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I have not looked this up but it does "suggest" she is pregnant :D
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.
Sylvia Plath
"Re-enters the water by melting." great line :cool: I always thought Hughes poems about animals were his best.
An Otter (I)
Underwater eyes, an eel's
Oil of water body, neither fish nor beast is the otter:
Four-legged yet water-gifted, to outfish fish;
With webbed feet and long ruddering tail
And a round head like an old tomcat.
Brings the legend of himself
From before wars or burials, in spite of hounds and vermin-poles;
Does not take root like the badger. Wanders, cries;
Gallops along land he no longer belongs to;
Re-enters the water by melting.
Of neither water nor land. Seeking
Some world lost when first he dived, that he cannot come at since,
Takes his changed body into the holes of lakes;
As if blind, cleaves the stream's push till he licks
The pebbles of the source; from sea
To sea crosses in three nights
Like a king in hiding. Crying to the old shape of the starlit land,
Over sunken farms where the bats go round,
Without answer. Till light and birdsong come
Walloping up roads with the milk wagon.
Ted Hughes
One of the best poems I have ever heard, I though JCC was quite thought provoking, but this is grown up JCC.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2013...ony-harrison-v
Totally agree :thumbup:Quote:
Originally Posted by Dr H Tool
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.
Sylvia Plath
Ahhhh.....a bit of our Sylvia to refresh the nostrils and raise our spirits for the week ahead!
thanks for reviving the thread with something so lively! ;-) like a bit of plath as you knowQuote:
Originally Posted by Mossdog
For N & K
Otis on vinyl
carries from
the barn. Blessed
is this day. The camera
captures us youthful
& triumphant.
Blessed be this day,
a celebration
of friends coming
together. Last night,
surrounded by
those I love, I had wanted
to read Berrigan's
"Words For Love,"
but I didn't want to say
the heart breaks, even though I know
it's true & the breaking
can be a good thing
sometimes, like the way
my heart shatters
a little each time
I think of my friends
& how lucky in life
I've been to get
to know them, to have
had the time to laugh &
drink & dance & to argue
& feel hurt too.
How can one possibly
say everything
that should be said?
These feelings
just feelings, not
defined by words.
To be overwhelmed,
caught in a whirlwind
& up to one's
ankles in the creek
as lightning bugs
polka-dot the sky
& Otis, again Otis,
always Otis in my
memory, provides
the soundtrack.
Not every day
can be a good day
but this is one
of them, one
of the best days.
Gina Myers
Quote:
Originally Posted by Alf
Lovely choice Alf i love that line about the pain involved in loving and appreciating good friends beautiful
Its hard to get online copies of my favourite Bukowski poems so I have had to resort to pasting this You tube version...i love the rawness of his verse which reminds me of Plath, imagine if they had got together ...the fireworks!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Flg3SL0GYVU
His poems always seems even better when he is reading them :cool:Quote:
Originally Posted by freckle
Now there's a face that the phrase "lived in" really applies to :D
Fell poets have style :rolleyes:
I will be in Heptonstall on Sunday for the fell race and I always find time to visit the churchyard when I am there. I love this one especially the way it turns from light to dark. I was reading somewhere that her really strong poetry only appeared after her electric shock treatment. I don't know how true that is but there is definitely a shock in this one. It was last posted in 2010 by freckle so its due for a run out again.
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 name 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.
Sylvia Plath
Great choice Alf :thumbup:Quote:
Originally Posted by Alf
The Greengrocer's Love Song
Do you carrot all for me?
My heart beets for you.
With your turnip nose
And radish face
You are a peach.
If we cantaeloupe
Lettuce marry.
Weed make a swell pear.
Anon
I know, I know it appleing really, I need to orange a reading from a different anthology...but it still makes me smile.
I popped into the churchyard at Heptonstall today after I had registered for the fell race. There were chaffinches playing over the churchyard wall and a robin looking out at the rows of stones. It has always amazed me that her family had not put proper surround stones round her grave. Apart from a dirty weathered headstone its just flat rocks that other people have lined the outside of the grave with. It gets cleared up periodically by a person or persons unknown. There were only three pens there today compared with the last time I visited it when there were dozens. Snowdrops and a single daffodil had bloomed on the grave and quickly been flattened by a recent downpour. There were some dwarf daffodils in the centre of the grave which have withstood the weather better. The name on the headstone is SYLVIA PLATH HUGHES and the HUGHES part doesn't look like it has been defaced recently.
From 'The Birthday Letters' collection.
THE BLUE FLANNEL SUIT
I had let it all grow. I had supposed
It was all OK. Your life
Was a liner I voyaged in.
Costly education had fitted you out.
Financiers and committees and consultants
Effaced themselves in the gleam of your finish.
You trembled with the new life of those engines.
That first morning,
Before your first class at College, you sat there
Sipping coffee. Now I know, as I did not,
What eyes waited at the back of the class
To check your first professional performance
Against their expectations. What assessors
Waited to see you justify the cost
And redeem their gamble. What a furnace
Of eyes waited to prove your metal. I watched
The strange dummy stiffness, the misery,
Of your blue flannel suit, its straitjacket, ugly
Half-approximation to your idea
Of the properties you hoped to ease into,
And your horror in it. And the tanned
Almost green undertinge of your face
Shrunk to its wick, your scar lumpish, your plaited
Head pathetically tiny.
You waited,
Knowing yourself helpless in the tweezers
Of the life that judges you, and I saw
The flayed nerve, the unhealable face-wound
Which was all you had for courage.
I saw that what you gripped, as you sipped,
Were terrors that killed you once already.
Now I see, I saw, sitting, the lonely
Girl who was going to die.
That blue suit,
A mad, execution uniform,
Survived your sentence. But then I sat, stilled,
Unable to fathom what stilled you
As I looked at you, as I am stilled
Permanently now, permanently
Bending so briefly at your open coffin.
Ted Hughes
So Many Summers
Beside one loch, a hind’s neat skeleton
Beside another, a boat pulled high and dry:
Two neat geometries drawn in the weather:
Two things already dead and still to die.
I passed them every summer, rod in hand,
Skirting the bright blue or the spitting gray,
And, every summer, saw how the bleached timbers
Gaped wider and the neat ribs fell away.
Time adds one malice to another one -
Now you’d look very close before you knew
If it’s the boat that ran, the hind went sailing.
So many summers, and I have lived them too.
Norman MacCaig
The Peace of Wild Things
When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children's lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake rests
in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought of grief.
I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.
Wendell Berry
That poem always causes me to reel with such confused emotions. With what? The power of words to shape and define our lives, the power of poetry?Quote:
Originally Posted by Alf
I too feel mixed emotions ...i respect plaths poetry but i think hughes the better poet and i feel that he had to suffer an awful lot of flak on account of her mental health difficulties.....CONTROVERSIAL view perhaps and i do not want to appear to be simplifying the situation as ther was a dialetic between them but i think he has all too often been demonised....Quote:
Originally Posted by Mossdog
absolutely adore this poem never tire of it....it really resonates with me...thanks for posting barryQuote:
Originally Posted by Sunbeam Alpine
Lovely poem that SA and something which resonates with me as well and probably most fell runners and people who love the outdoors I would think. :cool:Quote:
Originally Posted by Sunbeam Alpine
I am in the Plath camp on this one freckle. I think you are right about Hughes poetry being stronger taken as a whole but who knows what she would have produced had she lived and managed her depression?Quote:
Originally Posted by freckle
The 'Birthday letters' are very good but the passage of time before he published them has tarnished them in my eyes. He knew her state of mind when he cheated on her and must have known the dangers to her and her children as well. He was just as much "the owl's talons clenching my heart" as any depression was. I thought the Birthday letters was an old maudlin man full of self-pity still denying his responsibility in her death.
Fully agree. And look what else I've found by him...Quote:
Originally Posted by Alf
What We Need Is Here
Geese appear high over us,
pass, and the sky closes. Abandon,
as in love or sleep, holds
them to their way, clear
in the ancient faith: what we need
is here. And we pray, not
for new earth or heaven, but to be
quiet in heart, and in eye,
clear. What we need is here.
Wendell Berry
Personally I find I'm not in any camp. These were just two extremely talented, special people whose time together was immensely emotionally explosive, ultimately febrile and sadly, eventually destructive (for both). But I'm not sure that being judgemental or side taking is particularly helpful or necessary. We can all enjoy and also all suffer the magnificence of their crafted words. They were, as we all are, simply subject to their natures and the random exigencies of chance and circumstance. These were not people with evil intent (so few of us really are). Sure they took personal decisions and yes some might say they got these wrong - but that's life, literally that chaotic Apollonian and Dionysian fusion, but, hey, at least that way it's never ever boring and makes for a very rich narrative!!!Quote:
Originally Posted by Alf
THE QUIET WORLD
By Jeffrey McDaniel
In an effort to get people to look
into each other’s eyes more,
and also to appease the mutes,
the government has decided
to allot each person exactly one hundred
and sixty-seven words, per day.
When the phone rings, I put it to my ear
without saying hello. In the restaurant
I point at chicken noodle soup.
I am adjusting well to the new way.
Late at night, I call my long distance lover,
proudly say I only used fifty-nine today.
I saved the rest for you.
When she doesn’t respond,
I know she’s used up all her words,
so I slowly whisper I love you
thirty-two and a third times.
After that, we just sit on the line
and listen to each other breathe.
Jeffrey McDaniel
Quote:
Originally Posted by Mossdog
Some forumites :o would find 167 words a bit restrictive :rolleyes: Thanks for posting Mossy it made me look at some of his other stuff. He has a very original style.
The Forgiveness Parade
There's nothing like a full moon reflected in the eyes of a blind man
using a telescope to stir a bowl of Russian alphabet soup
for the cosmonauts who orbited the shadow of Jupiter
and are landing in an ocean of tears
shed by cold blooded murderers who miss their mothers convulsively
in their prison cells being wheeled caravan-style down Oswald Boulevard
as part of the Forgiveness Parade where relatives of the victims
stand quietly holding banners like 'Apology Accepted' as the vandals
stumble past in shackles followed by the hijackers and the pickpockets who
march single file up the fire escape of a skyscraper built by arsonists.
Jeffrey McDaniel
I know its not December but it feels like it at the moment and the twigs of the Birches in my garden still imprint the sky.
The Prospect
The twigs of the birch imprint the December sky
Like branching veins upon a thin old hand;
I think of summer-time, yes, of last July,
When she was beneath them, greeting a gathered band
Of the urban and bland.
Iced airs wheeze through the skeletoned hedge from the north,
With steady snores, and a numbing that threatens snow,
And skaters pass; and merry boys go forth
To look for slides. But well, well do I know
Whither I would go!
Thomas Hardy
A good point Alf who knows what might have been produced....Mossy I am not taking sides I just prefer his poetry but perhaps won't look at it in the same way after Alf's comments!Quote:
Originally Posted by Alf
this is beautiful especially the last few linesQuote:
Originally Posted by Mossdog
more on a theme of quietness...
A QUIET JOY – Yehuda Amichai
I’m standing in a place where I once loved.
The rain is falling. The rain is my home.
I think words of longing: a landscape
out to the very edge of what’s possible.
I remember you waving your hand
as if wiping mist from the windowpane,
and your face, as if enlarged
from an old blurred photo.
Once I committed a terrible wrong
to myself and others.
But the world is beautifully made for doing good
and for resting, like a park bench.
And late in life I discovered
a quiet joy
like a serious disease that’s discovered too late:
just a little time left now for quiet joy.
I like the idea of using the world as a park bench :DQuote:
Originally Posted by freckle
Boy at the Window
Seeing the snowman standing all alone
In dusk and cold is more than he can bear.
The small boy weeps to hear the wind prepare
A night of gnashings and enormous moan.
His tearful sight can hardly reach to where
The pale-faced figure with bitumen eyes
Returns him such a God-forsaken stare
As outcast Adam gave to paradise.
The man of snow is, nonetheless, content,
Having no wish to go inside and die.
Still, he is moved to see the youngster cry.
Though frozen water is his element,
He melts enough to drop from one soft eye
A trickle of the purest rain, a tear
For the child at the bright pane surrounded by
Such warmth, such light, such love, and so much fear.
Richard Wilbur
beautiful imagery...bitumen eyes or lumps of coal I guess? does make the otherwise jolly snowman sound embittered but "moved" by the little boy...charmingQuote:
Originally Posted by Alf
I liked the wilbur poem so much i looked up some more of his stuff...liked this one...
Love Calls Us to the Things of This World
Richard Wilbur
The eyes open to a cry of pulleys,
And spirited from sleep, the astounded soul
Hangs for a moment bodiless and simple
As false dawn.
Outside the open window
The morning air is all awash with angels.
Some are in bed-sheets, some are in blouses,
Some are in smocks: but truly there they are.
Now they are rising together in calm swells
Of halcyon feeling, filling whatever they wear
With the deep joy of their impersonal breathing;
Now they are flying in place, conveying
The terrible speed of their omnipresence, moving
And staying like white water; and now of a sudden
They swoon down into so rapt a quiet
That nobody seems to be there.
The soul shrinks
From all that is about to remember,
From the punctual rape of every blessed day,
And cries,
Oh, let there be nothing on earth but laundry,
Nothing but rosy hands in the rising steam
And clear dances done in the sight of heaven.''
Yet, as the sun acknowledges
With a warm look the world's hunks and colors,
The soul descends once more in bitter love
To accept the waking body, saying now
In a changed voice as the man yawns and rises,
Bring them down from their ruddy gallows;
Let there be clean linen for the backs of thieves;
Let lovers go fresh and sweet to be undone,
And the heaviest nuns walk in a pure floating
Of dark habits,
keeping their difficult balance.
I suppose "mincing little fops" might be considered politically incorrect these days but coming from a black female bi-sexual political activist at the turn of the 19/20th century she can probably get away with it :rolleyes::D
Sonnet
I had no thought of violets of late,
The wild, shy kind that spring beneath your feet
In wistful April days, when lovers mate
And wander through the fields in raptures sweet.
The thought of violets meant florists' shops,
And bows and pins, and perfumed papers fine;
And garish lights, and mincing little fops
And cabarets and songs, and deadening wine.
So far from sweet real things my thoughts had strayed,
I had forgot wide fields, and clear brown streams;
The perfect loveliness that God has made,--
Wild violets shy and Heaven-mounting dreams.
And now--unwittingly, you've made me dream
Of violets, and my soul's forgotten gleam.
Alice Dunbar-Nelson
how cool...........Quote:
Originally Posted by Alf
Sweet voice of solitude,the speaking of Spring,
A streamlet of song to our hearts did bring,
Cheerful measured by each passing day,
Yet lost amid Winter's misguided way,
Oh! Thrush,in your beautiful seconds of glory,
Creating sweet music 'mid frosts deep and hoary-
Undaunted in coldness,clear
Throated in rhyme,
It is you we remember as
March falls to time.
thats really lovely..full of hope...did you pen it?Quote:
Originally Posted by Masham Man
No, found it in our local paper and loved it too. Thought it perfectly descibes the season at the mo. A Song Thrush starts to sing most mornings outside my house but soon gives up, totally confused with this cold weather I think.Quote:
Originally Posted by freckle
Just think another 10 days and Swallows could be here!
that is indeed a nice thought MMQuote:
Originally Posted by Masham Man
The force that through the green fuse drives the flower
The force that through the green fuse drives the flower
Drives my green age; that blasts the roots of trees
Is my destroyer.
And I am dumb to tell the crooked rose
My youth is bent by the same wintry fever.
The force that drives the water through the rocks
Drives my red blood; that dries the mouthing streams
Turns mine to wax.
And I am dumb to mouth unto my veins
How at the mountain spring the same mouth sucks.
The hand that whirls the water in the pool
Stirs the quicksand; that ropes the blowing wind
Hauls my shroud sail.
And I am dumb to tell the hanging man
How of my clay is made the hangman's lime.
The lips of time leech to the fountain head;
Love drips and gathers, but the fallen blood
Shall calm her sores.
And I am dumb to tell a weather's wind
How time has ticked a heaven round the stars.
And I am dumb to tell the lover's tomb
How at my sheet goes the same crooked worm.
Dylan Thomas