Sylvia Plath - Ariel

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And now I
Foam to wheat, a glitter of seas.

Sylvia Plath
Cold glass, how you insert yourself Between myself and myself. I scratch like a cat. The blood that runs is dark fruit- An effect, a cosmetic. You smile. No, it is not fatal.

Sylvia Plath
The blood jet is poetry,
There is no stopping it.

Sylvia Plath
You do not do, you do not do
Any more, black shoe
In which I have lived like a foot
For thirty years, poor and white,
Barely daring to breathe or Achoo.

Sylvia Plath
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
Axes
After whose stroke the wood rings,
And the echoes!
Echoes travelling
Off from the centre like horses.

Sylvia Plath
This is the light of the mind, cold and planetary.
The trees of the mind are black. The light is blue.

Sylvia Plath
The woman is perfected
Her dead Body wears the smile of accomplishment,
The illusion of a Greek necessity Flows in the scrolls of her toga,
Her bare Feet seem to be saying:
We have come so far, it is over. Each dead child coiled, a white serpent,
One at each little Pitcher of milk, now empty.
She has folded Them back into her body as petals
Of a rose close when the garden Stiffens and odors bleed
From the sweet, deep throats of the night flower. The moon has nothing to be sad about,
Staring from her hood of bone. She is used to this sort of thing.
Her blacks crackle and drag.

Sylvia Plath
Herr God, Herr Lucifer,
Beware.
Beware. Out of the ash
I rise with my red hair
And I eat men like air.

Sylvia Plath
I am incapable of more knowledge.
What is this, this face
So murderous in its strangle of branches? — Its snaky acids hiss.
It petrifies the will. These are the isolate, slow faults,
That kill, that kill, that kill.

Sylvia Plath
Kindness glides about my house.
Dame Kindness, she is so nice!
The blue and red jewels of her rings smoke
In the windows, the mirrors
Are filling with smiles.

Sylvia Plath
Perfection is terrible, it cannot have children.

Sylvia Plath
There's a stake in your fat black heart
And the villagers never liked you.
They are dancing and stamping on you.
They always knew it was you.
Daddy, daddy, you bastard, I'm through.

Sylvia Plath
The moon is no door. It is a face in its own right,
White as a knuckle and terribly upset.
It drags the sea after it like a dark crime; it is quiet
With the O-gape of complete despair. I live here.

Sylvia Plath
And I, stepping from this skin Of old bandages, boredoms, old faces Step to you from the black car of Lethe, Pure as a baby.

Sylvia Plath
White
Godiva, I unpeel —
Dead hands dead stringencies.

Sylvia Plath
Darling, all night
I have been flickering, off, on, off, on.
The sheets grow heavy as a lecher's kiss.

Sylvia Plath
Now your head, excuse me, is empty.
I have the ticket for that.
Come here, sweetie, out of the closet.
Well, what do you think of that?
Naked as paper to start But in twenty-five years she'll be silver,
In fifty, gold.
A living doll, everywhere you look.
It can sew, it can cook,
It can talk, talk, talk. It works, there is nothing wrong with it.
You have a hole, it's a poultice.
You have an eye, it's an image.
My boy, it's your last resort.
Will you marry it, marry it, marry it.

Sylvia Plath