metaphorformetaphor:

The clocks slid back an hour
and stole light from my life
as I walked through the wrong part of town,
mourning our love.
And, of course, unmendable rain
fell to the bleak streets
where I felt my heart gnaw
at all our mistakes.

If the darkening sky could lift
more than one hour from this day
there are words I would never have said
nor heard you say.

But we will be dead, as we know,
beyond all light.
These are the shortened days
and the endless nights.

— Carol Ann Duffy, from “Mean Time,” Love Poems (Picador, 2010)

lovingsylvia:

“I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead;
I lift my lids and all is born again.
(I think I made you up inside my head.)”

–from “Mad Girl’s Love Song - A Villanelle”, 1954

“I made a model of you”

–from “Daddy”, 12 October 1962

“How we need another soul to cling to, another body to keep us warm. To rest and trust; to give your soul in confidence: I need this, I need someone to pour myself into.”

–The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath, entry no. 25, 1950

“I do it so it feels like hell.
I do it so it feels real.”

–from “Lady Lazarus”, 23-29 October 1962

“I thought, ‘This is what it is to be happy.’”

–The Bell Jar, Chapter Eight, 1963

“It was my first big chance, but here I was, sitting back and letting it run through my fingers like so much water.”

–The Bell Jar, Chapter One, 1963

“Perfection is terrible, it cannot have children.”

–from “The Munich Mannequins”, 28 January 1963

“For the eyeing of my scars, there is a charge
For the hearing of my heart–”

–from “Lady Lazarus”, 23-29 October 1962

“Everything is the same but different.”

–The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath, entry no. 132, 1952

“I am myself. That is not enough.”

–from “The Jailer”, 17 October 1962

“If you expect nothing from somebody you are never disappointed.”

–The Bell Jar, Chapter Five, 1963

“I desire the things which will destroy me in the end…“

–The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath, entry no. 63, 1951

“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.)”

–from “Mad Girl’s Love Song - A Villanelle”, 1954

“I felt very empty, the way the eye of a tornado must feel, moving dully along in the middle of the surrounding hullabaloo.”

–The Bell Jar, Chapter One, 1963

“It is so much safer not to feel”

–The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath, entry no. 155, 1952

“I am calm. I am calm. It is the calm before something awful“

–“Three Women: A Poem for Three Voices“, March 1962

“We should meet in another life, we should meet in air,
Me and you.”

–from “Lesbos”, 18 October 1962

“Out of the ash
I rise with my red hair
And I eat men like air.”

–from “Lady Lazarus”, 23-29 October 1962

peachesandmedicalscream:

Link to read the poem:

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/178974

            The  poem “Tulips”  is  a  representative  of  transitional  poems  of  1961.  The  poem  is  a metaphor  of  motionlessness  due  to  domesticity;  the  tulips are “like  an  awful  baby”  represent  the responsibilities of life, where Plath feels constricted by it. Tulips take her far away from her wish to “lay hands turned up and be utterly empty,”“where tulips are too red in the first place.” The repetitive images of the red tulips and private symbolic language allow Plath to bring the reader into  a  world  of  her  own  personal  motionlessness.  Having been through a miscarriage,  being restricted by motherhood and domesticity, the poem “Tulips” truly captures the heavy weight she experienced. The blood “redness” of the tulips bothers her, as she perceives them as an offense: 

The walls, also, seen to be warming themselves

The tulips should be behind the bars like dangerous animals;

They are opening like the mouth of some great African cat”            (57-59)

          In the second stanza Plath reduced herself to an object, a“stupid pupil,” she  lays on the bed watching nurses passing by “they have no trouble” unlike herself “they bring the numbness in their  bright  needles.”  These  images  of  the  nurses  help  her  detach  from  the  reality,  where  she imagines her body as a “pebble.” However, the family photo brings her back from the temporary imaginary place to the world where she has responsibilities: “my husband and child smiling out of  the  family  photo/  Their  smiles  catch  onto  my  skin,  little  smiling  hooks.”  Plath  perceives herself as “a thirty-years-old cargo boat” that has a lot of “cargo” to carry, meaning that she has a lot of responsibilities, from which she is tired and again slips into her imaginary place, where she sees  herself  as  nun.  She  is  purified  now.  There  is  a  drastic  chance  in  the  tone  in  the  following stanza “I  didn’ t  want  any  flowers.”  This  emphasizes  that  she  doesn’ t  want  the  responsibilities, even  though  she  can  be  purified  if  she  has  them.  Responsibilities  constrict  her,  making  her motionless,  but  she  just  wants  the  peace  and  tranquility: “I only  wanted/  To  lie  with  my  hands turned up and be utterly empty.”The tulips, as a metaphor of responsibilities, seem to not let her forget about the reality; they constantly remind  her  of  burden: “A dozen red  lead sinkers round my  neck.”          In the next stanza Sylvia Plath  becomes paranoid of the tulips; she  imagines  herself as “nobody,”  as  a “flat, ridiculous,  a  cut-paper  shadow”  and  she  has  a  concurrent  fear  of  being completely constricted. The tulips disturbed her life; they have woken her up from the numbness she tried to experience. Tulips are so vivid that they even “eat my [Plath’ s] oxygen,” she said.  In  contrast  to  the  first  stanza,  where  she  was  laying  motionless, “the  walls,  also,  seem  to  be warming  them”  now.  Despite  her  objections  against  the  reality,  where she  is  constricted  by  her duties, she is now letting the warmth of the tulips touch her soul:

Then the tulips filled it up like a loud noise.

Now the air snags and eddies round them the way a river

Snags and eddies round a sunken rust-red engine.

They concentrate my attention…                                                    (52-55)

Therefore, by denying the presence of the  vivid redness of the tulips, while being constricted by the  reality  herself,  Plath  denies  her  present  lifelines and  desires  the  ultimate  freedom:  Freedom through death: 

The water I taste is warm and salt, like the sea,

And comes from a country far away as health.