Sylvia Plath affectionados

[byquist]

Why do you like Sylvia so much?

[mono]

Why do you like Sylvia so much?
Why not?
Though I know many people who like her, and many people who dislike her, I find her poetry and literature astounding, mostly due to her wit, passion, raw emotions, twists of plot, introspection, autobiographical style, and creativity.
Just out of curiosity, why do you ask?

[Reason is a cow]

I love Plath's work, personally, and Sexton's as well, because I have gone through many similar struggles, and can identify emotionally with the writing. Other than that, Palth's dark style is brilliant.

[byquist]

Mono,

Well, taking a poetry class at the moment, and seeing a very interesting tape on her life, I'm in the process of writing a paper on her, particularly that poem entitled "Elm" which from what I can gather is one of her most admired. My preconceptions, which were only mild to begin with, were very limited until scratching below the surface. She's a forceful spirit all right; too bad she didn't hold on for the long haul or get a second lease on life at that dire moment.

Byquist

[rabid reader]

I like Plathe because she is so utterly twisted. I love how she was this amazingly bright young lady, everyone she met thought the world of her, but inside she was this tortured, mangled mess of a soul.

Reading her work is more an appercaition of the nature of the mad, or the irony of a cereal killer (minus the killing), I just cannot get enough of it. Plathe is most definatly listed in my top ten favorite writers and top five poets.

[mono]

Well, taking a poetry class at the moment, and seeing a very interesting tape on her life, I'm in the process of writing a paper on her, particularly that poem entitled "Elm" which from what I can gather is one of her most admired. My preconceptions, which were only mild to begin with, were very limited until scratching below the surface. She's a forceful spirit all right; too bad she didn't hold on for the long haul or get a second lease on life at that dire moment.
'Elm,' indeed, one of my favorites, too --

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.

Is it the sea you hear in me,
Its dissatisfactions?
Or the voice of nothing, that was you madness?

Love is a shadow.
How you lie and cry after it.
Listen: these are its hooves: it has gone off, like a horse.

All night I shall gallup thus, impetuously,
Till your head is a stone, your pillow a little turf,
Echoing, echoing.

Or shall I bring you the sound of poisons?
This is rain now, the big hush.
And this is the fruit of it: tin white, like arsenic.

I have suffered the atrocity of sunsets.
Scorched to the root
My red filaments burn and stand,a hand of wires.

Now I break up in pieces that fly about like clubs.
A wind of such violence
Will tolerate no bystanding: I must shriek.

The moon, also, is merciless: she would drag me
Cruelly, being barren.
Her radiance scathes me. Or perhaps I have caught her.

I let her go. I let her go
Diminished and flat, as after radical surgery.
How your bad dreams possess and endow me.

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.

Clouds pass and disperse.
Are those the faces of love, those pale irretrievables?
Is it for such I agitate my heart?

I am incapable of more knowledge.
What is this, this face
So murderous in its strangle of branches? ----

Its snaky acids kiss.
It petrifies the will. These are the isolate, slow faults
That kill, that kill, that kill.
For me, however, nothing quite beats 'The Moon And The Yew Tree' --

The Moon And The Yew Tree

This is the light of the mind, cold and planetary.
The trees of the mind are black. The light is blue.
The grasses unload their griefs on my feet as if I were God,
Prickling my ankles and murmuring of their humility.
Fumy, spirituous mists inhabit this place
Separated from my house by a row of headstones.
I simply cannot see where there is to get to.

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.
Twice on Sunday, the bells startle the sky—
Eight great tongues affirming the Resurrection.
At the end, they soberly bong out their names.

The yew tree points up. It has a Gothic shape.
The eyes lift after it and find the moon.
The moon is my mother. She is not sweet like Mary.
Her blue garments unloose small bats and owls.
How I would like to believe in tenderness—
The face of the effigy, gentled by candles,
Bending, on me in particular, its mild eyes.

I have fallen a long way. Clouds are flowering
Blue and mystical over the face of the stars.
Inside the church, the saints will be all blue,
Floating on their delicate feet over the cold pews,
Their hands and faces stiff with holiness.
The moon sees nothing of this. She is bald and wild.
And the message of the yew tree is blackness—blackness and silence.