Sylvia Plath – Admonition

If you dissect a bird

To diagram the tongue

You'll cut the chord

Articulating song.

If you flay a beast

To marvel at the mane

You'll wreck the rest

From which the fur began.

If you pluck out the heart

To find what makes it move,

You'll halt the clock

That syncopates our love.

John Keats – Bards of Passion and of Mirth...

Bards of Passion and of Mirth,

Ye have left your souls on earth!

Have ye souls in heaven too,

Doubled-lived in regions new?

Yes, and those of heaven commune

With the spheres of sun and moon;

With the noise of fountains wondrous,

And the parle of voices thund'rous;

With the whisper of heaven's trees

And one another, in soft ease

Seated on Elysian lawns

Browsed by none but Dian's fawns;

Underneath large blue-bells tented,

Where the daisies are rose-scented,

And the rose herself has got

Perfume which on earth is not;

Where the nightingale doth sing

Not a senseless, tranced thing,

But divine melodious truth;

Philosophic numbers smooth;

Tales and golden histories

Of heaven and its mysteries.

Thus ye live on high, and then

On the earth ye live again;

And the souls ye left behind you

Teach us, here, the way to find you,

Where your other souls are joying,

Never slumber'd, never cloying.

Here, your earth-born souls still speak

To mortals, of their little week;

Of their sorrows and delights;

Of their passions and their spites;

Of their glory and their shame;

What doth strengthen and what maim.

Thus ye teach us, every day,

Wisdom, though fled far away.

Bards of Passion and of Mirth,

Ye have left your souls on earth!

Ye have souls in heaven too,

Double-lived in regions new!

Sylvia Plath – All The Dead Dears

Rigged poker -stiff on her back

With a granite grin

This antique museum-cased lady

Lies, companioned by the gimcrack

Relics of a mouse and a shrew

That battened for a day on her ankle-bone.

These three, unmasked now, bear

Dry witness

To the gross eating game

We'd wink at if we didn't hear

Stars grinding, crumb by crumb,

Our own grist down to its bony face.

How they grip us through think and thick,

These barnacle dead!

This lady here's no kin

Of mine, yet kin she is: she'll suck

Blood and whistle my narrow clean

To prove it. As I think now of her hand,

From the mercury-backed glass

Mother, grandmother, greatgrandmother

Reach hag hands to haul me in,

And an image looms under the fishpond surface

Where the daft father went down

With orange duck-feet winnowing this hair ---

All the long gone darlings: They

Get back, though, soon,

Soon: be it by wakes, weddings,

Childbirths or a family barbecue:

Any touch, taste, tang's

Fit for those outlaws to ride home on,

And to sanctuary: usurping the armchair

Between tick

And tack of the clock, until we go,

Each skulled-and-crossboned Gulliver

Riddled with ghosts, to lie

Deadlocked with them, taking roots as cradles rock.

Rudyard Kipling – A Ballade of Jakko Hill

One moment bid the horses wait,

Since tiffin is not laid till three,

Below the upward path and straight

You climbed a year ago with me.

Love came upon us suddenly

And loosed -- an idle hour to kill --

A headless, armless armory

That smote us both on Jakko Hill.

Ah Heaven! we would wait and wait

Through Time and to Eternity!

Ah Heaven! we could conquer Fate

With more than Godlike constancy

I cut the date upon a tree --

Here stand the clumsy figures still:

"10-7-85, A.D."

Damp with the mist of Jakko Hill.

What came of high resolve and great,

And until Death fidelity!

Whose horse is waiting at your gate?

Whose 'rickshaw-wheels ride over me?

No Saint's, I swear; and -- let me see

To-night what names your programme fill --

We drift asunder merrily,

As drifts the mist on Jakko Hill.

L'envoi.

Princess, behold our ancient state

Has clean departed; and we see

'Twas Idleness we took for Fate

That bound light bonds on you and me.

Amen! Here ends the comedy

Where it began in all good will;

Since Love and Leave together flee

As driven mist on Jakko Hill!

Sylvia Plath – Aquatic Nocturne

deep in liquid

turquoise slivers

of dilute light

quiver in thin streaks

of bright tinfoil

on mobile jet:

pale flounder

waver by

tilting silver:

in the shallows

agile minnows

flicker gilt:

grapeblue mussels

dilate lithe and

pliant valves:

dull lunar globes

of blubous jellyfish

glow milkgreen:

eels twirl

in wily spirals

on elusive tails:

adroir lobsters

amble darkly olive

on shrewd claws:

down where sound

comes blunt and wan

like the bronze tone

of a sunken gong.