Bibliography: Blue light clear atoms Ariel, published by Harper & Row, 1966 The Bell Jar (1963) Sylvia Plath Sylvia Plath was born in Boston in 1932. She grew up in a comfortably middle-class style and attended Smith College. She suffered a breakdown at the end of her junior year of college, but recovered well enough to return and excel during her senior year, receiving various prizes and graduating summa cum laude. In 1955, having been awarded a Fulbright scholarship, she began two years at Cambridge University. There she met and married the British poet Ted Hughes and settled in England, bearing two children.
Her first book of poems, The Colossus (1960), demonstrated her precocious talent, but was far more conventional than the work that followed. Having studied with Robert Lowell in 1959 and been influenced by the “confessional” style of his collection Life Studies, she embarked on the new work that made her posthumous reputation as a major poet. A terrifying record of her encroaching mental illness, the poems that were collected after her suicide (at age 31) in 1963 in the volumes Ariel, Crossing the Water, and Winter Trees are graphically macabre, hallucinatory in their imagery, but full of ironic wit, technical brilliance, and tremendous emotional power. Her Selected Poems were published by Ted Hughes in 1985. Morning Song Sylvia Plath Love set you going like a fat gold watch.
The midwife slapped your foot soles, 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.
The Essay on Plath Sylvia
Even in her earlier poems, Sylvia Plath displays an unhealthy preoccupation with sex, madness, morbidity and obscurity. There seem to be a number of common themes running through all of Plaths poems, which encapsulate her personal attitudes and feelings of life at the time she wrote them. Of these themes, the most prevalent are: sex, madness, morbidity and obscurity. The whole concept of sex to ...
We stand round blankly as walls. I’m no more your mother Tha 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. Nick and the Candlestick by Sylvia Plath 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 Victorian a. 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. 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 in 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 halley 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.
The Essay on Love Makes Our Hearts Gentle
Love is an intense affection for another person based on personal or family ties, a strong affection for or attachment to another person based on regard or shared experiences or interests. Love is something that builds from friendship. Clearly love is not restricted to sexual relationships, but can also be between two extremely close friends. They will always be there for each other, and can share ...
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 all 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.
You ” re Clown like, happiest on your hands, Feet to the stars, and moon-skilled, 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 Fool’s Day, O high-riser, my little loaf. Vague as fog and looked for like mail. Farther off than Australia.
Bent-backed Atlas, our travelled 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.
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. Grey 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.
