Dabblings in poetry: Sylvia Plath

I should have loved a thunderbird instead;
At least when spring comes they roar back again.
I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead.
(I think I made you up inside my head.)

~ Mad Girl's Love Song, 1953

This verse was quoted in an unrelated book I was reading; poetry only very rarely grips me as viscerally and immediately as these few lines did. I had to look up the full text online because it wasn't even included in my collected Plath edition. (It was worth looking up. Holy fuck, I love this poem!)

But then I had the collected Plath down from the bookshelf, so I figured I might as well keep reading. Here are some excerpts from a few favourites.

( Soliloquy of the Solipsist )

( Frog Autumn )

( April 18 )

( Dirge for a Joker )

I didn't read cover to cover, but one thing that stood out to me was how many more poems I liked from among the juvenilia than from her published volumes. That could be due to how they were collected - only 50, from a few hundred - but there's also a raw emotionality to these early efforts that connects with me more than some of her more sophisticated, "mature" work.

Also, Mad Girl's Love Song is still my favourite of them all. <3