The Colossus: And Other Poems

BOOK: The Colossus: And Other Poems
3.43Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads
Sylvia Plath
The Colossus & Other Poems

Sylvia Plath was born in 1932 in Massachusetts. She began publishing poems and stories as a teenager and by the time she entered Smith College had won several poetry prizes. She was a Fulbright Scholar in Cambridge, England, and married British poet Ted Hughes in London in 1956. The young couple moved to the States, where Plath became an instructor at Smith College. Later, they moved back to England, where Plath continued writing poetry and wrote her novel,
The Bell Jar
, which was first published under the pseudonym Victoria Lucas in England in 1963. On February 11, 1963, Plath committed suicide. Her
Collected Poems
, published posthumously in 1981, won the Pulitzer Prize.

FIRST VINTAGE INTERNATIONAL EDITION, MAY
1998

Copyright
© 1957, 1958, 1959, 1960, 1961, 1962,
by Sylvia Plath

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published in hardcover in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., in 1962.

First published in England in somewhat different form by William Heinemann Ltd.

eISBN: 978-0-307-80882-0

Random House Web address:
www.randomhouse.com

v3.1

For Ted

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Arts in Society, The Atlantic Monthly, Audience, Chelsea, Critical Quarterly, Encounter, Grecourt Review, Harper’s Magazine, The Horn Book, The Hudson Review, The Kenyon Review, London Magazine, Mademoiselle, The Nation, The Observer, The Partisan Review, Poetry, The Sewanee Review, The Spectator, The Texas Literary Quarterly, and The Times Literary Supplement; also The New Yorker
, where the following poems originally appeared: “Hardcastle Crags,” “Man in Black,” “Mussel Hunter at Rock Harbor,” and “Watercolor of Grantchester Meadows.” I would also like to thank Elizabeth Ames and the Trustees at Yaddo, where many of the poems were written.

The Manor Garden

The fountains are dry and the roses over.

Incense of death. Your day approaches.

The pears fatten like little buddhas.

A blue mist is dragging the lake.

You move through the era of fishes,

The smug centuries of the pig—

Head, toe and finger

Come clear of the shadow. History

Nourishes these broken flutings,

These crowns of acanthus,

And the crow settles her garments.

You inherit white heather, a bee’s wing,

Two suicides, the family wolves,

Hours of blankness. Some hard stars

Already yellow the heavens.

The spider on its own string

Crosses the lake. The worms

Quit their usual habitations.

The small birds converge, converge

With their gifts to a difficult borning.

Two Views of a Cadaver Room
1

The day she visited the dissecting room

They had four men laid out, black as burnt turkey,

Already half unstrung. A vinegary fume

Of the death vats clung to them;

The white-smocked boys started working.

The head of his cadaver had caved in,

And she could scarcely make out anything

In that rubble of skull plates and old leather.

A sallow piece of string held it together.

In their jars the snail-nosed babies moon and glow.

He hands her the cut-out heart like a cracked heirloom.

2

In Brueghel’s panorama of smoke and slaughter

Two people only are blind to the carrion army:

He, afloat in the sea of her blue satin

Skirts, sings in the direction

Of her bare shoulder, while she bends,

Fingering a leaflet of music, over him,

Both of them deaf to the fiddle in the hands

Of the death’s-head shadowing their song.

These Flemish lovers flourish; not for long.

Yet desolation, stalled in paint, spares the little country

Foolish, delicate, in the lower right-hand corner.

Night Shift

It was not a heart, beating,

That muted boom, that clangor

Far off, not blood in the ears

Drumming up any fever

To impose on the evening.

The noise came from the outside:

A metal detonating

Native, evidently, to

These stilled suburbs: nobody

Startled at it, though the sound

Shook the ground with its pounding.

It took root at my coming

Till the thudding source, exposed,

Confounded inept guesswork:

Framed in windows of Main Street’s

Silver factory, immense

Hammers hoisted, wheels turning,

Stalled, let fall their vertical

Tonnage of metal and wood;

Stunned the marrow. Men in white

Undershirts circled, tending

Without stop those greased machines,

Tending, without stop, the blunt

Indefatigable fact.

BOOK: The Colossus: And Other Poems
3.43Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

Other books

Can't Hurry Love by Molly O'Keefe
The Great King by Christian Cameron
Deadly Harvest by Heather Graham
Hindrance by Angelica Chase
More than Just Sex by Ali Campbell
A Corpse for Yew by Joyce, Jim Lavene
Hamlet by William Shakespeare
Updraft by Fran Wilde
The Sheikh’s Reluctant Bride by Teresa Southwick