Home » Famous Poems » Sylvia Plath » Elm

Elm

for Ruth Fainlight


I know the bottom, she says.
 I know it with my great tap root;
It is what you fear.

I do not fear it: I have been there.


Is it the sea you hear in me,
Its dissatisfactions?
Or the voice of nothing, that was you madness?

Love is a shadow.

How you lie and cry after it.

Listen: these are its hooves: it has gone off, like a horse.


All night I shall gallup thus, impetuously,
Till your head is a stone, your pillow a little turf,
Echoing, echoing.


Or shall I bring you the sound of poisons?
This is rain now, the big hush.

And this is the fruit of it: tin white, like arsenic.


I have suffered the atrocity of sunsets.

Scorched to the root
My red filaments burn and stand,a hand of wires.


Now I break up in pieces that fly about like clubs.

A wind of such violence
Will tolerate no bystanding: I must shriek.


The moon, also, is merciless: she would drag me
Cruelly, being barren.

Her radiance scathes me.
 Or perhaps I have caught her.


I let her go.
 I let her go
Diminished and flat, as after radical surgery.

How your bad dreams possess and endow me.


I am inhabited by a cry.

Nightly it flaps out
Looking, with its hooks, for something to love.


I am terrified by this dark thing
That sleeps in me;
All day I feel its soft, feathery turnings, its malignity.


Clouds pass and disperse.

Are those the faces of love, those pale irretrievables?
Is it for such I agitate my heart?

I am incapable of more knowledge.

What is this, this face
So murderous in its strangle of branches? ----

Its snaky acids kiss.

It petrifies the will.
 These are the isolate, slow faults
That kill, that kill, that kill.