Selected Poems of Sylvia Plath Read Online Free PDF Page B

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. 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 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.

Ariel
    Stasis in darkness.
    Then the substanceless blue
    Pour of tor and distances.
    God’s lioness,
    How one we grow,
    Pivot of heels and knees! – The furrow
    Splits and passes, sister to
    The brown arc
    Of the neck I cannot catch,
    Nigger-eye
    Berries cast dark
    Hooks –
    Black sweet blood mouthfuls,
    Shadows.
    Something else
    Hauls me through air –
    Thighs, hair;
    Flakes from my heels.
    White
    Godiva, I unpeel –
    Dead hands, dead stringencies.
    And now I
    Foam to wheat, a glitter of seas.
    The child’s cry

    Melts in the wall.
    And I
    Am the arrow,
    The dew that flies
    Suicidal, at one with the drive
    Into the red
    Eye, the cauldron of morning.

Poppies in October
    Even the sun-clouds this morning cannot manage such skirts.
    Nor the woman in the ambulance
    Whose red heart blooms through her coat so astoundingly –
    A gift, a love gift
    Utterly unasked for
    By a sky
    Palely and flamily
    Igniting itscarbon monoxides, by eyes
    Dulled to a halt under bowlers.
    O my God, what am I
    That these late mouths should cry open
    In a forest of frost, in a dawn of cornflowers.

Nick and the Candlestick
    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 Victoriana.
    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.

Letter in November
    Love, the world
    Suddenly turns, turns color. The streetlight
    Splits through the rat’s-tail
    Pods of the laburnum at nine in the morning.
    It is the Arctic,
    This little black
    Circle, with its tawn silk grasses – babies’ hair.
    There is a green in the air,
    Soft, delectable.
    It cushions me lovingly.
    I am flushed and warm.
    I think I may be enormous,
    I am so stupidly happy,
    My wellingtons
    Squelching and squelching through the beautiful red.
    This is my property.
    Two times a day
    I pace it, sniffing
    The barbarous holly with its viridian
    Scallops, pure iron,
    And the wall of old corpses.
    I love them.
    I love them like history.
    The apples are golden,
    Imagine it –

    My seventy trees
    Holding their gold-ruddy balls
    In a thick gray death-soup,
    Their million
    Gold leaves metal and breathless.
    O love, O celibate.
    Nobody but me
    Walks the waist-high wet.
    The irreplaceable
    Golds bleed and deepen, the mouths of Thermopylae.

Death & Co.
    Two, of