Free Selected Poems of Sylvia Plath by Sylvia Plath

Publisher’s Note
    The poems in this selection, like those in Sylvia Plath: Collected Poems, are arranged in chronological order of composition rather than of publication. For all of the poems apart from ‘Miss Drake Proceeds to Supper’ (1956) and ‘Resolve’ (1956), which have been published only in Col lected Poems, dates of composition and the collections in which they originally appeared are given below.
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    The Colossus (London, 1960; New York, 1962): ‘Spinster’ (1956), ‘Maudlin’ (1956), ‘Night Shift’ (1957), ‘Full Fathom Five’ (1958), ‘Suicide off Egg Rock’ (1959), ‘The Hermit at Outermost House’ (1959), ‘Medallion’ (1959), ‘The Manor Garden’ (1959), ‘The Stones’ (1959), ‘The Burnt-Out Spa’ (1959)
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    Ariel (London and New York, 1965): ‘You’re’ (1960), ‘Morning Song’ (1961), ‘Tulips’ (1961), ‘The Moon and the Yew Tree’ (1961), ‘Little Fugue’ (1962), ‘Elm’ (1962), ‘Poppies in July’ (1962), ‘A Birthday Present’ (1962), ‘The Bee Meeting’ (1962), ‘Daddy’ (1962), ‘Cut’ (1962), ‘Ariel’ (1962), ‘Poppies in October’ (1962), ‘Nick and the Candlestick’ (1962), ‘Letter in November’ (1962), ‘Death & Co.’ (1962), ‘Sheep in Fog’ (1963), ‘The Munich Mannequins’ (1963), ‘Words’ (1963), ‘Edge’ (1963)
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    Crossing the Water (London and New York, 1971): ‘Face Lift’ (1961), ‘Insomniac’ (1961), ‘Wuthering Heights’ (1961), ‘Finisterre’ (1961), ‘Mirror’ (1961), ‘The Babysitters’ (1961), ‘An Appearance’ (1962), ‘Crossing the Water’ (1962), ‘Among the Narcissi’ (1962)

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    Winter Trees (London, 1971; New York, 1972): ‘Lesbos’ (1962), ‘By Candlelight’ (1962), ‘Mary’s Song’ (1962), ‘Winter Trees’ (1962)

SELECTED POEMS

Miss Drake Proceeds to Supper
    No novice
    In those elaborate rituals
    Which allay the malice
    Of knotted table and crooked chair,
    The new woman in the ward
    Wears purple, steps carefully
    Among her secret combinations of eggshells
    And breakable humming birds,
    Footing sallow as a mouse
    Between the cabbage-roses
    Which are slowly opening their furred petals
    To devour and drag her down
    Into the carpet’s design.
    With bird-quick eye cocked askew
    She can see in the nick of time
    How perilous needles grain the floorboards
    And outwit their brambled plan;
    Now through her ambushed air,
    Adazzle with bright shards
    Of broken glass,
    She edges with wary breath,
    Fending off jag and tooth,
    Until, turning sideways,
    She lifts one webbed foot after the other
    Into the still, sultry weather
    Of the patients’ dining room.

Spinster
    Now this particular girl
    During a ceremonious April walk
    With her latest suitor
    Found herself, of a sudden, intolerably struck
    By the birds’ irregular babel
    And the leaves’ litter.
    By this tumult afflicted, she
    Observed her lover’s gestures unbalance the air,
    His gait stray uneven
    Through a rank wilderness of fern and flower.
    She judged petals in disarray,
    The whole season, sloven.
    How she longed for winter then! –
    Scrupulously austere in its order
    Of white and black
    Ice and rock, each sentiment within border,
    And heart’s frosty discipline
    Exact as a snowflake.
    But here – a burgeoning
    Unruly enough to pitch her five queenly wits
    Into vulgar motley –
    A treason not to be borne. Let idiots
    Reel giddy in bedlam spring:
    She withdrew neatly.

    And round her house she set
    Such a barricade of barb and check
    Against mutinous weather
    As no mere insurgent man could hope to break
    With curse, fist, threat
    Or love, either.

Maudlin
    Mud-mattressed under the sign of the hag
    In a clench