Sylvia Plath was born on October 27, 1932 in Boston. Poet, he also wrote prose and essays. Had a complicated life, with mental problems since his youth and a depressive personality. And her destiny was marked by divorcing her husband. But we are celebrating the anniversary of his birth and the best memory is reading some of his poems. These are my chosen ones.
Sylvia Plath
He published his first poem with only eight years and continued writing stories and verses that he sent to various magazines, which allowed him to have his first successes. In the mid-50s, and when I was already suffering from several mental disorders, graduated from Smith College. But before he went through a psychiatric hospital for having attempted suicide.
Got a Fulbright scholarship and he was at the University of Cambridge, where he continued his literary work. There he met Ted hughes, with whom he married and had two children. But the marriage broke up for one infidelity of her husband. In that situation, with two children in charge, ill and barely with money, the suicide it came back to haunt him. And at just thirty years old, he killed himself by suffocating on gas.
His works include titles such as The colossus, Crossing the water, Winter trees o The bell jar. Received the Pulitzer Prize in 1982, as posthumous, for their Complete poems.
poems
Words
Axes
After whose blow the wood resounds,
And the echoes!
Echoes receding
From the center like horses.
The SAP
It swells like tears, like the
Water straining
For resetting your mirror
On the rock
That falls and turns
A white skull,
Eaten by weeds.
Years later
I meet them on the way -
Dry words without a rider.
The tireless noise of hooves.
While
From the bottom of the well, fixed stars
They rule a life.
***
Rival
If the moon smiled, it would look like you.
You leave the same impression
Of something very beautiful, but annihilating.
Both are very adept at borrowing light.
His mouth in O laments for the world; yours is unshakable,
And your first gift is to turn everything to stone.
I wake up in a mausoleum; are you here,
Hammering my fingers on the marble table, searching for cigarettes,
Malevolent as a woman, but not as nervous,
And dying to say something unanswerable.
The moon also lowers its subjects,
But during the day it is ridiculous.
Your dissatisfactions, on the other hand,
They come through the mailbox with loving regularity,
White and empty, expansive like carbon monoxide.
There is no day that is safe from news of you,
Through Africa, perhaps, but thinking of me.
***
I am vertical
I'd rather want to be horizontal.
I am not a tree with deep roots
on land, sipping minerals and maternal love,
thus re-blooming from March to March,
shining, nor pride of parterre
white of admiring shouts, heavily repainted,
and on the verge, I ignore, of losing its petals.
Compared to me he is immortal
the tree, and the boldest flowers:
I would like the age of one, the recklessness of the others.
Tonight, in infinitesimal light
of stars, trees and flowers
they have spread their great freshness.
I walk among them, they don't see me, when I sleep
sometimes I think that I brother
more than ever: my mind goes down.
It is more normal, cast. Heaven
and I had an open conversation, so I will
more useful when I finally unite with the earth.
Tree and flower will touch me, see me.
***
Mirror
I am silver and exact. Unprejudiced.
And how much I see I drink without delay
just as it is, intact of love or hate.
I'm not cruel, just truthful:
quadrangular eye of a little god.
On the opposite wall I pass the time
meditating: pink, mottled. I've been looking at her for so long
that is part of my heart. But it moves.
Faces and darkness separate us
non stop. Now I am a lake. Close
over me a woman, seek my reach.
Turn to those fallacious fireflies
of the moon. Your back I see, faithfully
I reflect it. She pays me with tears
and gestures. Cares. She comes and goes.
His face with the night replaces
the mornings. I was drowned girl and old