Sylvia Plath

Lady Lazarus

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By Sylvia Plath

I have done it again.

One years in every ten

I manage it —

A sort of walking miracle, my skin

Bright as Nazi Lampshade,

My right foot

A paperweight,

My face a featureless, fine

Jew linen.

Peel of 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 smiling woman.

I am only thirty

And like a 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

Then unwrap me hand and foot—

The big strip tease.

Gentleman, 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, same face, the same brute

Amused shout:

‘A miracle!’

That knocks me out.

There is a change

For the eying 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.

Edmund Spenser George Herbert How can you improve your english IGNOUassignment Kubla khan Poem RTC poem Sailing to Byzantium summary Sylvia Plath The Waste Land

Ariel

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By Sylvia Plath

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.

George Herbert IGNOUassignment poem summary Sylvia Plath

Daddy (poem)

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By Sylvia Plath

You do not, 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.

Daddy, I have had killed you.

You died before I had time—

Marble-heavy, a bag full of God,

Ghastly statue with one grey toe

Big as a Frisco seal

And a head in the freakish Atlantic

Where it pours bean green over blue

In the waters off beautiful Nauset.

I used to pray to recover you.

Ach, du.

In the German tongue, in the Polish town

Scraped flat by the roller

Of wars, wars, wars.

But the name of the town is common.

My Polack Friend

Says there are a dozen or two

So I could never tell where you

Put your foot, your root,

I never could talk to you.

The tongue stuck in my jaw.

It stuck in a barbed wire snare.

Ich, ich, ich, ich,

I could hardly speak.

I thought every German was you.

And the language obscene

An engine, an engine

Chuffing me off like a Jew.

A Jew to Dachau, Auschwitz, Belsen. 

I began to talk like a Jew.

I think I may well be a Jew.

The snows of Tyrol, the clear beer of Vienna

Are not very pure or true.

With my gypsy ancestress and my weird luck

And my Taroc pack and my Taroc pack

I may be a bit of a Jew.

I have always been scared of you,

With your Luftwaffe, your gobbledygoo.

And your neat mustache

And your Aryan eye, bright blue.

Panzer -man, Panzer -man, O you

Not God but a swastika

So black no sky could squeak through

Every woman adores a Fascist,

The boot in the face, the brute

Brute heart of a brute like you

You stand at the blackboard, daddy

In the picture I have of you,

A cleft in your chin instead of your foot

But no less a devil for that, no not

Any less the black man who

Bit my pretty red heart in two

I was ten when they buried you.

At twenty at I tried to die

And get back, back, back to you

I thought even the bones would do

But they pulled me out of the sack,

And they stuck me together with glue

And then I knew what to do

I made a model of you

A man in black with Meinkampf look

And a love of a rack and the screw.

And I said I do I do.

So daddy I am finally through.

The black telephone`s off at the root,

The voices just can`t worm through.

If I`ve killed one man, I`ve killed two

The vampire who said he was you

And drank my blood for a year,

Seven years, if you want to know.

Daddy you can lie back now.

There is 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.

https://shaiderenglish.wordpress.com/2022/03/20/the-colossus/

The Colossus

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By Sylvia Plath

I shall never get you put together entirely,

Pieced, glued, and properly jointed.

Mule- bray, pig- grunt and bawdy cackles

Proceed from your great lips.

It’s worse than a barnyard.

Perhaps you consider yourself an oracle,

Mouthpiece of the dead, or of some god or other.

Thirty years now I have labored

To dredge the slit from your throat.

I am the none the wiser.

Scaling little ladders with gluepots and pails of Lysol

I crawl like an ant in mourning

Over the weedy acres of your brow

To mend the immense skull- plates of and clear

The bald, white tumult of your eyes.

A blue sky out of the Oresteia

Arches above us. O father, all by yourself

You are pithy and historical as the Roman forum.

I open my lunch on a hill of black cypress.

Your fluted bones and acanthine hair are littered

In old their anarchy to the horizon- line.

 It would take more than a lightning- stroke

To create such a ruin

Nights, I squat in the cornucopia

Of your left ear, out of the wind,

Counting the reed stars and those of plum- color.

The sun rises under the pillar of your tongue.

My hours are married to shadow.

No longer do I listen for the scrape of a keel

On the bank stones of the landing.

Sylvia Plath: suicidal journey

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  • Sylvia Plath was an American poet, a novelist, and a short story writer, born on 27, October 1932 in Boston, Massachusetts US.
  • Her father, Otto Plath was an entomology
  • Her mother, Aurelia Schober Plath was a second generation American of Austrian descent.
  • She was highly known for the confession style in her work.
  • Her IQ was 160.
  • Her pen name was Victoria Lucas, because
  • She started writing at very young age of eight.
  • Boston Traveler was first poem published by her.
  • Plath studied and graduated from Smith college in Massachusetts, and Cambridge England.
  • By the time she arrived smith college, she wrote over 50 short stories published in raft magazines.
  • At the smith college she majored in English and won many prizes and Scholarships.
  • She was a great admirer of Dylan Thomas, W.B Yeats and Marianne Moore (she loved Dylan Thomas)
  • She married Ted Hughes, a well- known poet in 1957, and had two children, Frieda Rebecca and Nicholas Ferrar in 1962.
  • Soon, she left Ted Hughes with both the children knowing he has affair with Assia Wewill.
  • After separation of her husband, Plath produced 40 poems of rage, despair and vengeance in less than two months.
  • Plath was clinically depressed for most of her adult life, and treated with electroconvulsive therapy multiple times.
  • She attempted many sucides because of her depression.
  • On august 1953, she overdose on sleeping pills.
  • On June 1962, she drove her car off the side of the road into a river.
  • Eventually in 11 Feb, 1963 she killed herself at the age of 30, with carbon monoamine oxidase inhibitor poisonous on.
  • Plath struggled with `insomnia`. And because of this she lost 20 pounds (9kg).
  • She expresses her own condition in her poetry.
  • She mentioned her depression, constant agitation, sucidal thoughts and inability to cope with daily life.
  • She awarded with Pulitzer prize in 1982, for `the bell jar`.

Notable work:

  • The colossus, 1960- 62
  • The bell jar, 1963 and in us, 1971
  • Double exposure, 1963
  • Ariel, 1965 (after two year of her demise published by Ted Hughes)
  • Lady Lazarus (she expresses her suicidal tendency beyond her limitation)

The Children of Sylvia Plath:

Daughter, Freida Rebecca is a writer and artist, and son Nicholas Ferrar hanged himself at his home in Fairbanks, Alaska following a history of depression in March 16, 2009.