Happy Birthday to Sylvia Plath... and to me!!
Today, I will share with you my favorite Sylvia Plath poem:
Today, I will share with you my favorite Sylvia Plath poem:
Elm
BY SYLVIA PLATH
(For Ruth Fainlight)
I know the bottom, she says. I know it with my great tap root:
It is what you fear.
I do not fear it: I have been there.
Is it the sea you hear in me,
Its dissatisfactions?
Or the voice of nothing, that was your madness?
Love is a shadow.
How you lie and cry after it
Listen: these are its hooves: it has gone off, like a horse.
All night I shall gallop thus, impetuously,
Till your head is a stone, your pillow a little turf,
Echoing, echoing.
Or shall I bring you the sound of poisons?
This is rain now, this big hush.
And this is the fruit of it: tin-white, like arsenic.
I have suffered the atrocity of sunsets.
Scorched to the root
My red filaments burn and stand, a hand of wires.
Now I break up in pieces that fly about like clubs.
A wind of such violence
Will tolerate no bystanding: I must shriek.
The moon, also, is merciless: she would drag me
Cruelly, being barren.
Her radiance scathes me. Or perhaps I have caught her.
I let her go. I let her go
Diminished and flat, as after radical surgery.
How your bad dreams possess and endow me.
I am inhabited by a cry.
Nightly it flaps out
Looking, with its hooks, for something to love.
I am terrified by this dark thing
That sleeps in me;
All day I feel its soft, feathery turnings, its malignity.
Clouds pass and disperse.
Are those the faces of love, those pale irretrievables?
Is it for such I agitate my heart?
I am incapable of more knowledge.
What is this, this face
So murderous in its strangle of branches?——
Its snaky acids hiss.
It petrifies the will. These are the isolate, slow faults
That kill, that kill, that kill.
I will also share with you this totally bad arse song by Belle & Sebastian. I will be gone for awhile... No need to worry about me... I will be back...
Until next time...
XOXOXO
Anastasia
Come, and steal my thoughts away
Thief of my identity
I was holding on to decency, reality
Come, and take me for a while
Up to your abundant pace
I’ll be your sidecar if you want to race
Want to race
Put your hand on mine
And take me from this tired ride
Take me from this early night
From the sea and rain and countryside
If you talk to me then soon
I’ll be your accomplice in words
And we will talk only in verse
Talk only in verse
I will leave the ones I love
Leave them for the years to come
Even though I may be doing wrong, doing wrong
I will follow in your steps
Walk out to the station cold
Buy a ticket and and then slowly go, slowly go
In this place and time
Easy is the first escape
I got money I need no disguise
I’m a citizen and city wise
In this time and place
There is no one who will shoot you down
No one who will take a girl
And tell her she can’t have the world
You constantly struggle for self improvement
You have the ability to analyse and solve any problem
You are heading in the right direction
Your mind is creative, original and alert
Boy, you don’t know what you want
It isn't what you think it is
All the dreams, and guilt and loneliness, loneliness
Boy, if we were to be friends
Subtle is the art required
To draw the evil from this lonely pyre, lonely pyre
Take this hand from me
And guide me round your tools of work
Fashion me into your junior clerk
Let me live in shadows of your words
And when things get tough for you
As they did when you came up through the ranks
You can borrow from my faith
From my faith
Take this hand from me
And guide me round your tools of work
Fashion me into your junior clerk
Let me live in shadows of your words
And when things get tough for you
As they did when you came up through the ranks
You can borrow from my faith
From my faith [x36]
