Sylvia Plath - The Moon and the Yew Tree

This is the light of the mind, cold and planetary
The trees of the mind are black. The light is blue.
The grasses unload their griefs on my feet as if I were God
Prickling my ankles and murmuring of their humility
Fumy, spiritous mists inhabit this place.
Separated from my house by a row of headstones.
I simply cannot see where there is to get to.

The moon is no door. It is a face in its own right,
White as a knuckle and terribly upset.
It drags the sea after it like a dark crime; it is quiet
With the O-gape of complete despair. I live here.
Twice on Sunday, the bells startle the sky --
Eight great tongues affirming the Resurrection
At the end, they soberly bong out their names.

The yew tree points up, it has a Gothic shape.
The eyes lift after it and find the moon.
The moon is my mother. She is not sweet like Mary.
Her blue garments unloose small bats and owls.
How I would like to believe in tenderness -
The face of the effigy, gentled by candles,
Bending, on me in particular, its mild eyes.

I have fallen a long way. Clouds are flowering
Blue and mystical over the face of the stars
Inside the church, the saints will all be blue,
Floating on their delicate feet over the cold pews,
Their hands and faces stiff with holiness.
The moon sees nothing of this. She is bald and wild.
And the message of the yew tree is blackness - blackness and silence.

by Sylvia Plath




 

Sylvia Plath - Years

 

 

 

 

They enter as animals from the outer

Space of holly where spikes
Are not thoughts I turn on, like a Yogi,
But greenness, darkness so pure
They freeze and are.

O God, I am not like you
In your vacuous black,
Stars stuck all over, bright stupid confetti.
Eternity bores me,
I never wanted it.

What I love is
The piston in motion . . .
My soul dies before it.
And the hooves of the horses,
There merciless churn.

And you, great Stasis . . .
What is so great in that!
Is it a tiger this year, this roar at the door?
It is a Christus,
The awful God-bit in him.

Dying to fly and be done with it?
The blood berries are themselves,
They are very still.
The hooves will not have it,
In blue distance the pistons hiss.

by Sylvia Plath

 

 

 

 

 

 

Sylvia Plath - The Colossus

 

 

 

"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 silt from your throat.
I am none the wiser.

Scaling little ladders with glue pots and pails of lysol
I crawl like an ant in mourning
Over the weedy acres of your brow
To mend the immense skull plates and clear
The bald, white tumuli 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 their old 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 red 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 blank stones of the landing."

by Sylvia Plath

 

 

 

 

 

 

Happy Anniversary! Journeys of a Would-Be Poet

Dolan's pub (Limerick, Ireland) - Irish Traditional Music Session

July 7, 2015

The Monahan Twig; John In The Mist

Apr 25, 2021

Aspirations of a Would-Be Poet

by R.E. Slater

October 6, 2009

Thanks to a local group of Celtic musicians I stumbled upon last evening I have been able to re-imagine and complete a new set of verses today to add to a growing portfolio; this time writing of a Brigadoon-like experience through the greater length of today. Now for some rest after a long day of writing. My mind and hands are tired. I will take the rest of the week to firm up the edges of this new poem and refine it to make it more clear and more readable.

Last week I finished a personal narrative I had started working on in April as an all-too-common experience in my childhood. It starts out as a simple story but gathers additional layers of meaning as I add more thoughts and details to what at first seems a plain homily. I intend to add it to a selection of other personal narratives which will flesh each other out and perhaps provide historical relevance for the times I am writing about.

Otherwise, I spent one day simply re-organizing my stories in relation to one another and setting them into slip-case books which I can manage should I need to re-arrange them again. I retitled each book and can better find each written verse in compendium to one another. While doing this I found several poems which needed a word here or there, an adverb, a verb, a pronoun in re-reading them in a fresh light gained by distance away from these pieces. Without these additions they felt awkward to me and/or incomplete to the theme(s) I had intended. Even though I keep telling myself to refrain from overmuch editing at this point - that they are what they are and should now be left alone.

I should also add that I started on a short story and added a poem to it which is now completed even though the story isn't. I've also added some pictures to this story to help give it a more readable symmetry in describing what I was seeing. I think many readers will be better able to visualize what I'm writing about through the usage of these photos. Because of this, I may wish to add personal photo stock selectively to several previously written stories to help enliven their pages as well. Further, there is a collection of poems I'm writing as one complete set which will be related to this newest story either directly or indirectly. To date it consists of 4-6 pages contained in 4 sections and may grow by a couple more pages into another narrative homily that I wish to relate since my childhood stood so vastly different from many my age.

Apart from personal narratives I have tried to write descriptively in various styles and, have another 30 or so poems roughed out in various stages of completion. Either as legends or tales, allegories or interpretive parables, sonnets or songs, etc. When these are completed I should like to try my hand at more irregular lyrical poetry and break away from the symmetry I've produced in the first year of my experience. Which, by the way, had begun in the month of October of last year... so this then is my first anniversary of writing. I've come a long way but have so much more to write about and hope to have the chance to complete what I've started and intend to finish.

Anyway, unlike my first set of 100 poems, I think I'll need to read some poets in order to be able to copy their styles since their styles are so foreign from my mindset. I may be a year away from actually beginning this task since I am not finished with my current set of tasks.

But afterwards when I am done I should then like to try something remarkably different and foreign to my mind and ear. I think Dylan Thomas may be a good example to me however I do not like his rambling verse which seems to lose its meaning over the distance of time. So, should I chose to go this route, I'll try not to ramble and try as best I can to keep it relevant despite the movement of culture, era and language away from my era. This will be hard to do I think but good poets can keep their relevancy for the most part. Since I do not expect readers to be historical anthropologists and culturally literate I will try to write about our common condition and not so specifically as to lose its translation. At least that is my hope.

I can tell that I have been rambling because I am so tired but I thought to put these several lists together to remind myself of my journey and possible future goals.  Forgive me and apologies and good night.

RE Slater

October 6, 2009

End Note (June 25, 2021). I have no idea what I was talking about when mentioning Dylan Thomas years ago! I love his poetry. Love it! - re slater 

My Writing Progress Thus Far

I would like to say at the onset that I reserve the right to ramble in these blogs and not have to think about how I'm going to say something. More simply, my blogs are not how I write but a form of personal communication about what I am doing. Thanks for allowing me this unstructured pleasure.

As earlier mentioned last month, I have been working through both recent and older poems I've written and am glad I have. Many were in serious need of editing after reviewing them. Maybe because I'm becoming less rusty at writing or because I can better critique my past writings. Whatever it is, I find that this has become a necessary task once a poem has been produced and has laid in the closet for awhile simmering and aging.

For example, the Celtic poem I had written changed again when I added 4 end-verses to it. It took a cool allegory and gave it wings so that it tied all previous verses back to itself and to each other. Thus giving to the poem more flexibility and freedom.

As another example, the poem "Looking Glass" was six months old and in great need of repair and updating. After which it seemed to be able to fairly "sing" on its own. If I had not looked at it then its flaws would not have been seen.

Thus, by allowing several months or more to go by I can better re-visualize what I was trying to say originally and can more immediately see the errors within that piece. That, and the fact that my writing skills are slowly improving so that I have more ideas that I can add with a larger vocabulary and greater personal familiarity with stylistic differences.

Overall my word-pictures seem to be getting better and I am becoming more comfortable mixing my metaphors and themes in new integrated ways that provide quicker apprehension and sensual binding of the reader to the main themes.

I'm also discovering that language is very fluid because of its symbolic nature and cultural context and that to say something simply may be impossible yet the most practical and important task to work on. Succinctness and conveyance have been my greatest struggles and best rewards.

And then there is the element of meter; I had one poem I had written several months ago set in the standard 4-line meter form. But however much I tried to make it work (upon re-edit) I found it simply wasn't working. And so I changed it around to 9-line meter which is irregular and offbeat in rhythm. That changed made the entire poem so much better I couldn't believe it! Who would've thought?! By allowing it to speak to me on its own terms instead of on my own terms, and by learning to listening to it rather than forcing it into something it was not for, made all the difference. Thus, I'm learning that each poem is unique and requires me to better listen to what it is trying to say.

RE Slater
September 16, 2009

Still writing

Today I wrote a poem of 8 lines in 10 stanzas and kept it as sparse as I could. Played around with the elements, tones and colors on this one.

A couple days ago I finished a Gaelic poem started 4 weeks ago. This was my first attempt at an allegory. I wanted it to feel like a Charlotte Bronte read on the moors. Coincidentally, it ended up thematically paralleling 2 interpretive parables written a couple months ago which are still being finalized. So I think I will group them together in their own section.

On my short list to do, I would like to work through and finalize 10 recent poems and 1 short story I've roughed out. Each unit is more-or-less completed but I like to go back and edit them after letting some time go by. They read differently to me when I do this as opposed to when I am actually writing them. For me, it helps to give an "outsider's perspective" to gauge whether they're interesting, readable, clumsy, awkward, and so on.

Several of these poems are lengthy and will be more demanding in their review. I have one that is especially long - about 12 pages; but it's a good narrative broken into 4 sections and will be fun to ramble through while thinking over the content I'm presenting.

Lastly, the past two months I've reworked several of my "finished" poems. Each of these were at least 6 months old and in need of updating. Why? It seems that the more I write, the more words and styles I have in my head which then helps me to better edit my past completed works. And since I'm so new to writing, it seems that for now I'll have to allow this habit. But over time I hope to limit myself from this type of "introspective" labor and simple let the poem pass or fail on its own merit once they are submitted to the "done" side of the ledger.

RE Slater

August 27, 2009