slylvia plath Flashcards
morning song
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. We stand round blankly as walls.
I’m no more your mother
Than the cloud that distils 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
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 is 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.
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 kindness, 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.
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 its 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 color less.Colorless.
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 nothing, I am the owner.
Sylvia Plath - biography
~Born October 27, 1932 in Boston
~1936 moved to Winthrop, Massachusetts, close to the ocean which fascinated Sylvia
~during this time her father became very sick however he refused treatment resulting in his death in 1940. this had many consequences for Plath, she said “ I will never speak to god again “
~her first poem was published when she was 8 in Boston’s newspapers
~ entered Bradford High School in 1946
~
Sylvia Plath - biography (part 2 )
~graduated in 1950 first in her class and won a full scholarship to Smith College
~ in august 1950, “seventeen” magazine published her short story
~in August 1952 she began to show physical signs of depression
~ failure to secure a place on a summer writing course ran by Frank O’Connor in Harvard in 1953 precipitated a crisis. she was then put on a course of electro-convulsive shock treatments
~August 24, 1953 she attempts suicide, she crawled into a dark dirty space underneath her mothers house, where she swallowed pills . Plath was missing for 3 days.
Sylvia Plath - biography ( part 3)
~she spent 5 months at a private hospital which was paid for by Mrs Olive Higgins Pouty (American novelist and poet ), a generous benefactor of Plath.
~in 1954, Plath won several poetry contests at Smith College.
~she won a scholarship to Cambridge university, England
~
morning song analysis
(verse 1 and 2)
Love set you going like a fat gold watch. (neg opening line with a simile)
The midwife slapped your foot soles, and your bald cry ( “bald= raw emotion)
took its place among the elements.
Our voices echo, magnifying your arrival. New statue.
In a drafty museum, your nakedness (nakedness=simile)
shadows our safety. We stand round blankly as walls.( bizarre simile - frantic-childbirth)
morning song
verse 3 + 4
I’m no more your mother
Than the cloud that distils 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.
