|
696d8e8
|
But I am I now; and so many other millions are so irretrievably their own special variety of 'I' that I can hardly bear to think of it. I: how firm a letter; how reassuring the three strokes: one vertical, proud and assertive, and then the two short horizontal lines in quick, smug succession. The pen scratching on the paper...I...I...I...I...I...I.
|
|
|
Sylvia Plath |
|
a6de464
|
Bright beads of red are rising through the ink, Hearts-blood bubbles smearing out into the black stream
|
|
|
Sylvia Plath |
|
79c8c70
|
How can I tell Bob that my happiness streams from having wrenched a piece out of my life, a piece of hurt and beauty, and transformed it to typewritten words on paper? How can he know I am justifying my life, my keen emotions, my feeling, by turning it into print?
|
|
poetry
writing
|
Sylvia Plath |
|
c27463d
|
And so I rehabilitate myself - staying up late this Friday night in spite of vowing to go to bed early, because it is more important to capture moments like this, keen shifts in mood, sudden veering of direction - than to lose it in slumber.
|
|
|
Sylvia Plath |
|
67ca950
|
I am both worse and better than you thought.
|
|
|
Sylvia Plath |
|
a97f8dd
|
I have room in me for love, and for ever so many little lives.
|
|
|
Sylvia Plath |
|
efc922c
|
I am your opus.
|
|
interpersonal
lady-lazarus
|
Sylvia Plath |
|
0b6c1f8
|
Over your body the clouds go High, high and icily And a little flat, as if they Floated on a glass that was invisible. Unlike swans, Having no reflections; Unlike you, With no strings attached. All cool, all blue. Unlike you You, there on your back, Eyes to the sky.
|
|
gulliver
sylvia-plath
|
Sylvia Plath |
|
a52a33d
|
There is a certain clinical satisfaction in seeing just how bad things can get.
|
|
|
Sylvia Plath |
|
9d2d94d
|
From the night Buddy Willard kissed me and said I must go out with a lot of boys, he made me feel I was much more sexy and experienced than he was and that everything he did like hugging and kissing and petting was simply what I made him feel like doing out of the blue, he couldn't help it and didn't know how it came about. Now I saw he had only been pretending all this time to be so innocent.
|
|
|
Sylvia Plath |
|
ff8cad4
|
I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead;
|
|
sylvia-plath
|
Sylvia Plath |
|
d548cf5
|
Now, lying on my back in bed, I imagined Buddy saying, 'Do you know what a poem is, Esther?' 'No, what?' I would say. 'A piece of dust.' Then just as he was smiling and starting to look proud, I would say, 'So are the cadavers you cut up. So are the people you think you're curing. They're dust as dust as dust. I reckon a good poem lasts a whole lot longer than a hundred of those people put together.' And of course Buddy wouldn't have any a..
|
|
the-bell-jar
|
Sylvia Plath |
|
16f17d2
|
In this particular tub, two knees jut up like icebergs, while minute brown hairs rise on arms and legs in a fringe of kelp; green soap navigates the tidal slosh of seas breaking on legendary beaches; in faith we shall board our imagined ship and wildly sail among sacred islands of the mad till death shatters the fabulous stars and makes us real.
|
|
|
Sylvia Plath |
|
c5577b3
|
Let me fly with you.
|
|
|
Sylvia Plath |
|
8e6003c
|
My heroine would be myself, only in disguise.
|
|
|
Sylvia Plath |
|
fcca6b4
|
Hard, sharp, ticks. I hate them. Measuring thought, infinite space, by cogs and wheels. Can you understand? Someone, somewhere, can you understand me a little, love me a little? For all my despair, for all my ideals, for all that -- I love life. But it is hard, and I have so much -- so very much to learn.
|
|
|
Sylvia Plath |
|
5604b95
|
My life is a discipline, a prison: I live for my own work, without which I am nothing.
|
|
|
Sylvia Plath |
|
9e33d5b
|
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.
|
|
|
Sylvia Plath |
|
d0b20a8
|
I must not be selfless: develop a sense of self. A solidness that can't be attacked.
|
|
selfless
|
Sylvia Plath |
|
04d1d8b
|
It was like the first time i saw a cadaver. For weeks afterward the cadavers head, or what was left of it - floated up behind my eggs and bacon at breakfast and in the face of Buddy Willard, who was responsible for my seeing it in the first place, and pretty soon I felt as though I were carrying that cadavers head around with me on a string, like some black, noseless balloon stinking of vinegar.
|
|
|
Sylvia Plath |
|
d648b84
|
You were doing fine," a familiar voice informed my ear, "until that man stepped into your path."
|
|
|
Sylvia Plath |
|
0cf2cea
|
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 thunderbird instead; At least when spring comes they roar back again.
|
|
|
Sylvia Plath |
|
771bc15
|
Do you realize the illicit sensuous delight I get from picking my nose? I always have, ever since I was a child. There are so many subtle variations of sensation. A delicate, pointed-nailed fifth finger can catch under dry scabs and flakes of mucous in the nostril and draw them out to be looked at, crumbled between fingers, and flicked to the floor in minute crusts. Or a heavier, determined forefinger can reach up and smear down-and-out the..
|
|
|
Sylvia Plath |
|
dc01e73
|
What is my life for and what am I going to do with it? I don't know and I'm afraid. I can never read all the books I want; I can never be all the people I want and live all the lives I want. I can never train myself in all the skills I want. And why do I want? I want to live and feel all the shades, tones, and variations of mental and physical experience possible in my life. And I am horribly limited. Yet I am not a cretin: lame, blind and ..
|
|
|
Sylvia Plath |
|
ad36eb0
|
My bones hold a stillness, the far Fields melt my heart.
|
|
|
Sylvia Plath |
|
03f6f60
|
This is my first snow at Smith. It is like any other snow, but from a different window, and there lies the singular charm of it.
|
|
|
Sylvia Plath |
|
8c8abe2
|
For I must get back my soul from you; I am killing my flesh without it.
|
|
|
Sylvia Plath |
|
1e323e4
|
A man's world is different from a woman's world and a man's emotions are different from a woman's emotions and only marriage can bring the two different sets of emotions together properly.
|
|
marriage
relationship
|
Sylvia Plath |
|
61abf58
|
But they know. They all know. And what am I against so many...?
|
|
|
Sylvia Plath |
|
66bdfbc
|
With that strange knowing that comes over me, like a clairvoyance, I know that I am sure of myself and my enormous and alarmingly timeless love for you; which will always be.
|
|
love
plath
|
Sylvia Plath |
|
2bc0148
|
This is the light of the mind, cold and planetary.
|
|
|
Sylvia Plath |
|
6efdc87
|
What I didn't say was that each time I picked up a German dictionary or a German book, the very sight of those dense, black, barbed-wire letters made my mind shut like a clam.
|
|
mental-illness
|
Sylvia Plath |
|
9b38952
|
My flesh winced, in cowardice, from such a death.
|
|
|
Sylvia Plath |
|
701742c
|
The more hopeless you were, the farther away they hid you.
|
|
|
Sylvia Plath |
|
e11f1d9
|
The moon is my mother. She is not sweet like Mary. Her blue garments unloose small bats and owls.
|
|
moon
night
|
Sylvia Plath |
|
72827f0
|
To the person in The Bell Jar, black and stopped as a dead baby, the world itself is a bad dream
|
|
|
Sylvia Plath |
|
e5dfa5c
|
As I lay on my back in bed staring up at the blank, white ceiling the stillness seemed to grow bigger and bigger until I felt my eardrums would burst with it.
|
|
|
Sylvia Plath |
|
d748102
|
He just wanted to see what a girl who was crazy enough to kill herself looked like.
|
|
suicide
|
Sylvia Plath |
|
6814312
|
beating time along the edge of thought.
|
|
|
Sylvia Plath |
|
a0d41d4
|
If you dissect a bird / to diagram the tongue, / you'll cut the chord / articulating song.
|
|
sylvia-plath
|
Sylvia Plath |
|
67373e5
|
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 for nothing. ~ Tulips (1961)
|
|
loneliness
|
Sylvia Plath |
|
67c34b5
|
I had always imagined myself hitching up on to my elbows on the delivery table after it was all over - dead white, of course, with no makeup and from the awful ordeal, but smiling and radiant, with my hair down to my waist, and reaching out for my first little squirmy child and saying its name, whatever it was.
|
|
|
Sylvia Plath |
|
b28a44f
|
I moved in front of the medicine cabinet. If I looked in the mirror while I did it, it would be like watching somebody else, in a book or a play.
|
|
depression
surrealism
self-harm
mental-health
|
Sylvia Plath |
|
1f5152c
|
Your security and love of life don't depend on the presence of another, but only on yourself, your chosen work, and your developing identity. Then you can safely choose to enrich your life by marrying another person, and not, as e e cummings says, until.
|
|
|
Sylvia Plath |