Finisterre
From ZuluNotes - Free Leaving Cert Notes
| English Poem | |
| |
| Finisterre | |
|---|---|
| Subject | English |
| Section | Poetry |
| Paper | 2 |
| Poet | Sylvia Plath |
| On syllabus | 2007, 2008 |
| Note | |
- This was the land's end: the last fingers, knuckled and rheumatic,
- Cramped on nothing. Black
- Admonitory cliffs, and the sea exploding
- With no bottom, or anything on the other side of it,
- Whitened by the faces of the drowned.
- Now it is only gloomy, a dump of rocks ---
- Leftover soldiers from old, messy wars.
- The sea cannons into their ear, but they don't budge.
- Other rocks hide their grudges under the water.
- The cliffs are edged with trefoils, stars and bells
- Such as fingers might embroider, close to death,
- Almost too small for the mists to bother with.
- The mists are part of the ancient paraphernalia ---
- Souls, rolled in the doom-noise of the sea.
- They bruise the rocks out of existence, then resurrect them.
- They go up without hope, like sighs.
- I walk among them, and they stuff my mouth with cotton.
- When they free me, I am beaded with tears.
- Our Lady of the Shipwrecked is striding toward the horizon,
- Her marble skirts blown back in two pink wings.
- A marble sailor kneels at her foot distractedly, and at his foot
- A peasant woman in black
- Is praying to the monument of the sailor praying.
- Our Lady of the Shipwrecked is three times life size,
- Her lips sweet with divinity.
- She does not hear what the sailor or the peasant is saying ---
- She is in love with the beautiful formlessness of the sea.
- Gull-colored laces flap in the sea drafts
- Beside the postcard stalls.
- The peasants anchor them with conches. One is told:
- "These are the pretty trinkets the sea hides,
- Little shells made up into necklaces and toy ladies.
- They do not come from with Bay of the Dead down there,
- But from another place, tropical and blue,
- We have never been to.
- These are our crêpes. Eat them before they blow cold."
