Sylvia Plath

• Black Rook in Rainy Weather

  "Hunches a wet black rook

  Arranging and rearranging its feathers in the rain."
• Black Rook in Rainy Weather

  "I do not expect a miracle

  Or an accident

  To set the sight on fire."
• Black Rook in Rainy Weather

  "But let spotted leaves fall as they fall,

  Without ceremony, or portent."
• Black Rook in Rainy Weather

  "A certain minor light may still

  Leap incandescent

  Out of kitchen table or chair"
• Black Rook in Rainy Weather

  "(For it could happen

  Even in this dull, ruinous landscape)"
• Black Rook in Rainy Weather

  "As to seize my senses, haul

  My eyelids up and grant

  Brief respite from fear

  Of total neutrality."
• Black Rook in Rainy Weather

  "Miracles occur,

  If you care to call those spasmodic

  Tricks of radiance miracles."
• Black Rook in Rainy Weather

  "The long wait for the angel,

  For that rare, random descent."
• Morning Song


  "Love set you going like a fat gold watch"
• Morning Song

  "In a drafty museum, your nakedness

  Shadows our safety. We stand round blankly as walls."
• Morning Song

  "I'm no more your mother

  Than the cloud that distills a mirror to reflect its own slow

  Effacement at the winds hand."
• Morning Song

  "I stumble from bed, cow-heavy, and floral

  In my Victorian nightgown."
• Morning Song

  "The window square

  Whitens and swallows its dull stars. And now you try

  Your handful of notes;

  The clear vowels rise like balloons."
• Elm

  "I know the bottom, she says. I know it with my great tap root:

  It is what you fear.

  I do not fear it: I have been there."
• Elm

  "The voice of nothing, that was your madness?"
• Elm

  "Love is a shadow"
• Elm

  "The sound of poisons?

  This is rain"
• Elm

  "This is the fruit of it: tin-white, like arsenic."
• Elm

  "I have suffered the atrocities of sunsets.

  Scorched to the root

  My red filaments burn and stand, a hand of wires."
• Elm

  "I am terrified by this dark thing

  That sleeps in me:

  All day I feel it's soft, feathery turnings, its malignity."
• Elm

  "It petrifies the will. These are the isolate, slow faults

  That kill, that kill, that kill."
• Poppies in July

  "Little, poppies, little hell flames"
• Poppies in July

  "I put my hands among the flames. Nothing burns."
• Poppies in July

  "And it exhausts me to watch you

  Flickering like that, wrinkly and clear red, like the skin of a mouth.

  A mouth just bloodied.

  Little bloodied skirts!"
• Poppies in July

  "Where are your opiates, your nauseous capsules?"
• Poppies in July

  "If I could bleed, or sleep!-

  If my mouth could marry a hurt like that!"
• Poppies in July

  "Liquors seep to me, in this glass capsule,

  Dulling and stilling.

  But colorless. Colorless"
• The Arrival of the Bee Box

  "Square as a chair"
• The Arrival of the Bee Box

  "Coffin of a midget

  Or a square baby"
• The Arrival of the Bee Box

  "It is dark, dark,

  With the swarmy feeling of African hands

  Minute and shrunk for export,

  Black on black, angrily clambering."
• The Arrival of the Bee Box

  "The unintelligible syllables.

  It is like a Roman mob."
• The Arrival of the Bee Box

  "I have simply ordered a box of maniacs.

  ...

  They can die, I need feed them nothing, I am the owner."
• The Arrival of the Bee Box

  "In my moon suit and funeral veil.

  I am no source of honey

  So why would they turn on me?

  Tomorrow I will be sweet God, I will set them free.

  The box is only temporary."
• Child

  "Your clear eye is the one absolutely beautiful thing.

  I want to fill it with color and ducks"
• Child

  "April snowdrop, Indian pipe,

  Little

  Stalk without wrinkle"
• Child

  "Not this troublous

  Wringing of hands, this dark

  Ceiling without a star."
• Theme of Power
• Theme of Nature
• Theme of Motherhood
• Theme of Despair