1972): Nos. 157, 164, 168, 172, 175, 179, 186, 187, 190, 192, 197, 203, 208, 209, 210, 211, 216, 218, 219

JUVENILIA

A Selection of Fifty Early Poems

The fifty poems printed here are a selection from Sylvia Plath’s work produced mainly in the three or four years preceding 1956. Many of them were written as class assignments for her English professor at Smith College, Alfred Young Fisher, and the typescripts bear his profuse and detailed comments. In most cases, she seems to have followed his textual suggestions.

Bitter Strawberries

All that morning in the strawberry field

They talked about the Russians.

Squatted down between the rows

We listened.

We heard the head woman say,

‘Bomb them off the map.’

Horseflies buzzed, paused and stung.

And the taste of strawberries

Turned thick and sour.

Mary said slowly, ‘I’ve got a fella

Old enough to go.

If anything should happen . . .’

The sky was high and blue.

Two children laughed at tag

In the tall grass,

Leaping awkward and long-legged

Across the rutted road.

The fields were full of bronzed young men

Hoeing lettuce, weeding celery.

‘The draft is passed,’ the woman said.

‘We ought to have bombed them long ago.’

‘Don’t,’ pleaded the little girl

With blond braids.

Juvenilia

Her blue eyes swam with vague terror.

She added pettishly, ‘I can’t see why

You’re always talking this way . . .’

‘Oh, stop worrying, Nelda,’

Snapped the woman sharply.

She stood up, a thin commanding figure

In faded dungarees.

Businesslike she asked us, ‘How many quarts?’

She recorded the total in her notebook,

And we all turned back to picking.

Kneeling over the rows,

We reached among the leaves

With quick practiced hands,

Cupping the berry protectively before

Snapping off the stem

Between thumb and forefinger.

Family Reunion

Outside in the street I hear

A car door slam; voices coming near;

Incoherent scraps of talk

And high heels clicking up the walk;

The doorbell rends the noonday heat

With copper claws;

A second’s pause.

The dull drums of my pulses beat

Against a silence wearing thin.

The door now opens from within.

Oh, hear the clash of people meeting —

The laughter and the screams of greeting:

Fat always, and out of breath,

A greasy smack on every cheek

From Aunt Elizabeth;

There, that’s the pink, pleased squeak

Of Cousin Jane, our spinster with

The faded eyes

And hands like nervous butterflies;

While rough as splintered wood

Across them all

Rasps the jarring baritone of Uncle Paul;

The youngest nephew gives a fretful whine

And drools at the reception line.

Like a diver on a lofty spar of land

Atop the flight of stairs I stand.

A whirlpool leers at me,

Absorbent as a sponge;

I cast off my identity

And make the fatal plunge.

Female Author

All day she plays at chess with the bones of the world:

Favored (while suddenly the rains begin

Beyond the window) she lies on cushions curled

And nibbles an occasional bonbon of sin.

Prim, pink-breasted, feminine, she nurses

Chocolate fancies in rose-papered rooms

Where polished highboys whisper creaking curses

And hothouse roses shed immoral blooms.

The garnets on her fingers twinkle quick

And blood reflects across the manuscript;

She muses on the odor, sweet and sick,

Of festering gardenias in a crypt,

And lost in subtle metaphor, retreats

From gray child faces crying in the streets.

April 18

the slime of all my yesterdays

rots in the hollow of my skull

and if my stomach would contract

because of some explicable phenomenon

such as pregnancy or constipation

I would not remember you

or that because of sleep

infrequent as a moon of greencheese

that because of food

nourishing as violet leaves

that because of these

and in a few fatal yards of grass

in a few spaces of sky and treetops

a future was lost yesterday

as easily and irretrievably

as a tennis ball at twilight

Gold mouths cry

Gold mouths cry with the green young

certainty of the bronze boy

remembering a thousand autumns

and how a hundred thousand leaves

came sliding down his shoulderblades

persuaded by his bronze heroic reason.

We ignore the coming doom of gold

and we are glad in this bright metal season.

Even the dead laugh among the goldenrod.

The bronze boy stands kneedeep in centuries,

and never grieves,

remembering a thousand autumns,

with sunlight of a thousand years upon his lips

and his eyes gone blind with leaves.

Dirge for a Joker

Always in the middle of a kiss

Came the profane stimulus to cough;

Always from the pulpit during service

Leaned the devil prompting you to laugh.

Behind mock-ceremony of your grief

Lurked the burlesque instinct of the ham;

You never altered your amused belief

That life was a mere monumental sham.

From the comic accident of birth

To the final grotesque joke of death

Your malady of sacrilegious mirth

Spread gay contagion with each clever breath.

Now you must play the straight man for a term

And tolerate the humor of the worm.

To Eva Descending the Stair

A Villanelle

Clocks cry: stillness is a lie, my dear;

The wheels revolve, the universe keeps running.

(Proud you halt upon the spiral stair.)

The asteroids turn traitor in the air,

And planets plot with old elliptic cunning;

Clocks cry: stillness is a lie, my dear.

Red the unraveled rose sings in your hair:

Blood springs eternal if the heart be burning.

(Proud you halt upon the spiral stair.)

Cryptic stars wind up the atmosphere,

In solar schemes the tilted suns go turning;

Clocks cry: stillness is a lie, my dear.

Loud the immortal nightingales declare:

Love flames forever if the flesh be yearning.

(Proud you halt upon the spiral stair.)

Circling zodiac compels the year.

Intolerant beauty never will be learning.

Clocks cry: stillness is a lie, my dear.

(Proud you halt upon the spiral stair.)

Cinderella

The prince leans to the girl in scarlet heels,

Her green eyes slant, hair flaring in a fan

Of silver as the rondo slows; now reels

Begin on tilted violins to span

The whole revolving tall glass palace hall

Where guests slide gliding into light like wine;

Rose candles flicker on the lilac wall

Reflecting in a million flagons’ shine,

And gilded couples all in whirling trance

Follow holiday revel begun long since,

Until near twelve the strange girl all at once

Guilt-stricken halts, pales, clings to the prince

As amid the hectic music and cocktail talk

She hears the caustic ticking of the clock.

Jilted

My thoughts are crabbed and sallow,

My tears like vinegar,

Or the bitter blinking yellow

Of an acetic star.

Tonight the caustic wind, love,

Gossips late and soon,

And I wear the wry-faced pucker of

The sour lemon moon.

While like an early summer plum,

Puny, green, and tart,

Droops upon its wizened stem

My lean, unripened heart.

Sonnet: To Eva

All right, let’s say you could take a skull and break it

The way you’d crack a clock; you’d crush the bone

Between steel palms of inclination, take it,

Observing the wreck of metal and rare stone.

This was a woman: her loves and stratagems

Betrayed in mute geometry of broken

Cogs and disks, inane mechanic whims,

And idle coils of jargon yet unspoken.

Not man nor demigod could put together

The scraps of rusted reverie, the wheels

Of notched tin platitudes concerning weather,

Perfume, politics, and fixed ideals.

The idiot bird leaps up and drunken leans

To chirp the hour in lunatic thirteens.

Bluebeard

I am sending back the key

that let me into bluebeard’s study;

because he would make love to me

I am sending back the key;

in his eye’s darkroom I can see

my X-rayed heart, dissected body:

I am sending back the key

that let me into bluebeard’s study.

Aquatic Nocturne

deep in liquid indigo

turquoise slivers

   of dilute light

quiver in thin streaks

of bright tinfoil

   on mobile jet:

pale flounder

waver by

   tilting silver:

in the shallows

agile minnows

   flicker gilt:

grapeblue mussels

dilate lithe and

   pliant valves:

dull lunar globes

of bulbous jellyfish

   glow milkgreen:

eels twirl

in wily spirals

   on elusive tails:

adroit lobsters

amble darkly olive

   on shrewd daws:

down where sound

comes blunt and wan

   like the bronze tone

      of a sunken gong.

Notes to a Neophyte

Take the general mumble,

blunt as the faceless gut

of an anonymous clam,

vernacular as the strut

of a slug or small preamble

by snail under hump of home:

metamorphose the mollusk

of vague vocabulary

with structural discipline;

stiffen the ordinary

malleable mask

to the granite grin of bone.

For such a tempering task,

heat furnace of paradox

in an artifice of ice;

make love and logic mix,

and remember, if tedious risk

seems to jeopardize this:

it was a solar turbine

gave molten earth a frame,

and it took the diamond stone

a weight of world and time

being crystallized from carbon

to the hardest substance known.

Metamorphoses of the Moon

Cold moons withdraw, refusing to come to terms

with the pilot who dares all heaven’s harms

to raid the zone where fate begins,

flings silver gauntlet of his plane at space,

demanding satisfaction; no duel takes place:

the mute air merely thins and thins.

Sky won’t be drawn closer: absolute,

it holds aloof, a shrouded parachute

always the same distance from

the falling man who never will abstain

from asking, but inventive, hopes; in vain

challenges the silent dome.

No violation but gives dividends

of slow disaster: the bitten apple ends

the eden of bucolic eve:

understanding breaks through the skull’s shell

and like a cuckoo in the nest makes hell

for naïve larks who starve and grieve.

What prince has ever seized the shining grail

but that it turned into a milking pail?

It’s likely that each secret sought

will prove to be some common parlor fake:

a craft with paint and powder that can make

cleopatra from a slut.

For most exquisite truths are artifice

framed in disciplines of fire and ice

which conceal incongruous

elements like dirty socks and scraps

of day-old bread and egg-stained plates; perhaps

such sophistry can placate us.

But yet the perverse imp within will probe

beneath the fringes of forbidden robe,

seduced by curiosity,

until in disenchantment our eyes glut

themselves on the clay toes and short clubfoot

which mar the idol’s sanctity.

The choice between the mica mystery

of moonlight or the pockmarked face we see

through the scrupulous telescope

is always to be made: innocence

is a fairy-tale; intelligence

hangs itself on its own rope.

Either way we choose, the angry witch

will punish us for saying which is which;

in fatal equilibrium

we poise on perilous poles that freeze us in

a cross of contradiction, racked between

the fact of doubt, the faith of dream.

Dialogue En Route

‘If only something would happen!’

sighed Eve, the elevator-girl ace,

to Adam the arrogant matador

as they shot past the forty-ninth floor

in a rocketing vertical clockcase,

fast as a fallible falcon.

‘I wish millionaire uncles and aunts

would umbrella like liberal toadstools

in a shower of Chanel, Dior gowns,

filet mignon and walloping wines,

a pack of philanthropical fools

to indulge my extravagant wants.’

Erect in his folderol cloak

sham Adam the matador cried:

‘O may G-men all die of the choler,

and my every chimerical dollar

breed innumerable bills, bona fide:

a hot hyperbolical joke!’

Said Eve: ‘I wish venomous nematodes

were bewitched to assiduous lovers,

each one an inveterate gallant

with Valentino’s crack technical talent

for recreation down under the covers:

erotic and elegant episodes.’

Added Adam, that simian swell,

with his modish opposable thumb:

‘O for ubiquitous free aphrodisiacs,

and for pumpkins to purr into Cadillacs

and voluptuous Venus to come

waltzing up to me out of her cockle-shell.’

Breaking through gravity’s garrison,

Eve, the elevator-girl ace,

and Adam the arrogant matador

shot past the ninety-fourth floor

to corral the conundrum of space

at its cryptic celestial origin.

They both watched the barometer sink

as the world swiveled round in its orbit

and thousands were born and dropped dead,

when, from the inane overhead

(too quick for the pair to absorb it),

came a gargantuan galactic wink.

To a Jilted Lover

Cold on my narrow cot I lie

and in sorrow look

through my window-square of black:

figured in the midnight sky,

a mosaic of stars

diagrams the falling years,

while from the moon, my lover’s eye

chills me to death

with radiance of his frozen faith.

Once I wounded him with so

small a thorn

I never thought his flesh would burn

or that the heat within would grow

until he stood

incandescent as a god;

now there is nowhere I can go

to hide from him:

moon and sun reflect his flame.

In the morning all shall be

the same again:

stars pale before the angry dawn;

the gilded cock will turn for me

the rack of time

until the peak of noon has come

and by that glare, my love will see

how I am still

blazing in my golden hell.

The Dream

‘Last night,’ he said, ‘I slept well

except for two uncanny dreams

that came before the change of weather

when I rose and opened all

the shutters to let warm wind feather

with wet plumage through my rooms.

‘In the first dream I was driving

down the dark in a black hearse

with many men until I crashed

a light, and right away a raving

woman followed us and rushed

to halt our car in headlong course.

‘Crying, she came to the island

where we stopped, and with a curse

demanded that I pay a fine

for being such a rude assailant

and damaging the whole unseen

lighting plant of the universe.

‘Behind me then I heard a voice

warning me to hold her hand

and kiss her on the mouth for she

loved me and a brave embrace

would avoid all penalty.

“I know, I know,” I told my friend.

‘But yet I waited to be fined

and took the woman’s bright subpoena

(while she washed the way with tears),

then drove to you upon the wind. . . .

I do not tell you the nightmare

which occurred to me in China.’

Sonnet: To Time

Today we move in jade and cease with garnet

Amid the ticking jeweled clocks that mark

Our years. Death comes in a casual steel car, yet

We vaunt our days in neon and scorn the dark.

But outside the diabolic steel of this

Most plastic-windowed city, I can hear

The lone wind raving in the gutter, his

Voice crying exclusion in my ear.

So cry for the pagan girl left picking olives

Beside a sunblue sea, and mourn the flagon

Raised to toast a thousand kings, for all gives

Sorrow; weep for the legendary dragon.

Time is a great machine of iron bars

That drains eternally the milk of stars.

The Trial of Man

The ordinary milkman brought that dawn

Of destiny, delivered to the door

In square hermetic bottles, while the sun

Ruled decree of doomsday on the floor.

The morning paper clocked the headline hour

You drank your coffee like original sin,

And at the jet-plane anger of God’s roar

Got up to let the suave blue policeman in.

Impaled upon a stern angelic stare

You were condemned to serve the legal limit

And burn to death within your neon hell.

Now, disciplined in the strict ancestral chair,

You sit, solemn-eyed, about to vomit,

The future an electrode in your skull.

April Aubade

Worship this world of watercolor mood

in glass pagodas hung with veils of green

where diamonds jangle hymns within the blood

and sap ascends the steeple of the vein.

A saintly sparrow jargons madrigals

to waken dreamers in the milky dawn,

while tulips bow like a college of cardinals

before that papal paragon, the sun.

Christened in a spindrift of snowdrop stars,

where on pink-fluted feet the pigeons pass

and jonquils sprout like Solomon’s metaphors,

my love and I go garlanded with grass.

Again we are deluded and infer

that somehow we are younger than we were.

Go get the goodly squab

Go get the goodly squab in gold-lobed corn

And pluck the droll-flecked quail where thick they lie;

Reap the round blue pigeon from roof ridge,

But let the fast-feathered eagle fly.

Let the fast-feathered eagle fly

And the skies crack through with thunder;

Hide, hide, in the deep nest

Lest the lightning strike you to cinder.

Go snare the sleeping bear in leaf-lined den

And trap the muskrat napping in slack sun;

Dupe the dull sow lounging snout in mud,

But let the galloping antelope run.

Let the galloping antelope run

And the snow blow up behind;

Hide, hide, in the safe cave

Lest the blizzard drive you blind.

Go cull the purple snails from slothful shells

And bait the drowsing trout by the brook’s brim;

Gather idle oysters from green shoals,

But let the quicksilver mackerel swim.

Let the quicksilver mackerel swim

Where the black wave topples down;

Hide, hide, in the warm port

Lest the water drag you to drown.

Trio of Love Songs

(1)

Major faults in granite

mark a mortal lack,

yet individual planet

directs all zodiac.

Diagram of mountains

graphs a fever chart,

yet astronomic fountains

exit from the heart.

Tempo of strict ocean

metronomes the blood,

yet ordered lunar motion

proceeds from private flood.

Drama of each season

plots doom from above,

yet all angelic reason

moves to our minor love.

(2)

My love for you is more

athletic than a verb,

agile as a star

the tents of sun absorb.

Treading circus tightropes

of each syllable,

the brazen jackanapes

would fracture if he fell.

Acrobat of space,

the daring adjective

plunges for a phrase

describing arcs of love.

Nimble as a noun,

he catapults in air;

a planetary swoon

could climax his career,

but adroit conjunction

eloquently shall

link to his lyric action

a periodic goal.

(3)

If you dissect a bird

to diagram the tongue,

you’ll cut the chord

articulating song.

If you flay a beast

to marvel at the mane,

you’ll wreck the rest

from which the fur began.

If you assault a fish

to analyse the fin,

your hands will crush

the generating bone.

If you pluck out my heart

to find what makes it move,

you’ll halt the clock

that syncopates our love.

Lament

A Villanelle

The sting of bees took away my father

who walked in a swarming shroud of wings

and scorned the tick of the falling weather.

Lightning licked in a yellow lather

but missed the mark with snaking fangs:

the sting of bees took away my father.

Trouncing the sea like a raging bather,

he rode the flood in a pride of prongs

and scorned the tick of the falling weather.

A scowl of sun struck down my mother,

tolling her grave with golden gongs,

but the sting of bees took away my father.

He counted the guns of god a bother,

laughed at the ambush of angels’ tongues,

and scorned the tick of the falling weather.

O ransack the four winds and find another

man who can mangle the grin of kings:

the sting of bees took away my father

who scorned the tick of the falling weather.

Doomsday

The idiot bird leaps out and drunken leans

Atop the broken universal clock:

The hour is crowed in lunatic thirteens.

Our painted stages fall apart by scenes

While all the actors halt in mortal shock:

The idiot bird leaps out and drunken leans.

Streets crack through in havoc-split ravines

As the doomstruck city crumbles block by block:

The hour is crowed in lunatic thirteens.

Fractured glass flies down in smithereens;

Our lucky relics have been put in hock:

The idiot bird leaps out and drunken leans.

God’s monkey wrench has blasted all machines;

We never thought to hear the holy cock:

The hour is crowed in lunatic thirteens.

Too late to ask if end was worth the means,

Too late to calculate the toppling stock:

The idiot bird leaps out and drunken leans,

The hour is crowed in lunatic thirteens.

Moonsong at Morning

O moon of illusion,

enchanting men

with tinsel vision

along the vein,

cocks crow up a rival

to mock your face

and eclipse that oval

which conjured us

to leave our reason

and come to this

fabled horizon

of caprice.

Dawn shall dissever

your silver veil

which let lover think lover

beautiful;

the light of logic

will show us that

all moonstruck magic

is dissolute:

no sweet disguises

withstand that stare

whose candor exposes

love’s paling sphere.

In gardens of squalor

the sleepers wake

as their golden jailer

turns the rack;

each sacred body

night yielded up

is mangled by study

of microscope:

facts have blasted

the angel’s frame

and stern truth twisted

the radiant limb.

Reflect in terror

the scorching sun:

dive at your mirror

and drown within.

Doom of Exiles

Now we, returning from the vaulted domes

Of our colossal sleep, come home to find

A tall metropolis of catacombs

Erected down the gangways of our mind.

Green alleys where we reveled have become

The infernal haunt of demon dangers;

Both seraph song and violins are dumb;

Each clock tick consecrates the death of strangers.

Backward we traveled to reclaim the day

Before we fell, like Icarus, undone;

All we find are altars in decay

And profane words scrawled black across the sun.

Still, stubbornly we try to crack the nut

In which the riddle of our race is shut.

16 April 1954

The Dispossessed

The enormous mortgage must be paid somehow,

so if you can dream up any saving plan

tell me quick, darling, tell me now.

An odd disease has hit our holy cow,

no milk or honey fills the empty can;

the enormous mortgage must be paid somehow.

If you’ve a plot to halt the lethal flow

of weevil tribe and locust caravan

tell me quick, darling, tell me now.

Our creditor advances with a bow

to cast lock, stock and barrel under ban;

the enormous mortgage must be paid somehow.

If you can think of means to mend the vow

we broke the minute that the world began

tell me quick, darling, tell me now.

We’ve squandered all the banker will allow

and mislaid every vital talisman;

the enormous mortgage must be paid somehow:

tell me quick, darling, tell me now!

Admonitions

Oh never try to knock on rotten wood

or play another card game when you’ve won;

never try to know more than you should.

The magic golden apples all look good

although the wicked witch has poisoned one.

oh never try to knock on rotten wood.

From here the moon seems smooth as angel-food,

from here you can’t see spots upon the sun;

never try to know more than you should.

The suave dissembling cobra wears a hood

and swaggers like a proper gentleman;

oh never try to knock on rotten wood.

While angels wear a wakeful attitude

disguise beguiles and mortal mischief’s done:

never try to know more than you should.

For deadly secrets strike when understood

and lucky stars all exit on the run:

never try to knock on rotten wood,

never try to know more than you should.

Never try to trick me with a kiss

Never try to trick me with a kiss

Pretending that the birds are here to stay;

The dying man will scoff in scorn at this.

A stone can masquerade where no heart is

And virgins rise where lustful Venus lay:

Never try to trick me with a kiss.

Our noble doctor claims the pain is his,

While stricken patients let him have his say;

The dying man will scoff in scorn at this.

Each virile bachelor dreads paralysis,

The old maid in the gable cries all day:

Never try to trick me with a kiss.

The suave eternal serpents promise bliss

To mortal children longing to be gay;

The dying man will scoff in scorn at this.

Sooner or later something goes amiss;

The singing birds pack up and fly away;

So never try to trick me with a kiss:

The dying man will scoff in scorn at this.

The Dead

Revolving in oval loops of solar speed,

Couched in cauls of clay as in holy robes,

Dead men render love and war no heed,

Lulled in the ample womb of the full-tilt globe.

No spiritual Caesars are these dead;

They want no proud paternal kingdom come;

And when at last they blunder into bed

World-wrecked, they seek only oblivion.

Rolled round with goodly loam and cradled deep,

These bone shanks will not wake immaculate

To trumpet-toppling dawn of doomstruck day:

They loll forever in colossal sleep;

Nor can God’s stern, shocked angels cry them up

From their fond, final, infamous decay.

Danse macabre

Down among strict roots and rocks,

eclipsed beneath blind lid of land

goes the grass-embroidered box.

Arranged in sheets of ice, the fond

skeleton still craves to have

fever from the world behind.

Hands reach back to relics of

nippled moons, extinct and cold,

frozen in designs of love.

At twelve, each skull is aureoled

with recollection’s ticking thorns

winding up the raveled mold.

Needles nag like unicorns,

assault a sleeping virgin’s shroud

till her stubborn body burns.

Lured by brigands in the blood,

shanks of bone now resurrect,

inveigled to forsake the sod.

Eloping from their slabs, abstract

couples court by milk of moon:

sheer silver blurs their phantom act.

Luminous, the town of stone

anticipates the warning sound

of cockcrow crying up the dawn.

With kiss of cinders, ghosts descend,

compelled to deadlock underground.

Circus in Three Rings

In the circus tent of a hurricane

designed by a drunken god

my extravagant heart blows up again

in a rampage of champagne-colored rain

and the fragments whir like a weather vane

while the angels all applaud.

Daring as death and debonair

I invade my lion’s den;

a rose of jeopardy flames in my hair

yet I flourish my whip with a fatal flair

defending my perilous wounds with a chair

while the gnawings of love begin.

Mocking as Mephistopheles,

eclipsed by magician’s disguise,

my demon of doom tilts on a trapeze,

winged rabbits revolving about his knees,

only to vanish with devilish ease

in a smoke that sears my eyes.

Prologue to Spring

The winter landscape hangs in balance now,

Transfixed by glare of blue from gorgon’s eye;

The skaters freeze within a stone tableau.

Air alters into glass and the whole sky

Grows brittle as a tilted china bowl;

Hill and valley stiffen row on row.

Each fallen leaf is trapped by spell of steel,

Crimped like fern in the quartz atmosphere;

Repose of sculpture holds the country still.

What countermagic can undo the snare

Which has stopped the season in its tracks

And suspended all that might occur ?

Locked in crystal caskets are the lakes,

Yet as we wonder what can come of ice

Green-singing birds explode from all the rocks.

Song for a Revolutionary Love

O throw it away, throw it all away on the wind:

first let the heavenly foliage go,

and page by pride the good books blow;

scatter smug angels with your hand.

Undo the doings of the fathering age:

chuck the broken acropolis out,

fling the seven wonders after that

with struts and props of the holy stage.

Disrupt the calendars next; send the duteous

packing without a compass or scale

to chart the measure of fortune’s wheel;

let nothing be left to swaddle us.

Unravel antique samplers, unwind the clocks,

till unruly children stream down the sky

and old maids on impromptu petticoats fly

with begonia and building blocks.

Now empty boxes of the hoodwinked dead

upon the pouring air until

god hears from his great sunstruck hell

the chittering crackpots that he made.

Then hurl the bare world like a bluegreen ball

back into the holocaust

to burn away the humbug rust

and again together begin it all.

Sonnet to Satan

In darkroom of your eye the moonly mind

somersaults to counterfeit eclipse:

bright angels black out over logic’s land

under shutter of their handicaps.

Commanding that corkscrew comet jet forth ink

to pitch the white world down in swiveling flood,

you overcast all order’s noonday rank

and turn god’s radiant photograph to shade.

Steepling snake in that contrary light

invades the dilate lens of genesis

to print your flaming image in birthspot

with characters no cockcrow can deface.

O maker of proud planet’s negative,

obscure the scalding sun till no clocks move.

A Sorcerer Bids Farewell to Seem

I’m through with this grand looking-glass hotel

where adjectives play croquet with flamingo nouns;

methinks I shall absent me for a while

from rhetoric of these rococo queens.

Item: chuck out royal rigmarole of props

and auction off each rare white-rabbit verb;

send my muse Alice packing with gaudy scraps

of mushroom simile and gryphon garb.

My native sleight-of-hand is wearing out:

mad hatter’s hat yields no new metaphor,

the jabberwock will not translate his songs:

it’s time to vanish like the cheshire cat

alone to that authentic island where

cabbages are cabbages; kings: kings.

Midsummer Mobile

Begin by dipping your brush into clear light.

Then syncopate a sky of Dufy-blue

With tilted spars of sloops revolved by white

Gulls in a feathered fugue of wings. Outdo

Seurat: fleck schooner flanks with sun and set

A tremolo of turquoise quivering in

The tessellated wave. Now nimbly let

A tinsel pizzicato on fish fin

Be plucked from caves of dappled amber where

A mermaid odalisque lolls at her ease

With orange scallops tangled in wet hair,

Fresh from the mellow palette of Matisse:

Suspend this day, so singularly designed,

Like a rare Calder mobile in your mind.

On Looking into the Eyes of a Demon Lover

Here are two pupils

whose moons of black

transform to cripples

all who look:

each lovely lady

who peers inside

takes on the body

of a toad.

Within these mirrors

the world inverts:

the fond admirer’s

burning darts

turn back to injure

the thrusting hand

and inflame to danger

the scarlet wound.

I sought my image

in the scorching glass,

for what fire could damage

a witch’s face?

So I stared in that furnace

where beauties char

but found radiant Venus

reflected there.

Insolent storm strikes at the skull

Insolent storm strikes at the skull,

assaults the sleeping citadel,

knocking the warden to his knees

in impotence, to sue for peace,

while wantonly amused by this,

wind wakes the whole metropolis.

Skeptic cyclones try the bone

of strict and sacred skeleton;

polemic gales prove point by point

how flesh cleaves fast to frozen joint,

and a hurricane headache rocks

the temples of the orthodox.

Abracadabra of the rain

drowns Noah’s prayers with distain,

drives priest and prostitute in doorways,

bereft of Moses and of mores;

no ancient blueprint builds an ark

to navigate this final dark.

River floods transcend the level

demarcating good from evil,

and casuist arguments run riot

inundating Eden’s quiet:

all absolutes that angels give

flounder in the relative.

Lightning conjures God’s globe off its

orbit; neither law nor prophets

can rectify truant intent

to doublecross the firmament.

Now earth rejects communication

with heaven’s autocratic station,

and violates celestial custom

by seceding from the solar system.

Scintillant irony inspires

independent rebel fires

till the Announcer’s voice is lost

in heresies of holocaust.

Denouement

The telegram says you have gone away

And left our bankrupt circus on its own;

There is nothing more for me to say.

The maestro gives the singing birds their pay

And they buy tickets for the tropic zone;

The telegram says you have gone away.

The clever woolly dogs have had their day

They shoot the dice for one remaining bone;

There is nothing more for me to say.

The lion and the tigers turn to clay

And Jumbo sadly trumpets into stone;

The telegram says you have gone away.

The morbid cobra’s wits have run astray;

He rents his poisons out by telephone;

There is nothing more for me to say.

The colored tents all topple in the bay;

The magic sawdust writes: address unknown.

The telegram says you have gone away;

There is nothing more for me to say.

Two Lovers and a Beachcomber by the Real Sea

Cold and final, the imagination

Shuts down its fabled summer house;

Blue views are boarded up; our sweet vacation

Dwindles in the hour-glass.

Thoughts that found a maze of mermaid hair

Tangling in the tide’s green fall

Now fold their wings like bats and disappear

Into the attic of the skull.

We are not what we might be; what we are

Outlaws all extrapolation

Beyond the interval of now and here:

White whales are gone with the white ocean.

A lone beachcomber squats among the wrack

Of kaleidoscopic shells

Probing fractured Venus with a stick

Under a tent of taunting gulls.

No sea-change decks the sunken shank of bone

That chuckles in backtrack of the wave;

Though the mind like an oyster labors on and on,

A grain of sand is all we have.

Water will run by rule; the actual sun

Will scrupulously rise and set;

No little man lives in the exacting moon

And that is that, is that, is that.

Black Pine Tree in an Orange Light

Tell me what you see in it:

the pine tree like a Rorschach-blot

black against the orange light:

Plant an orange pumpkin patch

which at twelve will quaintly hatch

nine black mice with ebon coach,

or walk into the orange and make

a devil’s cataract of black

obscure god’s eye with corkscrew fleck;

put orange mistress half in sun,

half in shade, until her skin

tattoos black leaves on tangerine.

Read black magic or holy book

or lyric of love in the orange and black

till dark is conquered by orange cock,

but more pragmatic than all of this,

say how crafty the painter was

to make orange and black ambiguous.

Terminal

Riding home from credulous blue domes,

the dreamer reins his waking appetite

in panic at the crop of catacombs

sprung up like plague of toadstools overnight:

refectories where he reveled have become

the hostelry of worms, rapacious blades

who weave within the skeleton’s white womb

a caviare decay of rich brocades.

Turning the tables of this grave gourmet,

the fiendish butler saunters in and serves

for feast the sweetest meat of hell’s chef d’œuvres:

his own pale bride upon a flaming tray:

parsleyed with elegies, she lies in state

waiting for his grace to consecrate.

Love Is a Parallax

‘Perspective betrays with its dichotomy:

train tracks always meet, not here, but only

in the impossible mind’s eye;

horizons beat a retreat as we embark

on sophist seas to overtake that mark

where wave pretends to drench real sky.’

‘Well then, if we agree, it is not odd

that one man’s devil is another’s god

or that the solar spectrum is

a multitude of shaded grays; suspense

on the quicksands of ambivalence

is our life’s whole nemesis.’

So we could rave on, darling, you and I,

until the stars tick out a lullaby

about each cosmic pro and con;

nothing changes, for all the blazing of

our drastic jargon, but clock hands that move

implacably from twelve to one.

We raise our arguments like sitting ducks

to knock them down with logic or with luck

and contradict ourselves for fun;

the waitress holds our coats and we put on

the raw wind like a scarf; love is a faun

who insists his playmates run.

Now you, my intellectual leprechaun,

would have me swallow the entire sun

like an enormous oyster, down

the ocean in one gulp: you say a mark

of comet hara-kiri through the dark

should inflame the sleeping town.

So kiss: the drunks upon the curb and dames

in dubious doorways forget their monday names,

caper with candles in their heads;

the leaves applaud, and santa claus flies in

scattering candy from a zeppelin,

playing his prodigal charades.

The moon leans down to look; the tilting fish

in the rare river wink and laugh; we lavish

blessings right and left and cry

hello, and then hello again in deaf

churchyard ears until the starlit stiff

graves all carol in reply.

Now kiss again: till our strict father leans

to call for curtain on our thousand scenes;

brazen actors mock at him,

multiply pink harlequins and sing

in gay ventriloquy from wing to wing

while footlights flare and houselights dim.

Tell now, we taunt, where black or white begins

and separate the flutes from violins:

the algebra of absolutes

explodes in a kaleidoscope of shapes

that jar, while each polemic jackanapes

joins his enemies’ recruits.

The paradox is that ‘the play’s the thing’:

though prima donna pouts and critic stings,

there burns throughout the line of words,

the cultivated act, a fierce brief fusion

which dreamers call real, and realists, illusion:

an insight like the flight of birds:

Arrows that lacerate the sky, while knowing

the secret of their ecstasy’s in going;

some day, moving, one will drop,

and, dropping, die, to trace a wound that heals

only to reopen as flesh congeals:

cycling phoenix never stops.

So we shall walk barefoot on walnut shells

of withered worlds, and stamp out puny hells

and heavens till the spirits squeak

surrender: to build our bed as high as jack’s

bold beanstalk; lie and love till sharp scythe hacks

away our rationed days and weeks.

Then let the blue tent topple, stars rain down,

and god or void appall us till we drown

in our own tears: today we start

to pay the piper with each breath, yet love

knows not of death nor calculus above

the simple sum of heart plus heart.

Aerialist

Each night, this adroit young lady

Lies among sheets

Shredded fine as snowflakes

Until dream takes her body

From bed to strict tryouts

In tightrope acrobatics.

Nightly she balances

Cat-clever on perilous wire

In a gigantic hall,

Footing her delicate dances

To whipcrack and roar

Which speak her maestro’s will.

Gilded, coming correct

Across that sultry air,

She steps, halts, hung

In dead center of her act

As great weights drop all about her

And commence to swing.

Lessoned thus, the girl

Parries the lunge and menace

Of every pendulum;

By deft duck and twirl

She draws applause; bright harness

Bites keen into each brave limb

Then, this tough stint done, she curtsies

And serenely plummets down

To traverse glass floor

And get safe home; but, turning with trained eyes,

Tiger-tamer and grinning clown

Squat, bowling black balls at her.

Tall trucks roll in

With a thunder like lions; all aims

And lumbering moves

To trap this outrageous nimble queen

And shatter to atoms

Her nine so slippery lives.

Sighting the stratagem

Of black weight, black ball, black truck,

With a last artful dodge she leaps

Through hoop of that hazardous dream

To sit up stark awake

As the loud alarmclock stops.

Now as penalty for her skill,

By day she must walk in dread

Steel gauntlets of traffic, terror-struck

Lest, out of spite, the whole

Elaborate scaffold of sky overhead

Fall racketing finale on her luck.

Morning in the Hospital Solarium

Sunlight strikes a glass of grapefruit juice,

flaring green through philodendron leaves

in this surrealistic house

of pink and beige, impeccable bamboo,

patronized by convalescent wives;

heat shadows waver noiseless in

bright window-squares until the women seem

to float like dream-fish in the languid limbo

of an undulant aquarium.

Morning: another day, and talk

taxis indolent on whispered wheels;

the starched white coat, the cat’s paw walk,

herald distraction: a flock of pastel pills,

turquoise, rose, sierra mauve; needles

that sting no more than love: a room where time

ticks tempo to the casual climb

of mercury in graded tubes, where ills

slowly concede to sun and serum.

Like petulant parakeets corked up in cages

of intricate spunglass routine,

the women wait, fluttering, turning pages

of magazines in elegant ennui,

hoping for some incredible dark man

to assault the scene and make some

gaudy miracle occur, to come

and like a burglar steal their fancy:

at noon, anemic husbands visit them.

The Princess and the Goblins

(1)

From fabrication springs the spiral stair

up which the wakeful princess climbs to find

the source of blanching light that conjured her

to leave her bed of fever and ascend

a visionary ladder toward the moon

whose holy blue anoints her injured hand.

With finger bandaged where the waspish pin

flew from the intricate embroidery

and stung according to the witch’s plan,

she mounts through malice of the needle’s eye,

trailing her scrupulously simple gown

along bright asterisks by milky way.

Colonnades of angels nod her in

where ancient, infinite, and beautiful,

her legendary godmother leans down,

spinning a single stubborn thread of wool

which all the artful wizards cannot crimp

to keep the young girl from her crowning goal.

Initiated by the lunar lamp,

kindling her within a steepled flame,

the princess hears the thunder and the pomp

of squadrons underground abducting him

who is the destination of the cord

now bound around her wrist till she redeem

this miner’s boy from goblin bodyguard.

(2)

Guided only by the tug and twitch

of that mercurial strand, the girl goes down

the darkening stair, undoes the palace latch

and slips unseen past watchmen on the lawn

dozing around their silvered sentry box.

Across the frosted grass she marks the sheen

of thread conducting her to the worn tracks

made by miners up the mountainside

among the jagged mazes of the rocks.

Laboring on the tilt of that steep grade

behind which the declining moon has set,

she recalls queer stories her nurse read

about a goblin raid on miner’s hut

because new excavations came too near

the chambers where their fiendish queen would sit.

Hearing a weird cackle from afar,

she clutches at the talismanic cord

and confronts a cairn of iron ore.

Suddenly a brazen song is heard

from the pragmatic boy confined within,

gaily cursing the whole goblin horde.

Inviolate in the circle of that skein,

looping like faith about her bleeding feet,

the princess frees the miner, stone by stone,

and leads him home to be her chosen knight.

(3)

The princess coaxes the incredulous boy

through candid kitchens in the rising sun

to seek the staircase by the glare of day.

Hand in hand, they scale meridian,

clambering up the creaking heights of heat

until she hears the twittering machine

which quaintly wove the fabric of her fate

behind the zodiac on attic door

with abracadabra from the alphabet.

Pointing toward the spindle’s cryptic whir,

she tells the greenhorn miner to bow down

and honor the great goddess of the air

suspended aloft within her planet-shine.

Laughing aloud, the dazzled boy demands

why he should kneel before a silly scene

where pigeons promenade the gable-ends

and coo quadrilles about the blighted core

in a batch of raveled apple rinds.

At his words, the indignant godmother

vanishes in a labyrinth of hay

while sunlight winds its yarn upon the floor.

O never again will the extravagant straw

knit up a gilded fable for the child

who weeps before the desolate tableau

of clockwork that makes the royal blood run cold.

Touch-and-Go

Sing praise for statuary:

For those anchored attitudes

And staunch stone eyes that stare

Through lichen-lid and passing bird-foot

At some steadfast mark

Beyond the inconstant green

Gallop and flick of light

In this precarious park

Where vivid children twirl

Like colored tops through time

Nor stop to understand

How all their play is touch-and-go:

But, Go! they cry, and the swing

Arcs up to the tall tree tip;

Go! and the merry-go-round

Hauls them round with it.

And I, like the children, caught

In the mortal active verb,

Let my transient eye break a tear

For each quick, flaring game

Of child, leaf and cloud,

While on this same fugue, unmoved,

Those stonier eyes look,

Safe-socketed in rock.

Temper of Time

An ill wind is stalking

While evil stars whir

And all the gold apples

Go bad to the core.

Black birds of omen

Now prowl on the bough;

With a hiss of disaster

Sibyl’s leaves blow.

Through closets of copses

Tall skeletons walk;

Nightshade and nettles

Tangle the track.

In the ramshackle meadow

Where Kilroy would pass

Lurks the sickle-shaped shadow

Of snake in the grass.

Approaching his cottage

By crooked detour,

He hears the gruff knocking

Of the wolf at the door.

His wife and his children

Hang riddled with shot,

There’s a hex on the cradle

And death in the pot.

Epitaph in Three Parts

(1)

Rocking across the lapis lazuli sea

comes a flock of bottle battleships

each with a telegram addressed to me.

‘Destroy your mirror and avoid mishaps,’

chirps the first; ‘live on a silent island

where the water blots out all footsteps.’

The second sings: ‘Receive no roving gallant

who seeks to dally in the port till dawn,

for your fate involves a dark assailant.’

The third cries out as all the ships go down:

‘There is more than one good way to drown.’

(2)

In the air above my island flies

a crowd of shining gulls that plunge to launch

an accurate assault upon the eyes

of the bold sailor falling under drench

and hunger of the surf that plucks the land,

devouring green gardens inch by inch.

Blood runs in a glissando from the hand

that lifts to consecrate the sunken man.

Aloft, a lone gull halts upon the wind,

announcing after glutted birds have flown:

‘There is more than one good way to drown.’

(3)

Grasshopper goblins with green pointed ears

caper on leafstalk legs across my doorsill,

and mock the jangling rain of splintered stars.

My room is a twittering gray box with a wall

there and there and there again, and then

a window which proves the sky sheer rigmarole

that happens to conceal the lid of one

enormous box of gray where god has gone

and hidden all the bright angelic men.

A wave of grass engraves upon the stone:

‘There is more than one good way to drown.’

Uncollected Juvenilia

A complete list of poems composed before 1956

This alphabetical list includes all the poems Sylvia Plath composed before 1956. The texts of all but half a dozen of these early pieces are in the Sylvia Plath Archive of juvenilia in the Lilly Library at Indiana University. The rest are with the Sylvia Plath Estate. The bracketed date following certain titles indicates the year of composition, where it is known. An asterisk before a title indicates that it is included in the selection of fifty early poems printed above, p. 299.

*Admonitions

Adolescence (1949)

Advice for an Artificer

*Aerialist

All I Can Tell You Is About the Fog Alone and Alone in the Woods Was I (1948)

Among the Tall Deep-rooted Grasses

Apology for an April Satyr

Apparel for April (1953)

Apple Blossom (1943)

*April Aubade

*April 18

*Aquatic Nocturne

August Night

Autumn Portrait

A Ballad

Ballade banale

Bereft (1947)

*Bitter Strawberries

*Black Pine Tree in an Orange Light Blue-shingled Rooftops (1947)

*Bluebeard

The Bronze Boy

Camp Helen Storrow (1945)

Carnival (1948)

Carnival Nocturne (1953)

Checkmate (1948)

Chef d' œvre

*Cinderella

*Circus in Three Rings

City Streets

City Wife

Class Song (1950)

Closet Drama

Complaint

The Complex Couch

Crime Doesn't Pay

Crossing the Equator

*Danse macabre

The Dark River (1949)

*The Dead

*Denouement

Desert Song

The Desperate Hours

*Dialogue En Route

Dirge

*Dirge for a Joker

Dirge for Abigail

Dirge in Three Parts

*The Dispossessed

*Doom of Exiles (1954)

*Doomsday

*The Dream

Dreams (1945)

The Earth Had Wilted in the Heat

Earthbound (1948)

Elegy

Elizabeth’s April

Enchantment (1945)

Ennui (I)

Ennui (II)

*Epitaph in Three Parts

Eve Describes Her Birthday Party

The Fairy Scarf (1945)

Fall

Fall Guy

*Family Reunion

The Farewell

*Female Author

Finality (1947)

Fog (1948)

*Go get the goodly squab

Gold Leaves Stir (1950)

*Gold mouths cry

Golden Afternoon (1946)

Gone Is the River

The Crackles

Green as a Melon My Sweet World Was

Harlequin Love Song

Have You Forgotten

Housewife

Humoresque

Humpty Dumpty

I Am an American

I Do What You Wish

I Have Found My Perfect World (1948)

I Put My Fingers in My Ears (1949)

I Reach Out

I Thought That I Could Not Be Hurt (1946)

Ice Age (I)

Ice Age (II)

In the Corner of My Garden (1944)

In Memoriam (1946)

Incident

*Insolent storm strikes at the skull

Interlude (1947)

The Invalid

Item: stolen, one suitcase

*Jilted

Joy (1948)

*Lament

Let the Rain Fall Gently (1948)

Lonely Song (1949)

*Love Is a Parallax

March (1945)

March 15 Muse

March 21

Marcia

May (1947)

*Metamorphoses of the Moon

Midnight Snow (1946)

*Midsummer Mobile

Million Dollar Month

The Mistake (1948)

*Moonsong at Morning

*Morning in the Hospital Solarium

Mornings of Mist (1946)

Motherly Love (1946)

My Extravagant Heart Blows Up Again

Neither Moonlight nor Starlight

*Never try to trick me with a kiss

Never You

New England Library (1947)

New England Winter Without Snow

Not Here

Notes on Zarathustra’s Prologue

*Notes to a Neophyte

Obsession (1948)

October (1946)

Ode to a Bitten Plum (1950)

*On Looking into the Eyes of a Demon Lover

On the Futility of a Lexicon

P.N.

Paradox

Patience (1948)

Pearls of Dew (1940)

Pigeon Post

Portrait (1948)

Portrait d’une jeune fille

*The Princess and the Goblins

*Prologue to Spring

Question (1949)

The Rain (1945)

Recognition (1948)

Reflection (1948)

Reflections at Twelve

Reverie (1947)

Riddle (1948)

Riverside Reverie (1952)

Rondeau

Rondeau redouble

The Scarlet Beacon (1946)

Sea Symphony (1947)

Second Winter

Sleepers

Slow, Slow the Rhythm of the Moon (1950)

The Snowflake Star (1946)

Solo

*Song for a Revolutionary Love

Song for a Thaw

Song of Eve

Song of the Daydreamer (1948)

Song of the Superfluous Spring

Sonnet for a Green-eyed Sailor

Sonnet: The Suitcases Are Packed Again

Sonnet: To a Shade

* Sonnet: To Eva

*Sonnet to Satan

*Sonnet: To Time

*A Sorcerer Bids Farewell to Seem

Sorrow (1947)

Spring Again (1947)

The Spring Parade (1945)

Spring Sacrament

Spring Song to a Housewife

Steely Blue Crags (1947)

The Stoic

The Stranger (1947)

The Stream

Summer Street (1948)

*Temper of Time

*Terminal

Thy Kingdom Come

To a Dissembling Spring

*To a Jilted Lover

To Ariadne

To Eva

*To Eva Descending the Stair

To Miss Cox

To the Boy Inscrutable as God

To Time

Torch Song

*Touch-and-Go

The Traveller (1948)

*The Trial of Man

*Trio of Love Songs

Triolet frivole

Tulips at Dawn (1948)

Twilight

*Two Lovers and a Beachcomber by the Real Sea

Valentine: Lines to a Rich Bachelor

Van Winkle’s Village

Virus T.V.

Voices

Wallflower

Warning

Wayfaring at the Whitney

Wellfleet Beach Plums

When the Stars Are Pale and Cool

White Girl Between Yellow Curtains

White Phlox (1950)

Why Must the Slim Spring Rains Fall Now

Wild Geese (1948)

A Winter Sunset (1946)

Winter Words

A Wish Upon a Star (1944)

Words Fall to Winter

Words of Advice to an English Prof

Youth (1947)

Youth’s Appeal for Peace (1948)

Zeitgeist at the Zoo

Index of Titles and First Lines

Poems 1956-1963

The pagination of this electronic edition does not match the edition from which it was created. To locate a specific entry, please use your e-book reader’s search tools.

A dream tree, Polly’s tree, 128

A garden of mouthings. Purple, scarlet- speckled, black, 118

A secret! A secret!, 219

A smile fell in the grass, 249

A squeal of brakes, 230

Above the Oxbow, 87

Above whorled, spindling gorse, 71

Aftermath, 113

Alicante Lullaby, 43

All summer we moved in a villa brimful of echoes, 68

All the Dead Dears, 70

Amnesiac, 232

Among orange-tile rooftops, 28

Among the Narcissi, 190

An old beast ended in this place, 137

Anansi, black busybody of the folktales, 48

An Appearance, 189

The Applicant, 221

Apprehensions, 195

Arena dust rusted by four bulls’ blood to a dull redness, 47

Ariel, 239

The Arrival of the Bee Box, 212

As the gods began one world, and man another, 79

At this wharf there are no grand landings to speak of, 112

Axes/After whose stroke the wood rings, 270

The Babysitters, 174

Balloons, 271

Bare-handed, I hand the combs, 214

Barren Woman, 157

Battle-Scene from the Comic Operatic Fantasy The Seafarer, 84

The Beast (Poem for a Birthday: 4), 134

The Bee Meeting, 211

The Beekeeper’s Daughter, 118

The Beggars, 47

Behind him the hotdogs split and drizzled, 115

Berck-Plage, 196

Better that every fiber crack, 40

A Birthday Present, 206

Black lake, black boat, two black, cut- paper people, 190

Black Rook in Rainy Weather, 56

Blackberrying, 168

Blameless as daylight I stood looking, 109

Blue Moles, 126

Born green we were, 30

Brasilia, 258

Bucolics, 23

The Bull of Bendylaw, 108

Burning the Letters, 204

The Burnt-out Spa, 137

But I would rather be horizontal, 162

By a mad miracle I go intact, 35

By Candlelight, 236

By the gate with star and moon, 124

By the roots of my hair some god got hold of me, 141

Candles, 148

Channel Crossing, 26

Child, 265

Childless Woman, 259

Child’s Park Stones, 100

Clocks belled twelve. Main Street showed otherwise, 101

Clownlike, happiest on your hands, 141

Color floods to the spot, dull purple, 271

Color of lemon, mango, peach, 26

The Colossus, 129

‘Come lady, bring that pot, 34

The Companionable Ills, 105

Compelled by calamity’s magnet, 113

Contusion, 271

Conversation Among the Ruins, 21

The Courage of Shutting-Up, 209

The Couriers, 247

Crossing the Water, 190

Crystal Gazer, 54

Cut, 235

Dark House (Poem for a Birthday: 2), 132

Dark Wood, Dark Water, 127

Day of mist: day of tarnish, 52

Death & Co., 254

The Death of Myth-Making, 104

Departure, 51

The Detective, 208

Dialogue Between Ghost and Priest, 38

Dialogue Over a Ouija Board, 276

The Disquieting Muses, 74

Dream with Clam-Diggers, 43

Eavesdropper, 260

Edge, 272

Electra on Azalea Path, 116

Ella Mason and Her Eleven Cats, 53

Elm, 192

Empty, I echo to the least footfall, 157

Enter the chilly no-man’s land of about, 90

Epitaph for Fire and Flower, 45

Even the sun-clouds this morning cannot manage such skirts, 240

Event, 194

The Everlasting Monday, 62

The Eye-mote, 109

Fable of the Rhododendron Stealers, 103

Face Lift, 155

Faun, 35

The Fearful, 256

Fever 103°, 231

Fiesta Melons, 46

Finisterre, 169

Fired in sanguine clay, the model head, 69

Firesong, 30

First, are you our sort of person?, 221

First frost, and I walk among the rose- fruit, the marble toes, 130

Flintlike, her feet struck, 62

Flute Notes from a Reedy Pond (Poem for a Birthday: 5), 134

For a Fatherless Son, 205

Frog Autumn, 99

From my rented attic with no earth, 53

From under crunch of my man’s boot, 29

From Water-Tower Hill to the brick prison, 110

Full Fathom Five, 92

Gerd sits spindle-shanked in her dark tent, 54

Getting There, 247

The Ghost’s Leavetaking, 90

Gigolo, 267

The Glutton, 40

Go get the glass, then. But I know tonight will be, 276

Goatsucker, 111

God knows how our neighbor managed to breed, 60

The Goring, 47

The Great Carbuncle, 72

Green Rock, Winthrop Bay, 104

Grub-white mulberries redden among leaves, 98

Gulliver, 251

Halfway up from the little harbor of sardine boats, 121

The Hanging Man, 141

Hardcastle Crags, 62

Haunched like a faun, he hooed, 35

He, hunger-stung, hard to slake, 40

He was bullman earlier, 134

Head alone shows you in the prodigious act, 82

Hearing a white saint rave, 67

Heavy Women, 158

Here in this valley of discreet academies, 87

The Hermit at Outermost House, 118

How far is it?, 247

How the elements solidify!—, 194

How this tart fable instructs, 81

I?/I walk alone, 37

I am a miner. The light burns blue, 240

I am silver and exact. I have no preconceptions, 173

I am slow as the world. I am very patient, 176

I Am Vertical, 162

I came before the water-, 95

I can stay awake all night, if need be—, 154

I can taste the tin of the sky—the real tin thing, 151

I do not want a plain box, I want a sarcophagus, 172

I have done it again, 244

I know the bottom, she says. I know it with my great tap root, 192

I made a fire; being tired, 204

I ordered this, this clean wood box, 212

I shall never get out of this! There are two of me now, 158

I shall never get you put together entirely, 129

I walked the unwalked garden of rose-beds, 103

I Want, I Want, 106

If the moon smiled, she would resemble you, 166

I'm a riddle in nine syllables, 116

In Alicante they bowl the barrels, 43

In Benidorm there are melons, 46

In Midas’ Country, 99

In Plaster, 158

In ruck and quibble of courtfolk, 28

In sunless air, under pines, 100

In the dour ages, 80

In the marketplace they are piling the dry sticks, 135

In the rectory garden on his evening walk, 38

In this country there is neither measure nor balance, 144

In this day before the day nobody is about, 290

Incommunicado, 100

Insomniac, 163

Irrefutable, beautifully smug, 158

It beguiles—, 84

It happens. Will it go on?——, 266

It is a chilly god, a god of shades, 77

it is no night to drown in, 94

it is ten years, now, since we rowed to Children’s Island, 174

It was a place of force—, 193

It was not a heart, beating, 76

I’ve got a stubborn goose whose gut’s, 50

Jade—/Stone of the side, 242

The Jailer, 226

Kindness, 269

Kindness glides about my house, 269

The Lady and the Earthenware Head, 69

Lady Lazarus, 244

Lady, your room is lousy with flowers, 145

Landowners, 53

Last Words, 172

Leaving Early, 145

Lesbos, 227

A Lesson in Vengeance, 80

Letter in November, 253

Letter to a Purist, 36

A Life, 149

Little Fugue, 187

Little poppies, little hell flames, 203

Lorelei, 94

Love Letter, 147

Love set you going like a fat gold watch, 156

Love, the world, 253

Lyonnesse, 233

Maenad (Poem for a Birthday: 3), 133

Magi, 148

Magnolia Shoals, 121

Man in Black, 119

The Manor Garden, 125

Mary’s Song, 257

Maudlin, 51

Mayday: two came to field in such wise, 23

Mayflower, 60

Meadows of gold dust. The silver, 99

Medallion, 124

Medusa, 224

Memoirs of a Spinach-Picker, 89

Metaphors, 116

Midnight in the mid-Atlantic. On deck, 142

Mirror, 173

Miss Drake Proceeds to Supper, 41

Monologue at 3 a.m., 40

The Moon and the Yew Tree, 172

Moonrise, 98

Morning Song, 156

Mother, mother, what illbred aunt, 74

Mud-mattressed under the sign of the hag, 51

The Munich Mannequins, 262

Mushrooms, 139

Mussel Hunter at Rock Harbor, 95

My father kept a vaulted conch, 78

My night sweats grease his breakfast plate, 226

Mystic, 268

Natural History, 71

The Net-Menders, 121

New Year on Dartmoor, 176

Nick and the Candlestick, 240

The Night Dances, 249

Night Shift, 76

Nightfall, cold eye—neither disheartens, 47

No lame excuses can gloss over, 104

No map traces the street, 122

No novice, 41

No use, no use, now, begging Recognize!, 232

No use whistling for Lyonnesse!, 233

Nobody in the lane, and nothing, nothing but blackberries, 168

Not easy to state the change you made, 147

November Graveyard, 56

Now coldness comes sifting down, layer after layer, 134

Now this particular girl, 49

O half moon—, 252

O maiden aunt, you have come to call, 237

O mud, mud, how fluid!—, 202

Ode for Ted, 29

Off that landspit of stony mouth-plugs, 224

Old Ella Mason keeps cats, eleven at last count, 53

Old goatherds swear how all night long they hear, 111

Old Ladies’ Home, 120

Old man, you surface seldom, 92

On Boston Common a red star, 86

On Deck, 142

On storm-struck deck, wind sirens caterwaul, 26

On the Decline of Oracles, 78

On the Difficulty of Conjuring Up a Dryad, 65

On the Plethora of Dryads, 67

On the stiff twig up there, 56

On this bald hill the new year hones its edge, 152

Once I was ordinary, 133

Open-mouthed, the baby god, 106

The Other, 201

The Other Two, 68

Ouija, 77

Out here there are no hearthstones, 143

Outlandish as a circus, the ravaged face, 115

Over your body the clouds go, 251

Overnight, very, 139

Owl, 101

Paralytic, 266

Parliament Hill Fields, 152

Perfection is terrible, it cannot have children, 262

Perseus: The Triumph of Wit Over Suffering, 82

Pheasant, 191

Pocket watch, I tick well, 267

Poem for a Birthday, 131

Poems, Potatoes, 106

Point Shirley, 110

Polly’s Tree, 128

Poppies in July, 203

Poppies in October, 240

Private Ground, 130

Prospect, 28

Purdah, 242

Pure? What does it mean?, 231

Pursuit, 22

Queen Mary’s Rose Garden, 290

The Queen’s Complaint, 28

The Rabbit Catcher, 193

The Ravaged Face, 115

Ravening through the persistent bric-a-brac, 65

Recantation, 41

Resolve, 52

Rhyme, 50

Rigged poker-stiff on her back, 70

The Rival, 166

Rosebud, knot of worms, 73

Sculptor, 91

A Secret, 219

Sharded in black, like beetles, 120

Sheep in Fog, 262

The Shrike, 42

Since Christmas they have lived with us, 271

Sky and sea, horizon-hinged, 118

Sleep in the Mojave Desert, 143

The Sleepers, 122

Snakecharmer, 79

The Snowman on the Moor, 58

Soliloquy of the Solipsist, 37

Somebody is shooting at something in our town—, 215

Song for a Summer’s Day, 30

Southern Sunrise, 26

Sow, 60

Spider, 48

Spinster, 49

Spry, wry, and gray as these March sticks, 190

Stalemated their armies stood, with tottering banners, 58

Stars are dropping thick as stones into the twiggy, 165

Stars Over the Dordogne, 165

Stasis in darkness, 239

Stillborn, 142

Stings, 214

The Stones (Poem for a Birthday: 7), 136

Stopped Dead, 230

Street Song, 35

Strumpet Song, 33

Suicide off Egg Rock, 115

Summer grows old, cold-blooded mother, 99

The Surgeon at 2 a.m., 170

The Swarm, 215

Tale of a Tub, 24

‘Tea leaves I’ve given up, 41

Thalidomide, 252

That grandiose colossus who, 36

That lofty monarch, Monarch Mind, 71

The abstracts hover like dull angels, 148

The air is a mill of hooks—, 268

The black bull bellowed before the sea, 108

The courage of the shut mouth, in spite of artillery!, 209

The day she visited the dissecting room, 114

The day you died I went into the dirt, 116

The engine is killing the track, the track is silver, 264

The figs on the fig tree in the yard are green, 51

The fountains are dry and the roses over, 125

The groundhog on the mountain did not run, 100

The hills step off into whiteness, 262

The horizons ring me like faggots, 167

The month of flowering’s finished. The fruit’s in, 131

The moon’s man stands in his shell, 62

The night sky is only a sort of carbon paper, 163

The nose-end that twitches, the old imperfections—, 105

The photographic chamber of the eye, 24

The scene stands stubborn: skinflint trees, 56

The smile of iceboxes annihilates me, 189

The Sunday lamb cracks in its fat, 257

The tulips are too excitable, it is winter here, 160

The wet dawn inks are doing their blue dissolve, 257

The white light is artificial, and hygienic as heaven, 170

The woman is perfected, 272

The womb, 259

The word, defining, muzzles; the drawn line, 106

The word of a snail on the plate of a leaf?, 247

The yew’s black fingers wag, 187

There is a panther stalks me down, 22

There is this white wall, above which the sky creates itself—, 195

There, spring lambs jam the sheepfold. In air, 111

These poems do not live: it’s a sad diagnosis, 142

They are always with us, the thin people, 64

They are the last romantics, these candles, 148

They called the place Lookout Farm, 89

They enter as animals from the outer, 255

They’re out of the dark’s ragbag, these two, 126

The Thin People, 64

This dream budded bright with leaves around the edges, 43

This is a dark house, very big, 132

This is newness: every little tawdry, 176

This is not what I meant, 153

This is the city where men are mended, 136

This is the easy time, there is nothing doing, 217

This is the light of the mind, cold and planetary, 172

This is the sea, then, this great abeyance, 196

This is winter, this is night, small love—, 236

This man makes a pseudonym, 256

This was the land’s end: the last fingers, knuckled and rheumatic, 169

This wood burns a dark, 127

Three Women, 176

Through fen and farmland walking, 30

Through frost-thick weather, 32

Through portico of my elegant house you stalk, 21

Throughout black winter the red haws withstood, 60

The Times Are Tidy, 107

Tinker Jack and the Tidy Wives, 34

To his house the bodiless, 91

Totem, 264

Touch it: it won’t shrink like an eyeball, 149

The Tour, 237

Tulips, 160

Two Campers in Cloud Country, 144

Two girls there are: within the house, 31

Two, of course there are two, 254

Two Sisters of Persephone, 31

Two Views of a Cadaver Room, 114

Two Views of Withens, 71

Two virtues ride, by stallion, by nag, 104

Unlucky the hero born, 107

Up here among the gull cries, 121

Vanity Fair, 32

Viciousness in the kitchen!, 227

Virgin in a Tree, 81

Waking in Winter, 151

Water in the millrace, through a sluice of stone, 21

Watercolor of Grantchester Meadows, 111

We came over the moor-top, 72

What a thrill——, 235

What is this, behind this veil, is it ugly, is it beautiful ?, 206

What though green leaves only witness, 44

What was she doing when it blew in, 208

When night comes black, 42

Where the three magenta, 119

Whiteness being what I remember, 102

Whiteness I Remember, 102

Whitsun, 153

Who (Poem for a Birthday: 1), 131

Who are these people at the bridge to meet me? They are the villagers—, 211

Widow, 164

Widow. The word consumes itself—, 164

Will they occur, 258

Winter Landscape, with Rooks, 21

A Winter Ship, 112

Winter Trees, 257

Wintering, 217

A Winter’s Tale, 86

Witch Burning (Poem for a Birthday: 6), 135

With white frost gone, 33

Woodsmoke and a distant loudspeaker, 123

Words, 270

Words for a Nursery, 73

Words heard, by accident, over the phone, 202

Wreath for a Bridal, 44

Wuthering Heights, 167

Yaddo: The Grand Manor, 123

Yadwigha, on a Red Couch, Among Lilies, 85

Yadwigha, the literalists once wondered how you, 85

Years, 255

You bring me good news from the clinic, 155

You come in late, wiping your lips, 201

You might as well haul up, 45

You said you would kill it this morning, 191

You will be aware of an absence, presently, 205

Your brother will trim my hedges!, 260

Your clear eye is the one absolutely beautiful thing, 265

You’re, 141

Zoo Keeper’s Wife, 154

Fifty Early Poems

Admonitions, 319

Aerialist, 331

All day she plays at chess with the bones of the world, 301

All right, let’s say you could take a skull and break it, 304

All that morning in the strawberry field, 299

Always in the middle of a kiss, 302

An ill wind is stalking, 336

April Aubade, 312

April 18, 301

Aquatic Nocturne, 305

Begin by dipping your brush into clear light, 324

Bitter Strawberries, 299

Black Pine Tree in an Orange Light, 328

Bluebeard, 305

Cinderella, 303

Circus in Three Rings, 321

Clocks cry: stillness is a lie, my dear, 303

Cold and final, the imagination, 327

Cold moons withdraw, refusing to come to terms, 307

Cold on my narrow cot I lie, 309

Danse macabre, 320

The Dead, 320

deep in liquid indigo, 305

Denouement, 326

Dialogue En Route, 308

Dirge for a Joker, 302

The Dispossessed, 318

Doom of Exiles, 318

Doomsday, 316

Down among strict roots and rocks, 320

The Dream, 310

Each night, this adroit young lady, 331

Epitaph in Three Parts, 337

Family Reunion, 300

Female Author, 301

From fabrication springs the spiral stair, 333

Go get the goodly squab in gold-lobed corn, 313

Gold mouths cry with the green young, 302

Here are two pupils, 325

I am sending back the key, 305

‘If only something would happen!’, 308

I’m through with this grand looking-glass hotel, 324

In darkroom of your eye the moonly mind, 323

In the circus tent of a hurricane, 321

Insolent storm strikes at the skull, 325

Jilted, 304

Lament, 315

‘Last night,’ he said, ‘I slept well, 310

Love Is a Parallax, 329

Major faults in granite, 313

Metamorphoses of the Moon, 307

Midsummer Mobile, 324

Moonsong at Morning, 316

Morning in the Hospital Solarium, 332

My thoughts are crabbed and sallow, 304

Never try to trick me with a kiss, 319

Notes to a Neophyte, 306

Now we, returning from the vaulted domes, 318

O moon of illusion, 316

O throw it away, throw it all away on the wind, 322

Oh never try to knock on rotten wood, 319

On Looking into the Eyes of a Demon Lover, 325

Outside in the street I hear, 300

‘Perspective betrays with its dichotomy, 329

The Princess and the Goblins, 333

Prologue to Spring, 322

Revolving in oval loops of solar speed, 320

Riding home from credulous blue domes, 328

Rocking across the lapis lazuli sea, 337

Sing praise for statuary, 335

Song for a Revolutionary Love, 322

Sonnet: To Eva, 304

Sonnet to Satan, 323

Sonnet: To Time, 311

A Sorcerer Bids Farewell to Seem, 324

Sunlight strikes a glass of grapefruit juice, 332

Take the general mumble, 306

Tell me what you see in it, 328

Temple of Time, 336

Terminal, 328

The enormous mortgage must be paid somehow, 318

The idiot bird leaps out and drunken leans, 316

The ordinary milkman brought that dawn, 312

The prince leans to the girl in scarlet heels, 303

the slime of all my yesterdays, 301

The sting of bees took away my father, 315

The telegram says you have gone away, 326

The winter landscape hangs in balance now, 322

To a Jilted Lover, 309

To Eva Descending the Stair, 303

Today we move in jade and cease with garnet, 311

Touch-and-Go, 335

The Trial of Man, 312

Trio of Love Songs, 313

Two Lovers and a Beachcomber by the Real Sea, 327

Worship this world of watercolor mood, 312

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About the author

Meet Sylvia Plath

About the book

“Sylvia Plath and the Death Throes of Romanticism”

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About the author

Meet Sylvia Plath

“Sylvia submitted forty-five pieces to Seventeen before her first short story was published.”

SYLVIA PLATH was born in 1932 in Massachusetts and spent her early years in the seaside town of Winthrop. Her mother’s parents were Austrian, her father, a professor of biology at Boston University (and an internationally known authority on bees), had emigrated to the States as an adolescent, from a Prussian town in the Polish Corridor. She had one brother, Warren, two and a half years younger. When she was eight, her father died after a long, difficult illness. The family then moved inland to the town of Wellesley, a conservative upper-middle-class suburb of Boston. Sylvia’s mother, Aurelia Plath, taught students in the medical-secretarial training program at Boston University, while Sylvia and Warren attended local public schools.

At an early age Sylvia began to write poems and to draw in pen and ink. She submitted forty-five pieces to Seventeen before her first short story was published in the August 1950 issue. That same year she entered Smith College, where she held class and college offices, became a member of The Smith Review’s editorial board, and published poems and stories in Seventeen and the Christian Science Monitor. In August 1951 she won Mademoiselle’s fictioncontest. The following year she won two Smith College poetry prizes and was chosen to be a guest editor in New York in Mademoiselle’s College Board Contest. That summer she published three poems in Harper’s magazine.

“[The Ariel] poems were significantly different; Ted Hughes has written that ‘Tulips’ marked ‘the first sign of what was on its way.’”

Sylvia returned home following her stint at Mademoiselle and suffered what she termed a “six month crash,” a period marked by an attempted suicide and a well-publicized disappearance—she was found in the crawl space beneath the house. She emerged from hospitalization and shock treatment to complete her senior year at Smith. She graduated summa cum laude and traveled to Cambridge University on a Fulbright Scholarship. Within a year of her arrival in England, she met and married the British poet Ted Hughes. The couple moved to the States in 1957.

Sylvia began work as a teacher at Smith College and was assessed by her colleagues as “one of the two or three finest instructors ever to appear in the English department. . . .” After a year of teaching, however, she made the decision to leave Smith in order to write fulltime. To free herself of writer’s block and the early stages of depression that later beset her, she took a secretarial job in the psychiatric department of Massachusetts General Hospital. This was the basis of perhaps her best short story, “Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams.” She returned to England with Ted in December 1959.

Her first child, Frieda, was born in April 1960 in London, and her first book of poetry, The Colossus, was accepted for fall publication. She wrote her novel The Bell Jar “about a college girl building up for and going through a nervous breakdown” with the help of a Eugene F. Saxton Fellowship.

In the fall of 1960 the Hugheses moved to a Devon village where they had bought an ancient thatched house. Their son Nicholas was born there in January 1962.

At this time Sylvia was writing poems out of which the “Ariel” voice arose. These poems were significantly different; Ted Hughes has written that “Tulips” marked “the first sign of what was on its way.” This poem came “at top speed, as one might write an urgent letter.” From then on, all her poems were written in this way.

Sylvia insisted on separation from Ted during the late summer of 1962, having learned of Ted’s affair with their friend Assia Wevill. Winter alone in Devon seemed impossible. Sylvia began to commute to London, where she was “getting work with the BBC,” and hunted for an apartment there. The manuscript of The Bell Jar had been accepted for publication by William Heinemann Limited and Sylvia continued working on the “Ariel” poems, producing many of them during an astonishingly prolific period in October and November 1962.

“Of the extraordinary poems Sylvia Plath left behind, eleven were completed during her brief time in London.”

In mid-December Sylvia moved herself and the children to London where she had signed a lease on a seemingly auspicious flat: “Walking desolate around my beloved Primrose Hill in London and brooding on the hopelessness of ever finding a flat . . . I passed Yeats’s house, with its blue plaque ‘Yeats lived here,’ which I’d often passed and longed to live in. . . . I am here on a five-year lease and it is utter heaven . . . and it’s Yeats’s house, which right now means a lot to me.” Ted Hughes was later to tell his daughter, Frieda, that Sylvia “willed herself right into that flat with every fiber of her being.”

Reviews of The Bell Jar, published January 1963, distressed her. It was the most bitterly cold winter London had known since 1813–14. During the few weeks she lived in Yeats’s house, the lighting and heating went off at unannounced intervals, the telephone was not yet connected, she had fired the au pair and was waiting for a replacement, she suffered repeated attacks of flu, and the children had miserable colds. Sylvia fell into a deepening depression. Her doctor prescribed antidepressants to which, in the United States, she was known to react badly, but in England they went under a different brand name and Sylvia was unaware she was taking the very medication she should avoid. Her doctor was trying to get her into hospital and was arranging a psychiatrist, but on February 11, 1963, she took her own life.

Of the extraordinary poems Sylvia Plath left behind, eleven were completed during her brief time in London. The last poem, “Edge,” was written on February 5, 1963. It begins:

The woman is perfected.

Her dead

Body wears the smile of accomplishment . . .

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About the book

“Sylvia Plath and the Death Throes of Romanticism”

by Joyce Carol Oates

The following essay appears in New Heaven, New Earth: The Visionary Experience in Literature (1974); copyright 2008 by Ontario Review, Inc. Reprinted with permission of Joyce Carol Oates.

I am not cruel, only truthful—

The eye of a little god. . . .

(Sylvia Plath, “Mirror”)

TRAGEDY IS NOT A WOMAN, however gifted, dragging her shadow around in a circle, or analyzing with dazzling scrupulosity the stale, boring inertia of the circle; tragedy is cultural, mysteriously enlarging the individual so that what he has experienced is both what we have experienced and what we need not experience—because of his, or her, private agony. It is proper to say that Sylvia Plath represents for us a tragic figure involved in a tragic action, and that her tragedy is offered to us as a near-perfect work of art, in her books The Colossus (1960), The Bell Jar (1963), Ariel (1965), and the posthumous volumes published in 1971, Crossing the Water and Winter Trees. This essay is an attempt to analyze Plath in terms of her cultural significance, to diagnose, through Plath’s poetry, the pathological aspects of our era that make a death of the spirit inevitable—for that era and all who believe in its assumptions. It is also based upon the certainty that Plath’s era is concluded and that we may consider it with the sympathetic detachment with which we consider any era that has gone before us and makes our own possible: the cult of Plath insists she is a saintly martyr, but of course she is something less dramatic than this, but more valuable. The “I” of the poems is an artful construction, a tragic figure whose tragedy is classical, the result of a limited vision that believed itself the mirror held up to nature—as in the poem “Mirror,” the eye of a little god who imagines itself without preconceptions, “unmisted by love or dislike.” This is the audacious hubris of tragedy, the inevitable reality-challenging statement of the participant in a dramatic action he does not know is “tragic.” He dies, and only we can see the purpose of his death—to illustrate the error of a personality who believed itself godlike.

The assumptions of the essay are several: that the artist both creates and is created by his art, and that the self—especially the “I” of lyric poetry—is a personality who achieves a kind of autonomy free not only of the personal life of the artist but free, as well, of the part-by-part progression of individual poems; that the autobiographical personality is presented by the artist as a testing of reality, and that its success or failure or bewilderment will ultimately condition the artist’s personal life; that the degree to which an audience accepts or rejects or sympathetically detaches itself from a given tragic action will ultimately condition the collective life of an era; and that the function of literary criticism is not simply to dissect either cruelly or reverentially, to attack or to glorify, but to illustrate how the work of a significant artist helps to explain his era and our own. The significance of Plath’s art is assumed. Her significance as a cultural phenomenon is assumed. What needs desperately to be seen is how she performed for us, and perhaps in place of some of us, the concluding scenes in the fifth act of a tragedy, the first act of which began centuries ago.

Narcissi

Lawrence said in Apocalypse that when he heard people complain of being lonely he knew their affliction: “. . . they have lost the Cosmos.” It is easy to agree with Lawrence, but less easy to understand what he means. Yet if there is a way of approaching Plath’s tragedy, it is only through an analysis of what Plath lost and what she was half-conscious of having lost:

I am solitary as grass. What is it I miss?

Shall I ever find it, whatever it is?

(“Three Women”)

We must take this loss as a real one, not a rhetorical echoing of other poets’ cries; not a yearning that can be dismissed by the robust and simple-minded among us who like that formidably healthy and impossible Emerson, sought to dismiss the young people of his day “diseased” with problems of original sin, evil, predestination, and the like by contemptuously diagnosing their worries as “the soul’s mumps, and measles, and whooping-coughs” (“Spiritual Laws”). Emerson possessed a consciousness of such fluidity and explorative intelligence that any loss of the cosmos for him could seem nothing more serious than an adolescent’s perverse rebelliousness, at its most profound a doubt to be answered with a few words.

These “few words” in our era are multiplied endlessly—all the books, the tradition at our disposal, the example of a perpetually renewed and self-renewing nature—and yet they are not convincing to the Sylvia Plaths of our time. For those who imagine themselves as filled with emptiness, as wounds “walking out of hospital,” as the pronouncements of a practical-minded, combative, “healthy” society of organized individuals, are meaningless. Society, seen from the solitary individual’s viewpoint, is simply an organization of the solitary, linked together materially—perhaps, in fact, crowded together but not “together,” not vitally related. One of Plath’s few observations about larger units of human beings is appropriately cynical:

And then there were other faces. The faces of nations.

Governments, parliaments, societies,

The faceless faces of important men.

It is these men I mind:

They are so jealous of anything that is not flat!

They are jealous gods

That would have the whole world flat because they are.

(“Three Women”)

And, in a rapid associative leap that is typical of her poetry—and typical of a certain type of frightened imagination—Plath expands her sociological observation to include the mythical figures of “Father” and “Son,” who conspire together to make a heaven of flatness: “Let us flatten and launder the grossness from these souls” (“Three Women”). The symbolic figures of “Father” and “Son” do not belong to a dimension of the mind exclusive, let alone transcendent, of society; and if they embody the jealous assumptions of an imagined family of “parent” and “child,” they are more immediate, more terrifyingly present, than either.

“Nations, governments, parliaments, societies” conspire only in lies and cannot be trusted. Moreover, they are male in their aggression and their cynical employment of rhetoric; their counterparts cannot be women like Plath, but the creatures of “Heavy Women,” who smile to themselves above their “weighty stomachs” and meditate “devoutly as the Dutch bulb,” absolutely mute, “among the archetypes.” Between the archetypes of jealous, ruthless power, represented by the Father/Son of religious and social tradition, and the archetypes of moronic fleshly beauty, represented by these smug mothers, there is a very small space for the creative intellect, for the employment and expansion of a consciousness that tries to transcend such limits. Before we reject Plath’s definition of the artistic self as unreasonably passive, even as infantile, we should inquire why so intelligent a woman should assume these limitations, why she should not declare war against the holders of power and of the “mysteries” of the flesh—why her poetry approaches but never crosses over the threshold of an active, healthy attack upon obvious evils and injustices. The solitary ego in its prison cell is there by its own desire, its own admission of guilt in the face of even the most crazily ignorant of accusers. Like Eugene O’Neill, who lived into his sixties with this bewildering obsession of the self-annihilated-by-Others, Plath exhibits only the most remote (and rhetorical) sympathy with other people. If she tells us she may be a bit of a “Jew,” it is only to define herself, her sorrows, and not to involve our sympathies for the Jews of recent European history.

Of course, the answer is that Plath did not like other people; like many who are persecuted, she identified in a perverse way with her own persecutors, and not with those who, along with her, were victims. But she did not “like” other people because she did not essentially believe that they existed; she knew intellectually that they existed, of course, since they had the power to injure her, but she did not believe they existed in the way she did, as pulsating, breathing, suffering individuals. Even her own children are objects of her perception, there for the restless scrutiny of her image-making mind, and not there as human beings with a potentiality that would someday take them beyond their immediate dependency upon her, which she sometimes enjoys and sometimes dreads.

The moral assumptions behind Plath’s poetry condemned her to death, just as she, in creating this body of poems, condemned it to death. But her moral predicament is not so pathological as one may think, if conformity to an essentially sick society is taken to be—as many traditional moralists and psychologists take it—a sign of normality. Plath speaks very clearly a language we can understand. She is saying what men have been saying for many centuries, though they have not been so frank as she, and, being less sensitive as well, they have not sickened upon their own hatred for humanity: they have thrived upon it, in fact, “sublimating” it into wondrous achievements of material and mechanical splendor. Let us assume that Sylvia Plath acted out in her poetry and in her private life the deathliness of an old consciousness, the old corrupting hell of the Renaissance ideal and its “I”-ness, separate and distinct from all other fields of consciousness, which exist only to be conquered or to inflict pain upon the “I.” Where at one point in civilization this very masculine, combative ideal of an “I” set against all other “I’s”—and against nature as well—was necessary in order to wrench man from the hermetic contemplation of a God-centered universe and get him into action, it is no longer necessary, its health has become a pathology, and whoever clings to its outmoded concepts will die. If romanticism and its gradually accelerating hysteria are taken as the ultimate ends of a once-vital Renaissance ideal of subject/object antagonism, then Plath must be diagnosed as one of the last romantics; and already her poetry seems to us a poetry of the past, swiftly receding into history.

The “I” that is declared an enemy of all others cannot identify with anyone or anything, since even nature—or especially nature—is antagonistic to it. Man is spirit/body but, as in the poem “Last Things,” Plath states her distrust of the spirit that “escapes like steam / In dreams, through the mouth-hole or eye-hole. I can’t stop it.” Spirit is also intellect, but the “intellect” exists uneasily inside a prison house of the flesh; a small, desperate, calculating process (like the ego in Freud’s psychology) that achieves only spasmodic powers of identity in the constant struggle between the id and the superego or between the bestial world of fleshly female “archetypes” and hypocritical, deathly male authorities. This intellect does not belong naturally in the universe and feels guilt and apprehension at all times. It does not belong in nature; nature is “outside” man, superior in brute power to man, though admittedly inferior in the possibilities of imagination. When this intellect attempts its own kind of creation, it cannot be judged as transcendent to the biological processes of change and decay, but as somehow conditioned by these processes and, of course, found inferior. Why else would Plath call a poem about her own poetry “Stillborn” and lament the deadness of her poems, forcing them to compete with low but living creatures?—“They are not pigs, they are not even fish. . . .” It is one of the truly pathological habits of this old consciousness that it puts all things into immediate competition: erecting Aristotelian categories of x and non-x, assuming that the distinction between two totally unconnected phases of life demands a kind of war, a superior/inferior grading.

For instance, let us examine one of Plath’s lighter and more “positive” poems. This is “Magi,” included in the posthumous Crossing the Water. It summons up literary affiliations with Eliot and Yeats, but its vision is exclusively Plath’s and, in a horrifying way, very female. Here, Plath is contemplating her six-month-old daughter, who smiles “into thin air” and rocks on all fours “like a padded hammock.” Imagined as hovering above the child, like “dull angels,” are the Magi of abstraction—the intellectual, philosophical concepts of Good, True, Evil, Love, the products of “some lamp-headed Plato.” Plath dismisses the Magi by asking “What girl ever flourished in such company?” Her attitude is one of absolute contentment with the physical, charming simplicities of her infant daughter; she seems to want none of that “multiplication table” of the intellect. If this poem had not been written by Sylvia Plath, who drew such attention to her poetry by her suicide, one would read it and immediately agree with its familiar assumptions—how many times we’ve read this poem, by how many different poets! But Plath’s significance now forces us to examine her work very carefully, and in this case the poem reveals itself as a vision as tragic as her more famous, more obviously troubled poems.

It is, in effect, a death sentence passed by Plath on her own use of language, on the “abstractions” of culture or the literary as opposed to the physical immediacy of a baby’s existence. The world of language is condemned as only “ethereal” and “blank”—obviously inferior to the world of brute, undeveloped nature. Plath is saying here, in this agreeable-mannered poem, that because “Good” and “Evil” have no meaning to a six-month-old infant beyond the facts of mother’s milk and a bellyache, they have no essential meaning at all—to anyone—and the world of all adult values, the world of complex linguistic structures, the world in which Plath herself lives as a normal expression of her superior intellect, is as “loveless” as the multiplication table and therefore must be rejected. It is extraordinary that the original romantic impulse to honor and appreciate nature, especially mute nature, should dwindle in our time to this: a Sylvia Plath willfully admitting to herself and to us that she is inferior to her own infant! The regressive fantasies here are too pathetic to bear examination, but it is worth suggesting that this attitude is not unique. It reveals much that is wrong with contemporary intellectuals’ assessment of themselves: a total failure to consider that the undeveloped (whether people or nations) are not sacred because they are undeveloped, but sacred because they are part of nature, that and the role of the superior intellect is not to honor incompletion, in itself or in anything, but to help bring about the fulfillment of potentialities. Plath tells us that a six-month-old infant shall pass judgment on Plato; and in the poem “Candles” she asks, “How shall I tell anything at all / To this infant still in a birth-drowse?” It is impossible, of course, for her to tell the infant anything, if she assumes that the infant possesses an intuitive knowledge superior to her own. And yet, and yet . . . she does desire to “tell” the infant and us. But her “telling” cannot be anything more than a half-guilty assertion of her own impotence, and she will ultimately condemn it as wasteful. The honoring of mute nature above man’s ability to make and use language will naturally result in muteness; this muteness will force the individual into death, for the denial of language is a suicidal one and we pay for it with our lives.

Back from the maternity ward, resting after her painful experience, the most “positive” of Plath’s three women is reassured when she looks out her window, at dawn, to see the narcissi opening their white faces in the orchard. And now she feels uncomplex again; she is relieved of the miraculous pain and mystery of childbirth and wants only for herself and for her child “the clear bright colors of the nursery, / The talking ducks, the happy lambs.” She meditates:

I do not will [my baby] to be exceptional.

It is the exception that interests the devil.

..................................

I will him to be common.

It seems to us pitiful that Plath should desire the “common”—should imagine that her loving words for her infant are anything less than a curse. But her conviction that “the exception interests the devil” is very familiar to us, an expression of our era’s basic fear of the intellect; the centuries-old division between “intellect” and “instinct” has resulted in a suicidal refusal to understand that man’s intelligence is instinctive in his species, simply an instinct for survival and for the creation of civilization. Yet the “loving of muteness” we find in Plath is understandable if it is seen as a sensitive revulsion against the world of strife, the ceaseless battle of the letter “I” to make victories and extend its territory. Even the highest intelligence, linked to an ego that is self-despising, will utter curses in the apparent rhythms of love:

. . . right now you are dumb.

And I love your stupidity,

The blind mirror of it. I look in

And find no face but my own. . . .

(“For a Fatherless Son”)

The narcissi of the isolated ego are not really “quick” and “white” as children (see “Among the Narcissi”), but victimized, trampled, and bitter unto death. Plath’s attitude in these gentler poems about her motherhood is, at best, a temporary denial of her truly savage feelings—we are shocked to discover her celebration of hatred in “Lesbos” and similar poems, where she tells us what she really thinks about the “stink of fat and baby crap” that is forcing her into silence, “hate up to my neck.”

The poems of hatred seem to us very contemporary, in their jagged rhythms and surreal yoking together of images, and in their defiant expression of a rejection of love, of motherhood, of men, of the “Good, the True, the Beautiful. . . .” If life really is a struggle for survival, even in a relatively advanced civilization, then very few individuals will win; most will lose (and nearly all women are fated to lose); something is rotten in the very fabric of the universe. All this appears to be contemporary, but Plath’s poems are in fact the clearest, most precise (because most private), expression of an old moral predicament that has become unbearable now. And its poignant genesis is very old indeed:

And now I was sorry that God had made me a man. The beasts, birds, fishes, etc., I blessed their condition, for they had not a sinful nature; they were not to go to hell after death. . . .

(John Bunyan, Grace Abounding)

Male/Female                 “I”/“i”

Nature as Object and as Nightmare

All this involves a variety of responses, though behind them is a single metaphysical belief. The passive, paralyzed, continually surfacing and fading consciousness of Plath in her poems is disturbing to us because it seems to summon forth, to articulate with deadly accuracy, the regressive fantasies we have rejected—and want to forget. The experience of reading her poems deeply is a frightening one: it is like waking to discover one’s adult self, grown to full height, crouched in some long-forgotten childhood hiding place, one’s heart pounding senselessly, all the old rejected transparent beasts and monsters crawling out of the wallpaper. So much for Plato! So much for adulthood! Yet I cannot emphasize strongly enough how valuable the experience of reading Plath can be, for it is a kind of elegant “dreaming-back,” a cathartic experience that not only cleanses us of our personal and cultural desires for regression but explains by way of its deadly accuracy what was wrong with such desires.

The same can be said for the reading of much of contemporary poetry and fiction, fixated as it is upon the childhood fears of annihilation, persecution, the helplessness we have all experienced when we are, for one reason or another, denied an intellectual awareness of what is happening. For instance, the novels of Robbe-Grillet and his imitators emphasize the hypnotized passivity of the “I” in a world of dense and apparently autonomous things; one must never ask “Who manufactured these things? Who brought them home? Who arranged them?”—for such questions destroy the novels. Similarly, the highly praised works of Pynchon, Barthelme, Purdy, Barth (the Barth of the minimal stories, not the earlier Barth), and countless others are verbalized screams and shudders to express the confusion of the ego that believes—perhaps because it has been told so often—itself somehow out of place in the universe, a mechanized creature if foolish enough to venture into Nature; a too-natural creature for the mechanical urban paradise he has inherited but has had no part in designing. The “I” generated by these writers is typically a transparent, near-nameless personality; in the nightmarish works of William Burroughs, the central consciousness does not explore a world so much as submit pathetically to the exploration of himself by a comically hostile world, all cartoons and surprising metamorphoses. Plath’s tentative identity in such poems as “Winter Trees,” “Tulips,” and even the robustly defiant “Daddy” is essentially a child’s consciousness, seizing upon a symbolic particularity (tulips, for instance), and then shrinking from its primary noon, so that the poems—like the fiction we read so often today—demonstrate a dissolution of personality. As Jan B. Gordon has remarked in a review of Winter Trees (Modern Poetry Studies, vol. 2, no. 6, p. 282), Plath’s landscapes become pictorial without any intermediate stage, so that we discover ourselves “in una selva oscura where associations multiply endlessly, but where each tree looks like every other one. . . .” That is the danger risked by those minimal artists of our time whose subject is solely the agony of the locked-in ego: their agonies, like Plath’s landscapes, begin to look alike.

But if we turn from the weak and submissive ego to one more traditionally masculine, activated by the desire to name and to place and to conquer, we discover a consciousness that appears superficially antithetical:

Average reality begins to rot and stink as soon as the act of individual creation ceases to animate a subjectively perceived texture.

(Vladimir Nabokov, from an interview)

The obscure moon lighting an obscure world

Of things that would never be quite expressed,

Where you yourself were never quite yourself

And did not want nor have to be,

Desiring the exhilarations of changes:

The motive for metaphor, shrinking from

The weight of primary noon,

The A B C of being. . . .

(Wallace Stevens, “Motive for Metaphor”)

Where in Plath (and in countless of our contemporaries) the ego suffers dissolution in the face of even the most banal of enemies, in such writers as Nabokov and Stevens the ego emerges as confident and victorious. Yet we see that it is the same metaphysics—the same automatic assumption that there is an “average” reality somehow distinct from us, either superior (and therefore terrifying) or inferior (and therefore saved from “rot” and “stink” only by our godly subjective blessing). This is still the old romantic bias, the opposition between self and object, “I” and non-“I,” man and nature. Nabokov and Stevens have mastered art forms in which language is arranged and rearranged in such a manner as to give pleasure to the artist and his readers, excluding any referent to an available exterior world. Their work frees the ego to devise and defend a sealed-off universe, inhabited chiefly by the self-as-artist, so that it is quite natural to assume that Nabokov’s writing is about the art of writing and Stevens’s poems about the art of writing; that the work gives us the process of creativity that is its chief interest. Again, as in Plath, the work may approach the threshold of an awareness of other inhabitants of the human universe, but it never crosses over because, basically, it cannot guarantee the existence of other human beings: its own autonomy might be threatened or at least questioned. The mirror and never the window is the stimulus for this art that, far from being overwhelmed by nature, turns from it impatiently, in order to construct the claustrophobic Ada or the difficult later poems of Stevens, in which metaphors inhabit metaphors and the “weight of primary noon” is hardly more than a memory. The consciousness discernible behind the works of Nabokov and Stevens is like that totally autonomous ego imagined—but only imagined—by Sartre, which is self-created, self-named, untouched by parental or social or cultural or even biological determinants.

Since so refined an art willfully excludes the emotional context of its own creation, personality is minimal; art is all. It is not surprising that the harsh, hooking images of Plath’s poetry should excite more interest, since Plath is, always honest, perhaps more honest than we would like, and her awareness of a lost cosmos involves her in a perpetual questioning of what nature is, what the Other is, what does it want to do to her, with her, in spite of her . . . ? Nabokov and Stevens receive only the most incidental stimuli from their “average reality” and “obscure world,” but Plath is an identity reduced to desperate statements about her dilemma as a passive witness to a turbulent natural world:

There is no life higher than the grasstops

Or the hearts of sheep, and the wind

Pours by like destiny, bending

Everything in one direction.

...................

The sheep know where they are,

Browsing in their dirty wool-clouds,

Grey as the weather.

The black slots of their pupils take me in.

It is like being mailed into space,

A thin, silly message.

(“Wuthering Heights”)

And, in “Two Campers in Cloud Country,” the poet and her companion experience a kind of comfort up in Rock Lake, Canada, where they “mean so little” and where they will wake “blank-brained as water in the dawn.” If the self is set in opposition to everything that excludes it, then the distant horizons of the wilderness will be as terrible as the kitchen walls and the viciousness of hissing fat. There is never any integrating of the self and its experience, the self and its field of perception. Human consciousness, to Plath, is always an intruder in the natural universe.

This distrust of the intellect in certain poets can result in lyric-meditative poetry of an almost ecstatic beauty, when the poet acknowledges his separateness from nature but seems not to despise or fear it:

O swallows, swallows, poems are not

The point. Finding again the world,

That is the point, where loveliness

Adorns intelligible things

Because the mind’s eye lit the sun.

(Howard Nemerov, “The Blue Swallows”)

Nemerov shares with Stevens and Plath certain basic assumptions: that poems are “not the point” in the natural universe, and that the poet, therefore, is not in the same field of experience as the swallows. Poetry, coming from the mind of man, not from the objects of mind’s perception, is somehow a self-conscious, uneasy activity that must apologize for itself. In this same poem, the title poem of Nemerov’s excellent collection The Blue Swallows, the poet opposes the “real world” and the “spelling mind” that attempts to impose its “unreal relations on the blue swallows.” But despite Nemerov’s tone of acquiescence and affirmation, this is a tragic assumption in that it certainly banishes the poet himself from the world: only if he will give up poetry and “find again the world” has he a chance of being saved. It is a paradox that the poet believes he will honor the objects of his perception—whether swallows, trees, sheep, bees, infants—only by withdrawing from them. Why does it never occur to romantic poets that they exist as much by right in the universe as any other creature, and that their function as poets is a natural function?—that the adult imagination is superior to the imagination of birds and infants?

In art this can lead to silence; in life, to suicide.

The Deadly Mirror: The Risks of Lyric Poetry

Among the lesser-known of Theodore Roethke’s poems is “Lines Upon Leaving a Sanitarium,” in which the poet makes certain sobering, unambiguous statements:

Self-contemplation is a curse

That makes an old confusion worse.

. . . . . . . . . .

The mirror tells some truth, but not

Enough to merit constant thought.

Perhaps it is not just Plath’s position at the end of a once-energetic tradition and the circumstances of her own unhappy life that doomed her and her poetry to premature dissolution, but something in the very nature of lyric poetry itself. What of this curious art form that, when not liberated by music, tends to turn inward upon the singer, folding and folding again upon the poet? If he is immature to begin with, of what can he sing except his own self’s immaturity, and to what task can his imagination put itself except the selection of ingenious images to illustrate this immaturity? Few lyric poets, beginning as shakily as the young Yeats, will continue to write and rewrite, to imagine and reimagine, in a heroic evolution of the self from one kind of personality to another. The risk of lyric poetry is its availability to the precocious imagination, its immediate rewards in terms of technical skill, which then hypnotize the poet into believing that he has achieved all there is to achieve in his life as well as in his art. How quickly these six-inch masterpieces betray their creators! The early successes, predicated upon ruthless self-examination, demand a repeating of their skills even when the original psychological dramas have been outgrown or exhausted, since the lyric poet is instructed to look into his heart and write and, by tradition, he has only his self to write about. But poetry—like all art—demands that its subject be made sacred. Art is the sacralizing of its subject. The problem, then, is a nearly impossible one: How can the poet make himself sacred? Once he has exposed himself, revealed himself, dramatized his fantasies and terrors, what can he do next? Most modern poetry is scornful, cynical, contemptuous of its subject (whether self or others), bitter or amused or coldly detached. It shrinks from the activity of making the world sacred because it can approach the world only through the self-as-subject; and the prospect of glorifying oneself is an impossible one. Therefore, the ironic mode. Therefore, silence. It is rare to encounter a poet like Robert Lowell, who beginning with the stunning virtuosity of his early poems, can move through a period of intense preoccupation with self (Life Studies) into a period of exploratory maneuvers into the personalities of poets quite unlike him (Imitations) and, though a shy, ungregarious man, write plays and participate in their productions (The Old Glory) and move into a kind of existential political-historical poetry in which the self is central but unobtrusive (Notebook). Most lyric poets explore themselves endlessly, like patients involved in a permanent psychoanalysis, reporting back for each session determined, to discover, to drag out of hiding, the essential problem of their personalities—when perhaps there is no problem in their personalities at all, except this insane preoccupation with the self and its moods and doubts, while much of the human universe struggles simply for survival.

If the lyric poet believes—as most people do—that the “I” he inhabits is not integrated with the entire stream of life, let alone with other human beings, he is doomed to a solipsistic and ironic and self-pitying art, in which metaphors for his own narcissistic predicament are snatched from newspaper headlines concerning real atrocities. The small enclosed form of the typical lyric poem seems to preclude an active sanctifying of other people; it is much easier, certainly, for a novelist to investigate and rejoice in the foreign/intimate nature of other people, regardless of his maturity or immaturity. When the novel is not addressed to the same self-analysis as the lyric poem, it demands that one look out the window and not into the mirror; it demands an active involvement with time, place, personality, pasts and futures, and a dramatizing of emotions. The novel allows for a sanctification of any number of people, and if the novelist pits his “I” against others, he will have to construct that “I” with care and love; technical virtuosity is so hard to come by—had Dostoyevsky the virtuosity of Nabokov?—that it begins to seem irrelevant. The novelist’s obligation is to do no less than attempt the sanctification of the world!—while the lyric poet, if he is stuck in a limited emotional cul-de-sac, will circle endlessly inside the bell jar of his own world, and only by tremendous strength is he able to break free.*

The implications of this essay are not that a highly self-conscious art is inferior by nature to a more socially committed art—on the contrary, it is usually the case that the drama of the self is very exciting. What is a risk for the poet is often a delight for his reader; controlled hysteria is more compelling than statements of Spinozan calm. When Thomas Merton cautioned the mystic against writing poems, believing that the “poet” and the “mystic” must never be joined, he knew that the possession of any truth, especially an irrefutable truth, cannot excite drama. It may be a joy to possess wisdom, but how to communicate it? If you see unity beneath the parts, bits, and cogs of the phenomenal world, this does not mean you can make poetry out of it—

All leaves are this leaf,

all petals, this flower

in a lie of abundance.

All fruit is the same,

the trees are only one tree

and one flower sustains all the earth.

(“Unity,” from Manual Metaphysics by Pablo Neruda; trans, by Ben Belitt)

—not Neruda’s best poetry.

By contrast, Plath’s poems convince us when they are most troubled, most murderous, most unfair—as in “Daddy,” where we listen in amazement to a child’s voice cursing and rekilling a dead man, in a distorted rhythmic version of what would be, in an easier world, a nursery tune. An unforgettable poem, surely. The “parts, bits, cogs, the shining multiples” (“Three Women”) constitute hallucinations that involve us because they stir in us memories of our own infantile pasts and do not provoke us into a contemplation of the difficult and less dramatic future of our adulthood. The intensity of “Lesbos” grows out of an adult woman’s denying her adulthood, her motherhood, lashing out spitefully at all objects—babies or husbands or sick kittens—with a strident, self-mocking energy that is quite different from the Plath of the more depressed poems:

And I, love, am a pathological liar,

And my child—look at her, face down on the floor,

Little unstrung puppet, kicking to disappear—

Why, she is schizophrenic, her face red and white, a panic....

You say I should drown my girl.

She’ll cut her throat at ten if she’s mad at two.

The baby smiles, fat snail,

From the polished lozenges of orange linoleum.

You could eat him. He’s a boy. . . .

Though Plath and her friend, another unhappy mother, obviously share the same smoggy hell, they cannot communicate, and Plath ends the poem with her insistence upon their separateness: “Even in your Zen heaven we shan’t meet.”

A woman who despises herself as a woman obviously cannot feel sympathy with any other woman; her passionate love/hate is for the aggressors, the absent husbands or the dead fathers who have absorbed all evil. But because these male figures are not present, whatever revenge is possible must be exacted upon their offspring. The poem “For a Fatherless Son” is more chilling than the cheerful anger of “Daddy” because it is so relentless a curse. And if it hints of Plath’s own impending absence, by way of suicide, it is a remarkably cruel poem indeed. Here the mother tells her son that he will presently be aware of an absence, growing beside him like “a death tree . . . an illusion, / And a sky like a pig’s backside. . . .” The child is temporarily too young to realize that his father has abandoned him, but

one day you may touch what’s wrong

The small skulls, the smashed blue hills, the godawful hush.

This is one of the few poems of Plath’s in which the future is imagined, but it is imagined passively, helplessly; the mother evidently has no intention of rearranging her life and establishing a household free of the father or of his absence. She does not state her hatred for the absent father, but she reveals herself as a victim, bitter and spiteful, and unwilling to spare her son these emotions. Again, mother and child are roughly equivalent; the mother is not an adult, not a participant in the world of “archetypes.”

So unquestioningly is the division between selves accepted, and so relentlessly the pursuit of the solitary, isolated self by way of the form of this poetry, that stasis and ultimate silence seem inevitable. Again, lyric poetry is a risk because it rarely seems to open into a future: the time of lyric poetry is usually the present or the past. “This is a disease I carry home, this is a death,” Plath says in “Three Women,” and, indeed, this characterizes most of her lines. All is brute process, without a future; the past is recalled only with bitterness, a stimulus for present dismay.

When the epic promise of “One’s-self I sing” is mistaken as the singing of a separate self, and not the universal self, the results can only be tragic.

Crossing the Water

Plath understood well the hellish fate of being Swift’s true counterpart, the woman who agrees that the physical side of life is a horror, an ungainly synthesis of flesh and spirit—the disappointment of all the romantic love poems and the nightmare of the monkish soul. Since one cannot make this existence sacred, one may as well dream of “massacres” or, like the Third Voice in the play “Three Women,” express regret that she had not arranged to have an abortion: “I should have murdered this,” she says in a Shakespearean echo, “that murders me.” “Crossing the water”—crossing over into another dimension of experience—cannot be a liberation, an exploration of another being, but only a quiet movement into death for two “black, cut-paper people”:

Cold worlds shake from the oar.

The spirit of blackness is in us, it is in the fishes.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Are you not blinded by such expressionless sirens?

This is the silence of astounded souls.

(“Crossing the Water”)

In most of the poems and very noticeably in The Bell Jar, Plath exhibits a recurring tendency to dehumanize people, to flatten everyone into “cut-paper people,” most of all herself. She performs a kind of reversed magic, a desacralizing ritual for which psychologists have terms—reification, rubricization. Absolute, dramatic boundaries are set up between the “I” and all others, and there is a peculiar refusal to distinguish between those who mean well, those who mean ill, and those who are neutral. Thus, one is shocked to discover in The Bell Jar that Esther, the intelligent young narrator, is as callous toward her mother as the psychiatrist is to her, and that she sets about an awkward seduction with the chilling precision of a machine—hardly aware of the man involved, telling us very little about him as an existing human being. He does not really exist, he has no personality worth mentioning. Only Esther exists.

“Lady Lazarus,” risen once again from the dead, does not expect a sympathetic response from the mob of spectators that crowd in to view her, a mock-phoenix rising from another failed suicide attempt: to Plath there cannot be any connection between people, between the “I” who performs and the crowd that stares. All deaths are separate, and do not evoke human responses. To be really safe, one must be like the young man of “Gigolo,” who has eluded the “bright fish hooks, the smiles of women,” and who will never age because—like Plath’s ideal self—he is a perfect narcissus, self-gratified. He has successfully dehumanized himself.

The cosmos is indeed lost to Plath and her era, and even a tentative exploration of a possible “God” is viewed in the old terms, in the old images of dread and terror. “Mystic” is an interesting poem, on a subject rare indeed in Plath, and seems to indicate that her uneasiness with the “mill of hooks” of the air—“questions without answer”—had led her briefly to thoughts of God. Yet whoever this “God” is, no comfort is possible because the ego cannot experience any interest or desire without being engulfed:

Once one has seen God, what is the remedy?

Once one has been seized up

Without a part left over,

Not a toe, not a finger, and used,

Used utterly. . . .

What is the remedy?

Used: the mystic will be exploited, victimized, hurt. He can expect no liberation or joy from God, but only another form of dehumanizing brutality. Plath has made beautiful poetry out of the paranoia sometimes expressed by a certain kind of emotionally disturbed person who imagines that any relationship with anyone will overwhelm him, engulf and destroy his soul. (For a brilliant poem about the savagery of erotic love between lovers who cannot quite achieve adult autonomy or the generosity of granting humanity to each other, see Ted Hughes’s “Lovesong” in Crow, not inappropriate in this context.)

The dread of being possessed by the Other results in the individual’s failure to distinguish between real and illusory enemies. What must be in the human species a talent for discerning legitimate threats to personal survival evidently never developed in Plath—this helps to explain why she could so gracefully fuse the “evil” of her father with the historical outrages of the Nazis, unashamedly declare herself a “Jew” because the memory of her father persecuted her. In other vivid poems, she senses enemies in tulips (oxygen-sucking tulips?—surely they are human!) or sheep (which possess the unsheeplike power of murdering a human being) or in the true blankness of a mirror, which cannot be seen as recording the natural maturation process of a young woman but must be reinterpreted as drawing the woman toward the “terrible fish” of her future self. Plath’s inability to grade the possibilities of danger is reflected generally in our society and helps to account for peculiar admissions of helplessness and confusion in adults who should be informing their children: if everything unusual or foreign is an evil, if everything new is an evil, then the individual is lost. The political equivalent of childlike paranoia is too obvious to need restating, but we have a cultural equivalent as well that seems to pass unnoticed. Surely the sinister immorality of films like A Clockwork Orange (though not the original English version of the Burgess novel), lies in their excited focus upon small, isolated, glamorized acts of violence by nonrepresentative individuals, so that the unfathomable violence of governments is totally ignored or misapprehended. Delmore Schwartz said that even the paranoid has enemies. Indeed he has enemies, but paranoia cannot allow us to distinguish them from friends.

In the summer of 1972 I attended a dramatic reading of Plath’s “Three Women,” given by three actresses as part of the International Poetry Conference in London. The reading was done in a crowded room, and unfortunately the highly professional performance was repeatedly interrupted by a baby’s crying from another part of the building. Here was—quite accidentally—a powerful and perhaps even poetic counterpoint to Plath’s moving poem. For there, in the baby’s cries from another room, was what Plath had left out: the reason for the maternity ward, the reason for childbirth and suffering and motherhood and poetry itself.

What may come to seem obvious to people in the future—that unique personality does not necessitate isolation, that the “I” of the poet belongs as naturally in the universe as any other aspect of its fluid totality, above all that this “I” exists in a field of living spirit of which it is one aspect—was tragically unknown to Plath, as it has been unknown or denied many. Hopefully, a world of totality awaits us, not a played-out world of fragments; but Sylvia Plath acted out a tragically isolated existence, synthesizing for her survivors so many of the sorrows of that dying age—romanticism in its death throes, the self’s ship, Ariel, prematurely drowned.

It is so beautiful, to have no attachments!

I am solitary as grass. What is it I miss?

Shall I ever find it, whatever it is?

(“Three Women”)

poetry

THE COLOSSUS

ARIEL

CROSSING THE WATER: TRANSITIONAL POEMS

WINTERTREES

ARIEL: THE RESTORED EDITION

prose

THE BELL JAR

JOHNNY PANIC AND THE BIBLE OF DREAMS: SHORT STORIES,

PROSE, AND DIARY EXCERPTS

THE UNABRIDGED JOURNALS OF SYLVIA PLATH

(edited by Karen V. Kukil)

letters

LETTERS HOME: CORRESPONDENCE, 1950-1963

(selected and edited, with commentary by Aurelia Schober Plath)

for children

THE BED BOOK

THE ITT-DOESN’T-MATTER SUIT

MRS. CHERRY’S KITCHEN

Credits

Cover design by Adam Johnson

Cover photograph © Bettmann/CORBIS

Copyright

“Rhyme,” “Black Pine Tree in an Orange Light,” “Incommunicado,” and “Morning in the Hospital Solarium” originally appeared in the American Poetry Review.

“Walking in Winter,” “Barren Woman,” “Perseus,” and “Song for a Summer’s Day” originally appeared in the New York Times Book Review.

P.S.™ is a trademark of HarperCollins Publishers.

THE COLLECTED POEMS. Poems copyright © 1960, 1965, 1971, 1981 by the Estate of Sylvia Flath. Editorial material copyright © 1981 by Ted Hughes. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

First Harper Perennial edition published 1992.

First Harper Perennial Modern Classics edition published 2008.

The Library of Congress has catalogued the previous edition as follows:

Plath, Sylvia.

The collected poems.

Includes index.

ISBN 0-06-013369-4

ISBN 0-06-090900-5 (pbk.)

I. Hughes, Ted, 1980-1998.II. Title.

PS3566.L27A17 1981811’.5475-25057

AACR2

EPub Edition September 2016 ISBN 9780062669452

ISBN 978-0-06-155889-4 (pbk.)

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* Since completing this essay I have come upon Roy Fuller's complex consideration of Nietzschean "tragedy" and its relationship to the literature of the present day, "Professors and Gods," in The Times Literary Supplement, March 9, 1973. He acknowledges that poetry in our time has lost much to the novel, but that it need not surrender entirely what the art of the novel forces upon the novelist—"a viewpoint not always his own and a regard for the situation of others." Fuller's distinction between the dramatized "tragedy" of the individual and the higher, more formal, and far more idealistic "tragedy" of the community is an important one, helping to explain why tragedy as an art form is so difficult and, in execution, so often disappointing in our time.