I read The Bell Jar for the first time...

     I read Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar last night, I've never read it before. Plath's early death took a literary great away from this world. I wonder, if she had been born at a later date, if she would still be here, society being more willing to recognize the emotional needs tied to the literary genius.

The Moon and the Yew Tree

Sylvia Plath            

 This is the light of the mind, cold and planetary

The trees of the mind are black. The light is blue.
The grasses unload their griefs on my feet as if I were God
Prickling my ankles and murmuring of their humility
Fumy, spiritous mists inhabit this place.
Separated from my house by a row of headstones.
I simply cannot see where there is to get to.

 The moon is no door. It is a face in its own right,

White as a knuckle and terribly upset.

It drags the sea after it like a dark crime; it is quiet
With the O-gape of complete despair. I live here.
Twice on Sunday, the bells startle the sky --
Eight great tongues affirming the Resurrection
At the end, they soberly bong out their names.

 

The yew tree points up, it has a Gothic shape.
The eyes lift after it and find the moon.
The moon is my mother. She is not sweet like Mary.
Her blue garments unloose small bats and owls.
How I would like to believe in tenderness -
The face of the effigy, gentled by candles,
Bending, on me in particular, its mild eyes.

 

I have fallen a long way. Clouds are flowering
Blue and mystical over the face of the stars
Inside the church, the saints will all be blue,
Floating on their delicate feet over the cold pews,
Their hands and faces stiff with holiness.
The moon sees nothing of this. She is bald and wild.
And the message of the yew tree is blackness - blackness and silence.




You’re

By Sylvia Plath 

                                            

Clownlike, happiest on your hands,   

Feet to the stars, and moon-skulled,   

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 Fools’ Day,

O high-riser, my little loaf.

Vague as fog and looked for like mail.   

Farther off than Australia.

Bent-backed Atlas, our traveled 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.

 

Poppies in October

by Sylvia Plath

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 its carbon monoxides, by eyes

Dulled to a halt under bowlers.

Oh my God, what am I

That these late mouths should cry open

In a forest of frosts, in a dawn of cornflowers.

Sylvia Plath (27 October 1962)

Crossing the Water

by Sylvia Plath

Black lake, black boat, two black, cut-paper people. Where do the black trees go that drink here? Their shadows must cover Canada. A little light is filtering from the water flowers. Their leaves do not wish us to hurry: They are round and flat and full of dark advice. Cold worlds shake from the oar. The spirit of blackness is in us, it is in the fishes. A snag is lifting a valedictory, pale hand; Stars open among the lilies. Are you not blinded by such expressionless sirens? This is the silence of astounded souls.