Sylvia Plath - Elm
From ZuluNotes - Free Leaving Cert Notes
| English Poem | |
| |
| Sylvia Plath - Elm | |
|---|---|
| Subject | English |
| Section | Poetry |
| Paper | 2 |
| Poet | Sylvia Plath |
| On syllabus | 2007, 2008 |
| Note | |
The Poem
- 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 your 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 gallop 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, this 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 hiss.
- It petrifies the will. These are the isolate, slow faults
- That kill, that kill, that kill.
