Hmmmm sorry Floridagirl you have me at a disadvantage who is Sylvia.
Tigs
Fri Oct 08, 2004 11:12 pm
DanceofSorrows
Joined: 29 Aug 2004
Posts: 2837
Yes I like a few of her things. I have a book by her but haven't read her in awhile. I like dark and lighter poets, intenisty can be cruel but worth the views....
Dance~
Sun Oct 10, 2004 1:46 am
Floridagirl
Joined: 27 Sep 2004
Posts: 43
Location: Florida
Tigger,
Sylvia was a "dark" poet living in the 50's and 60's. She also wrote the Bell Jar, which was made into a movie. Sylvia was a young woman struggling with her identity and disillusioned with the pettiness of the world. She committed suicide in the 60s. Here is one of my favorites she wrote:
Ariel
Stasis in darkness.
Then the substanceless blue
Pour of tor and distances.
God's lioness,
How one we grow,
Pivot of heels and knees!--The furrow
Splits and passes, sister to
The brown arc
Of the neck I cannot catch,
Nigger-eye
Berries cast dark
Hooks----
Black sweet blood mouthfuls,
Shadows.
Something else
Hauls me through air----
Thighs, hair;
Flakes from my heels.
White
Godiva, I unpeel----
Dead hands, dead stringencies.
And now I
Foam to wheat, a glitter of seas.
The child's cry
Melts in the wall.
And I
Am the arrow,
The dew that flies,
Suicidal, at one with the drive
Into the red
Eye, the cauldron of morning.
Mon Oct 11, 2004 12:57 pm
misfit
Joined: 27 May 2004
Posts: 101
Location: europe
Mirror
I am silver and exact. I have no preconceptions.
Whatever I see I swallow immediately
Just as it is, unmisted by love or dislike.
I am not cruel, only truthful-
The eye of the little god, four cornered.
Most of the time I meditate on the opposite wall.
It is pink, with speckles. I have looked at it so long
I think it is a part of my heart. But it flickers.
Faces and darkness separate us over and over.
Now I am a lake. A woman bends over me,
Searching my reaches for what she really is.
Then she turns to those liars, the candles or the moon.
I see her back, and reflect it faithfully.
She rewards me with tears and an agitation of hands.
I am important to her. She comes and goes.
Each morning it is her face that replaces the darkness.
In me she has drowned a young girl, and in me an old woman
Rises toward her day after day, like a terrible fish.
I like this poem, as for me it depicts one's search for oneself, one's truth that the mirror shows, but it is also in itself another perspective beneath and above it's surface, a reflection of her inner and outer self, and a reflection on the passing of time, the changes that it implies : the vanishing of the youth, the turbulence caused in the inner self by the agitation of that terrible fish, the old woman...and so much more than that...
Am I talking too much ?
Anyway, this was just to share one of her poems... I really admire the work and life of this woman... I particularily appreciated the Bell Jar which is a loosely autobiographical novel which tells the story of a gifted young woman's mental breakdown beginning during a summer internship as a junior editor at a magazine in New York City in the early 1950s.
Sylvia Plath committed suicide in 1963 and left behind this scathingly sad, honest and perfectly written book, which remains one of the best told tales of a woman's descent into insanity.
"The silence drew off, baring the pebbles and shells and all the tatty wreckage of my life. Then, at the rim of vision, it gathered itself, and in one sweeping tide, rushed me to sleep."
Mon Oct 25, 2004 1:02 pm
Floridagirl
Joined: 27 Sep 2004
Posts: 43
Location: Florida
Ah, yes. What a lovely critique of "Mirror". Thanks for sharing.
Mon Oct 25, 2004 2:52 pm
DanceofSorrows
Joined: 29 Aug 2004
Posts: 2837
Enjoying the critique of the poems, if any she is definetly one to saunter with.
Sun Oct 31, 2004 5:51 pm
Tigger Site Admin
Joined: 06 Feb 2004
Posts: 890
Thanks for enlightening me ...nice poems.
Sad tale though I have to say.
Tigs
Sun Oct 31, 2004 11:06 pm
misfit
Joined: 27 May 2004
Posts: 101
Location: europe
One of my favourites.
Lady Lazarus
I have done it again.
One year in every ten
I manage it--
A sort of walking miracle, my skin
Bright as a Nazi lampshade,
My right foot
A paperweight,
My face featureless, fine
Jew linen.
Peel off the napkin
O my enemy.
Do I terrify?--
The nose, the eye pits, the full set of teeth?
The sour breath
Will vanish in a day.
Soon, soon the flesh
The grave cave ate will be
At home on me
And I a smiling woman.
I am only thirty.
And like the cat I have nine times to die.
This is Number Three.
What a trash
To annihilate each decade.
What a million filaments.
The peanut-crunching crowd
Shoves in to see
Them unwrap me hand and foot--
The big strip tease.
Gentlemen, ladies
These are my hands
My knees.
I may be skin and bone,
Nevertheless, I am the same, identical woman.
The first time it happened I was ten.
It was an accident.
The second time I meant
To last it out and not come back at all.
I rocked shut
As a seashell.
They had to call and call
And pick the worms off me like sticky pearls.
Dying
Is an art, like everything else.
I do it exceptionally well.
I do it so it feels like hell.
I do it so it feels real.
I guess you could say I've a call.
It's easy enough to do it in a cell.
It's easy enough to do it and stay put.
It's the theatrical
Comeback in broad day
To the same place, the same face, the same brute
Amused shout:
'A miracle!'
That knocks me out.
There is a charge
For the eyeing of my scars, there is a charge
For the hearing of my heart--
It really goes.
And there is a charge, a very large charge
For a word or a touch
Or a bit of blood
Or a piece of my hair or my clothes.
So, so, Herr Doktor.
So, Herr Enemy.
I am your opus,
I am your valuable,
The pure gold baby
That melts to a shriek.
I turn and burn.
Do not think I underestimate your great concern.
Ash, ash--
You poke and stir.
Flesh, bone, there is nothing there--
A cake of soap,
A wedding ring,
A gold filling.
Herr god, Herr Lucifer
Beware
Beware.
Out of the ash
I rise with my red hair
And I eat men like air.
Forget my French, but one of the things I really appreciate about this poem is the contrast between the seriousness of the experience and the light form of the poem, which can be very misleading at first. The changing of tones is also quite disturbing. It's very hard to use this technique with such talent...
It's also appealing to me for its subject. This highly wrought poem seems to put forward the poet's attempt to control and manipulate her own fears and terror, to triumph over them and rise.
I love those poets who dare going down deep into themselves and expose themselves as if they were stripping layers of their mind and souls in front of us.
Mon Nov 01, 2004 1:00 pm
DanceofSorrows
Joined: 29 Aug 2004
Posts: 2837
NOOOO will not forget the french
Just cause I like it so~
Mon Nov 01, 2004 8:17 pm
misfit
Joined: 27 May 2004
Posts: 101
Location: europe
You.....
Wed Nov 03, 2004 1:43 pm
Jack Napes
Joined: 11 Dec 2004
Posts: 123
Location: East Dubuque,Il
Hi FloridaGirl...
I can only say that each time I read Sylvia, I feel pain. Some time ago, there was an excellent article in
Smithsonian
telling of her life. It seems to me that it was in print about a year ago or so. Frankly, (to me) just the mere mention of her name stirs up feelings of sorrow and intense sadness. Makes you wish that you could have been someone there to stop her, and take some of that pain away.
We really can't "save" anyone though, can we?
Not the least of all...ourselves.
Thanks for the post.
It, (and the replies)
stirred
me .
Regards from Jack....
Jack says "Hi", to everyone on the board! _________________ Escaping The Bonds Of Dogma
Wanted to revive this board if only for a while... I LOVE Plath's poetry, out of 6 or 7 poems studied in school her work was that which left the biggest impression on me. (Although Elizabeth Bishop follows closely behind).
And I have to agree with Jack, although her poems are stark and honest knowing the story of her life makes them so much more sad... every time I read anything of hers I just wish I could have been there to put my arms around her and somehow make it better... although, of course, I am very unsure it would help against the demons she obviously faced.
Anyhow, I wanted to post this to the thread, it being one of her last poems. I always wonder if this poem somehow reflects on what she imagine would become of her... makes me shiver when I read it. (Altough, is there a suggestion for what she thought about doing with her children but could not when she faced that moment? I always wonder...)
EDGE
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.
By: Sylvia Plath
Anyhow, that's my two cents added.
~Zen _________________ ~ A woman should be an illusion. (Albert Einstein) ~
~ Don't part with your illusions. When they are gone you may still exist, but you have ceased to live. (Mark Twain) ~
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Hmmmm sorry Floridagirl you have me at a disadvantage who is Sylvia.
