Today's poet

[Alf]

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

[Mossdog]

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:

[Mossdog]

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.

[Alf]

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

[Alf]

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

[Sunbeam Alpine]

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

[Mossdog]

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

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?

[freckle]

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?

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....

[freckle]

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

absolutely adore this poem never tire of it....it really resonates with me...thanks for posting barry

[Alf]

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

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.