for me, the most influential poem of my life is this Dylan Thomas poem...
The Force That Through the Green Fuse Drives the Flower
The force that through the green fuse drives the flower
Drives my green age; that blasts the roots of trees
Is my destroyer.
And I am dumb to tell the crooked rose
My youth is bent by the same wintry fever.
The force that drives the water through the rocks
Drives my red blood; that dries the mouthing streams
Turns mine to wax.
And I am dumb to mouth unto my veins
How at the mountain spring the same mouth sucks.
The hand that whirls the water in the pool
Stirs the quicksand; that ropes the blowing wind
Hauls my shroud sail.
And I am dumb to tell the hanging man
How of my clay is made the hangman's lime.
The lips of time leech to the fountain head;
Love drips and gathers, but the fallen blood
Shall calm her sores.
And I am dumb to tell a weather's wind
How time has ticked a heaven round the stars.
And I am dumb to tell the lover's tomb
How at my sheet goes the same crooked worm.
While my hair was still cut straight across my forehead
I played about the front gate, pulling flowers
You came by on bamboo stilts, playing horse,
You walked about my seat, playing with blue plums
And we went on living in the village of Chokan:
Two small people, without dislike or suspicion.
At fourteen I married My Lord you.
I never laughed, being bashful.
Lowering my head, I looked at the wall.
Called to, a thousand times, I never looked back.
At fifteen I stopped scowling,
I desired my dust to be mingled with yours
Forever and forever, and forever.
Why should I climb the look out?
At sixteen you departed,
You went into far Ku-to-Yen, by the river of swirling eddies,
And you have been gone five months.
The monkeys make sorrowful noise overhead.
You dragged your feet when you went out.
By the gate now, the moss is grown, the different mosses,
Too deep to clear them away!
The leaves fall early this autumn, in wind.
The paired butterflies are already yellow with August
Over the grass in the West garden,
They hurt me.
I grow older,
If you are coming down through the narrows of the river Kiang,
Please let me know beforehand,
And I will come out to meet you,
As far as Cho-fu-Sa.
There is no such thing as leftover pizza. There is now pizza and later pizza. - anonymous The risk I took was calculated, but man, am I bad at math - The Mincing Mockingbird
I LIE upon my bed and hear and see.
The moon is rising through the glistening trees;
And momently a great and sombre breeze,
With a vast voice returning fitfully,
Comes like a deep-toned grief, and stirs in me,
Somehow, by some inexplicable art,
A sense of my soul's strangeness, and its part
In the dark march of human destiny.
What am I, then, and what are they that pass
Yonder, and love and laugh, and mourn and weep?
What shall they know of me, or I, alas!
[Page 74]
Of them? Little. At times, as if from sleep,
We waken to this yearning passionate mood,
And tremble at our spiritual solitude.
II
Nay, never once to feel we are alone,
While the great human heart around us lies:
To make the smile on other lips our own,
To live upon the light in others' eyes:
To breathe without a doubt the limped air
Of that most perfect love that knows no pain:
To say–I love you–only, and not care
Whether the love come back to us again:
Divinest self-forgetfulness, at first
A task, and then a tonic, then a need;
To greet with open hands the best and worst,
And only for another's wound to bleed:
This is to see the beauty that God meant,
Wrapped round with life, ineffably content.
III
There is a beauty at the goal of life,
A beauty growing since the world began,
Through every age and race, through lapse and strife
Till the great human soul complete her span.
Beneath the waves of storm that lash and burn,
The currents of blind passion that appall,
To listen and keep watch till we discern
The tide of sovereign truth that guides it all;
So to address our spirits to the height,
And so attune them to the valiant whole,
That the great light be clearer for our light,
And the great soul the stronger for our soul:
To have done this is to have lived, though fame
Remember us with no familiar name.
But I would rather be horizontal.
I am not a tree with my root in the soil
Sucking up minerals and motherly love
So that each March I may gleam into leaf,
Nor am I the beauty of a garden bed
Attracting my share of Ahs and spectacularly painted,
Unknowing I must soon unpetal.
Compared with me, a tree is immortal
And a flower-head not tall, but more startling,
And I want the one's longevity and the other's daring.
Tonight, in the infinitesimal light of the stars,
The trees and flowers have been strewing their cool odors.
I walk among them, but none of them are noticing.
Sometimes I think that when I am sleeping
I must most perfectly resemble them--
Thoughts gone dim.
It is more natural to me, lying down.
Then the sky and I are in open conversation,
And I shall be useful when I lie down finally:
Then the trees may touch me for once, and the flowers have time for me.
I used to put strange things in newspaper machines just to freak people out. I grew out of that.
She rules! Most people are all about "Daddy" but I don't think you can beat "I am Vertical".....
have you seen the movie Sylvia?
I saw it and hated it, sorry. Sylvia was here in Cambridge, you know. She won a Fulbright scholarship and went to Newnham. She lived in Eltisley Avenue, around the corner from Grantchester Meadows (made famous by Rupert Brooke and, in rock music, Pink Floyd); she made a big impression here and, by some personal accounts I've heard, she wasn't a victim character at all. She was pretty strident, popular, and glamourous.
You hold on like no other
You were caught as you came out of life
To re-enter it
I don't know if it's in one direction or in another that you shake the
garden gate
You have raised up to your heart the serpentine grass
And forever curled the birds of paradise in the hoarse sky
Your gaze is clairvoyant
You are seated
And we too are seated
The skull for a few more days
In the dip of our features
All of our acts before us
At arm's length
In the little ones' vine tendril
You are feeding us a line on existentialism
There are no flies on you
published as part of the poem cycle Xenophiles, in Poemes.
Ca. 1947,
translated by Jean-Pierre Cauvin and Mary Anne Caws
I saw it and hated it, sorry. Sylvia was here in Cambridge, you know. She won a Fulbright scholarship and went to Newnham. She lived in Eltisley Avenue, around the corner from Grantchester Meadows (made famous by Rupert Brooke and, in rock music, Pink Floyd); she made a big impression here and, by some personal accounts I've heard, she wasn't a victim character at all. She was pretty strident, popular, and glamourous.
This is interesting. Changes my ideas about her--and about her poems.
Is there a good, reliable biography out there?
I used to put strange things in newspaper machines just to freak people out. I grew out of that.
But Plath was very complex. She did have many sides, introverted as well as extroverted.
I'll try and find the audio recording of her reading her poetry. It's stunning because her voice is hard, deep, firm and confident; not what you might expect.
Pile the bodies high at Austerlitz and Waterloo.
Shovel them under and let me work--
I am the grass; I cover all.
And pile them high at Gettysburg
And pile them high at Ypres and Verdun.
Shovel them under and let me work.
Two years, ten years, and the passengers ask the conductor:
What place is this?
Where are we now?
Comments
and rightfully so.
man, my mind is sort of muddled now,
under the hue of amber
if I a-had a poem to give,
it would definitely be
from Bob Drillin'
The Force That Through the Green Fuse Drives the Flower
The force that through the green fuse drives the flower
Drives my green age; that blasts the roots of trees
Is my destroyer.
And I am dumb to tell the crooked rose
My youth is bent by the same wintry fever.
The force that drives the water through the rocks
Drives my red blood; that dries the mouthing streams
Turns mine to wax.
And I am dumb to mouth unto my veins
How at the mountain spring the same mouth sucks.
The hand that whirls the water in the pool
Stirs the quicksand; that ropes the blowing wind
Hauls my shroud sail.
And I am dumb to tell the hanging man
How of my clay is made the hangman's lime.
The lips of time leech to the fountain head;
Love drips and gathers, but the fallen blood
Shall calm her sores.
And I am dumb to tell a weather's wind
How time has ticked a heaven round the stars.
And I am dumb to tell the lover's tomb
How at my sheet goes the same crooked worm.
I have eaten
the plums
that were in
the icebox
and which
you were probably
saving
for breakfast
Forgive me
they were delicious
so sweet
and so cold
While my hair was still cut straight across my forehead
I played about the front gate, pulling flowers
You came by on bamboo stilts, playing horse,
You walked about my seat, playing with blue plums
And we went on living in the village of Chokan:
Two small people, without dislike or suspicion.
At fourteen I married My Lord you.
I never laughed, being bashful.
Lowering my head, I looked at the wall.
Called to, a thousand times, I never looked back.
At fifteen I stopped scowling,
I desired my dust to be mingled with yours
Forever and forever, and forever.
Why should I climb the look out?
At sixteen you departed,
You went into far Ku-to-Yen, by the river of swirling eddies,
And you have been gone five months.
The monkeys make sorrowful noise overhead.
You dragged your feet when you went out.
By the gate now, the moss is grown, the different mosses,
Too deep to clear them away!
The leaves fall early this autumn, in wind.
The paired butterflies are already yellow with August
Over the grass in the West garden,
They hurt me.
I grow older,
If you are coming down through the narrows of the river Kiang,
Please let me know beforehand,
And I will come out to meet you,
As far as Cho-fu-Sa.
The risk I took was calculated, but man, am I bad at math - The Mincing Mockingbird
Yes!! I had forgotten all about this one!! I love this so much! Thanks for bringing this gem back to me...!
for shame
I'm a BAD canadian!!!!
hehe
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
I'm a number that doesn't count
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
the nothing ventured - the nothing feigned
I LIE upon my bed and hear and see.
The moon is rising through the glistening trees;
And momently a great and sombre breeze,
With a vast voice returning fitfully,
Comes like a deep-toned grief, and stirs in me,
Somehow, by some inexplicable art,
A sense of my soul's strangeness, and its part
In the dark march of human destiny.
What am I, then, and what are they that pass
Yonder, and love and laugh, and mourn and weep?
What shall they know of me, or I, alas!
[Page 74]
Of them? Little. At times, as if from sleep,
We waken to this yearning passionate mood,
And tremble at our spiritual solitude.
II
Nay, never once to feel we are alone,
While the great human heart around us lies:
To make the smile on other lips our own,
To live upon the light in others' eyes:
To breathe without a doubt the limped air
Of that most perfect love that knows no pain:
To say–I love you–only, and not care
Whether the love come back to us again:
Divinest self-forgetfulness, at first
A task, and then a tonic, then a need;
To greet with open hands the best and worst,
And only for another's wound to bleed:
This is to see the beauty that God meant,
Wrapped round with life, ineffably content.
III
There is a beauty at the goal of life,
A beauty growing since the world began,
Through every age and race, through lapse and strife
Till the great human soul complete her span.
Beneath the waves of storm that lash and burn,
The currents of blind passion that appall,
To listen and keep watch till we discern
The tide of sovereign truth that guides it all;
So to address our spirits to the height,
And so attune them to the valiant whole,
That the great light be clearer for our light,
And the great soul the stronger for our soul:
To have done this is to have lived, though fame
Remember us with no familiar name.
I love it SO MUCH.
But I would rather be horizontal.
I am not a tree with my root in the soil
Sucking up minerals and motherly love
So that each March I may gleam into leaf,
Nor am I the beauty of a garden bed
Attracting my share of Ahs and spectacularly painted,
Unknowing I must soon unpetal.
Compared with me, a tree is immortal
And a flower-head not tall, but more startling,
And I want the one's longevity and the other's daring.
Tonight, in the infinitesimal light of the stars,
The trees and flowers have been strewing their cool odors.
I walk among them, but none of them are noticing.
Sometimes I think that when I am sleeping
I must most perfectly resemble them--
Thoughts gone dim.
It is more natural to me, lying down.
Then the sky and I are in open conversation,
And I shall be useful when I lie down finally:
Then the trees may touch me for once, and the flowers have time for me.
One of the best closing two lines ever, imo.
She rules! Most people are all about "Daddy" but I don't think you can beat "I am Vertical".....
have you seen the movie Sylvia?
I saw it and hated it, sorry. Sylvia was here in Cambridge, you know. She won a Fulbright scholarship and went to Newnham. She lived in Eltisley Avenue, around the corner from Grantchester Meadows (made famous by Rupert Brooke and, in rock music, Pink Floyd); she made a big impression here and, by some personal accounts I've heard, she wasn't a victim character at all. She was pretty strident, popular, and glamourous.
You were caught as you came out of life
To re-enter it
I don't know if it's in one direction or in another that you shake the
garden gate
You have raised up to your heart the serpentine grass
And forever curled the birds of paradise in the hoarse sky
Your gaze is clairvoyant
You are seated
And we too are seated
The skull for a few more days
In the dip of our features
All of our acts before us
At arm's length
In the little ones' vine tendril
You are feeding us a line on existentialism
There are no flies on you
published as part of the poem cycle Xenophiles, in Poemes.
Ca. 1947,
translated by Jean-Pierre Cauvin and Mary Anne Caws
This is interesting. Changes my ideas about her--and about her poems.
Is there a good, reliable biography out there?
Try "The Death and Life of Sylvia Plath" by Ronald Hayman, and "The Journals of Sylvia Plath", edited by Karen V. Kukil.
Here are some links:
http://www.sylviaplath.de/
http://www.sylviaplathforum.com/
http://www.neuroticpoets.com/plath/
But Plath was very complex. She did have many sides, introverted as well as extroverted.
I'll try and find the audio recording of her reading her poetry. It's stunning because her voice is hard, deep, firm and confident; not what you might expect.
This here is seriously cool......
Pile the bodies high at Austerlitz and Waterloo.
Shovel them under and let me work--
I am the grass; I cover all.
And pile them high at Gettysburg
And pile them high at Ypres and Verdun.
Shovel them under and let me work.
Two years, ten years, and the passengers ask the conductor:
What place is this?
Where are we now?
I am the grass.
Let me work.