  Poetry
This week: Sylvia Plath Edited by: Stormy Lady  
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Mad Girl's Love Song
"I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead;
I lift my lids and all is born again.
(I think I made you up inside my head.)
The stars go waltzing out in blue and red,
And arbitrary blackness gallops in:
I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead.
I dreamed that you bewitched me into bed
And sung me moon-struck, kissed me quite insane.
(I think I made you up inside my head.)
God topples from the sky, hell's fires fade:
Exit seraphim and Satan's men:
I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead.
I fancied you'd return the way you said,
But I grow old and I forget your name.
(I think I made you up inside my head.)
I should have loved a thunder bird instead;
At least when spring comes they roar back again.
I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead.
(I think I made you up inside my head.)"
On October 27, 1932 Sylvia Plath was born in Jamaica Plain, Massachusetts. Sylvia's father battled a lengthy illness. Thinking it was cancer he did not seek medical help. When he finally did get medical help he had advanced diabetes . At the end of his life his leg was amputation in hopes to help save his life but it wasn't enough. Otto died shortly after Sylvia's 8th birthday.
Sylvia was a great student and stayed at the top of her class. One would think with her high academic achievements she would have been happy, but that was not the case. She hid her inner doubts and feared someone would find out that the person she pretended to be was not the person she was on the inside. Sylvia worked hard to get accepted into Frank O'Connor's creative writing course at Harvard and when she wasn't she became extremely depressed and withdrawn. This state of mind left her unable to deal with her life any longer and on August 24, 1952 she attempted suicide. She was institutionalized for the next few months in Maclean Hospital.
Sylvia started at Newham College at Cambridge University in 1955. She had several meaningless relationships before she met Ted Hughes on February 25, 1956. They were married in London four months later on June 16th. Their wedding was described later in "A Pink Wool Knitted Dress" a poem written by Ted Hughes.
Upon finishing her studies at Cambridge in 1975, Sylvia was approached about a teaching job at Smith College. She was excited about the chance to teach something that she was so passionate about. Her fears soon took over and after just one year of teaching she felt that she had let everyone down and didn't come back to teach again. She took an easier job as a receptionist at Massachusetts General Hospital. It was there she began an affair with Ruth Boucher.
Sylvia and Ted moved back to England In 1959. Their daughter Frieda Rebecca was born on April 1, 1960. It was during this time Sylvia signed a contract to publish "The Colossus" which was released in October 1960. To the rest of the world Sylvia appeared to be organized and on top of everything. Inside her demons had returned. She felt exhausted and once again afraid that she will let down her guard and someone would find out. She wanted it all and that made her press on. Writing was her outlet and like so many others before was her curse too.
Four months after her book was published, February 1961, Sylvia had a miscarriage. This left her lost in a state of depression once again. Sylvia wrote about it all in a poem entitled "Parliament Hill Fields." Later that year her family moved to a farm, this left Sylvia felling more isolated than ever. It seemed that her marriage was starting to show the strain it was under. On January 17, 1962 their son Nicholas Farrar was born. Six months later Sylvia and Ted separated after she learned of an affair Ted was having. Sylvia wrote as in outlet and in the following months she wrote at least 26 poems found in "Ariel".
Sylvia moved her children into an apartment in London in December of 1962. The apartment was at 23 Fitzroy Road, that had once been home to William Bulter Yeats. One month later, January 1963, "The Bell Jar" was published. It was only a few weeks later that the battle Sylvia had been fighting silently for years came to an end. Sylvia took her own life on February 11, 1963.
Tulips
By Sylvia Plath
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.
Mirror
By Sylvia Plath
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 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.
Thank you all!
Stormy Lady
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The winners of "Stormy's poetry newsletter & contest" [ASR] are:
Poets and Paupers
The stars shine in the firmament;
each bearing a name:
Shakespeare, Percy, Frost, Whitman, Poe ...
and the newest, Angelou.
These mystic monarchs of words
inspire, soothe, entertain, and
share visions of worlds
seen only through their eyes.
Their poetic creations
on canvas
or hewn from granite
would be on altars of gold.
Instead, they are engraved
in the hearts,
on the souls,
of those who
have shared their written words,
have tasted
the sweetness
the bitterness
of their swirling emotions,
have glimpsed the fury of their visions,
have traveled within their realms.
I stare at the page and,
raising my pen,
I trace the ethereal images
of their brightness.
The ink flows and dries
as I seek to find
my own light.
I do not seek,
nor shall a single copper
come to my purse and yet ...
I am rich from the inheritance
they have been bequeathed,
asking only my fidelity
in return.
Long live the monarchs
Released from poet's mental cage,
a raucous flock of eager words
descends upon the waiting page
to capture sound of morning birds,
and, thus, the written narrative
becomes a gift for him to give.
As long as ink keeps flowing down
that swirling stream of consciousness,
his pen will spout verb and noun,
to be arranged with great finesse,
until artistic fury dries
and his Muse becomes paralyzed.
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Poetry: January 31, 2018 Issue [#8737]
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