Read The Colossus: And Other Poems Online
Authors: Sylvia Plath
The Colossus: And Other Poems
The Colossus & Other Poems
Sylvia Plath was born in 1932 in Massachusetts. She began publishing poems and stories as a teenager and by the time she entered Smith College had won several poetry prizes. She was a Fulbright Scholar in Cambridge, England, and married British poet Ted Hughes in London in 1956. The young couple moved to the States, where Plath became an instructor at Smith College. Later, they moved back to England, where Plath continued writing poetry and wrote her novel,
The Bell Jar
, which was first published under the pseudonym Victoria Lucas in England in 1963. On February 11, 1963, Plath committed suicide. Her
Collected Poems
, published posthumously in 1981, won the Pulitzer Prize.
FIRST VINTAGE INTERNATIONAL EDITION, MAY
1998
Copyright
© 1957, 1958, 1959, 1960, 1961, 1962,
by Sylvia Plath
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published in hardcover in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., in 1962.
First published in England in somewhat different form by William Heinemann Ltd.
eISBN: 978-0-307-80882-0
Random House Web address:
www.randomhouse.com
v3.1
For Ted
Arts in Society, The Atlantic Monthly, Audience, Chelsea, Critical Quarterly, Encounter, Grecourt Review, Harper’s Magazine, The Horn Book, The Hudson Review, The Kenyon Review, London Magazine, Mademoiselle, The Nation, The Observer, The Partisan Review, Poetry, The Sewanee Review, The Spectator, The Texas Literary Quarterly, and The Times Literary Supplement; also The New Yorker
, where the following poems originally appeared: “Hardcastle Crags,” “Man in Black,” “Mussel Hunter at Rock Harbor,” and “Watercolor of Grantchester Meadows.” I would also like to thank Elizabeth Ames and the Trustees at Yaddo, where many of the poems were written.
The fountains are dry and the roses over.
Incense of death. Your day approaches.
The pears fatten like little buddhas.
A blue mist is dragging the lake.
You move through the era of fishes,
The smug centuries of the pig—
Head, toe and finger
Come clear of the shadow. History
Nourishes these broken flutings,
These crowns of acanthus,
And the crow settles her garments.
You inherit white heather, a bee’s wing,
Two suicides, the family wolves,
Hours of blankness. Some hard stars
Already yellow the heavens.
The spider on its own string
Crosses the lake. The worms
Quit their usual habitations.
The small birds converge, converge
With their gifts to a difficult borning.
1The day she visited the dissecting room
They had four men laid out, black as burnt turkey,
Already half unstrung. A vinegary fume
Of the death vats clung to them;
The white-smocked boys started working.
The head of his cadaver had caved in,
And she could scarcely make out anything
In that rubble of skull plates and old leather.
A sallow piece of string held it together.
In their jars the snail-nosed babies moon and glow.
He hands her the cut-out heart like a cracked heirloom.
In Brueghel’s panorama of smoke and slaughter
Two people only are blind to the carrion army:
He, afloat in the sea of her blue satin
Skirts, sings in the direction
Of her bare shoulder, while she bends,
Fingering a leaflet of music, over him,
Both of them deaf to the fiddle in the hands
Of the death’s-head shadowing their song.
These Flemish lovers flourish; not for long.
Yet desolation, stalled in paint, spares the little country
Foolish, delicate, in the lower right-hand corner.
It was not a heart, beating,
That muted boom, that clangor
Far off, not blood in the ears
Drumming up any fever
To impose on the evening.
The noise came from the outside:
A metal detonating
Native, evidently, to
These stilled suburbs: nobody
Startled at it, though the sound
Shook the ground with its pounding.
It took root at my coming
Till the thudding source, exposed,
Confounded inept guesswork:
Framed in windows of Main Street’s
Silver factory, immense
Hammers hoisted, wheels turning,
Stalled, let fall their vertical
Tonnage of metal and wood;
Stunned the marrow. Men in white
Undershirts circled, tending
Without stop those greased machines,
Tending, without stop, the blunt
Indefatigable fact.