Sylvia Plath reading 'The Applicant'

Рет қаралды 55,931

8 жыл бұрын

First, are you our sort of a person?
Do you wear
A glass eye, false teeth or a crutch,
A brace or a hook,
Rubber breasts or a rubber crotch,
Stitches to show something's missing? No, no? Then
How can we give you a thing?
Stop crying.
Open your hand.
Empty? Empty. Here is a hand
To fill it and willing
To bring teacups and roll away headaches
And do whatever you tell it.
Will you marry it?
It is guaranteed
To thumb shut your eyes at the end
And dissolve of sorrow.
We make new stock from the salt.
I notice you are stark naked.
How about this suit -
Black and stiff, but not a bad fit.
Will you marry it?
It is waterproof, shatterproof, proof
Against fire and bombs through the roof.
Believe me, they'll bury you in it.
Now your head, excuse me, is empty.
I have the ticket for that.
Come here, sweetie, out of the closet.
Well, what do you think of that?
Naked as paper to start
But in twenty-five years she'll be silver,
In fifty, gold.
A living doll, everywhere you look.
It can sew, it can cook,
It can talk, talk, talk.
It works, there is nothing wrong with it.
You have a hole, it's a poultice.
You have an eye, it's an image.
My boy, it's your last resort.
Will you marry it, marry it, marry it.

Пікірлер: 16

@stantonhager2290 Жыл бұрын

Tudor C, Thank you for adding an element of Sylvia Plath that barely exists elsewhere online: her poems--not gossip about the poet but the poems themselves, lucidly and compellingly read by Plath herself. I particularly thank you for wholly disregarding all lurid references to the turmoil and suffering of her lived life. I just finished spending several hours searching online for critical discussions of Plath's poetic craft, poetic inventiveness, and poetic accomplishments, all of which I regard as great as that of the most celebrated poets of the 20th century. What, you might wonder, did my online search turn up at even the most prestigious poetry websites? Hardly anything more than obsessive, redundant, and gossipy chat about the poet's numerous psychiatric hospitalizations, her electroshock treatments, her constant suicidal ideation and frequent suicide attempts, the shameful suppositions about what roles her father and mother might have played in her ruin, the perils of "confessional poetry," etc. But no Plath subject did I discover more titillating to the community of the literati than her turbulent marriage to Ted Hughes: the invented, imagined son-of-a-bitch, wife-cheating "vampyr" who thrived on tormenting her. The urban legend of his brutal treatment of Plath is so obsessively written about all over the web (on pages of supermarket tabloid variety), that if a shred of supporting fact existed, it would smugly convince thousands that Hughes himself was the person who shoved Plath's head into the oven. Enough rant. More listening. In future, Sylvia Plath's entrances in my life will be strictly through the poems, especially through the marvelous recordings you have provided.

@daniellewieners4750 8 ай бұрын

Thankyou, she is in my opinion not was but is my Heroine.