But I would rather be horizontal.
I am not a tree with my root in the soil
Sucking up minerals and motherly love
So that each March I may gleam into leaf,
Nor am I the beauty of a garden bed
Attracting my share of Ahs and spectacularly painted,
Unknowing I must soon unpetal.
Compared with me, a tree is immortal
And a flower-head not tall, but more startling,
And I want the one's longevity and the other's daring.
Tonight, in the infinitesimallight of the stars,
The trees and the flowers have been strewing their cool odors.
I walk among them, but none of them are noticing.
Sometimes I think that when I am sleeping
I must most perfectly resemble them--
Thoughts gone dim.
It is more natural to me, lying down.
Then the sky and I are in open conversation,
And I shall be useful when I lie down finally:
Then the trees may touch me for once, and the flowers have time for me.
Sylvia Plath, Collected Poems, ed. and intr. Ted Hughes (London: Faber and Faber, 1981).
* * *
I've recently bumped into it on a web site dedicated to "neurotic poets", and couldn't help recalling how this poetry once meant the world to me, in all its madness, in all its lucidity. It spoke to me and for me at a time when I was very, very close to losing the grip on everything.
I haven't returned to it for so long, but it's always been in my mind - a dark contrast to lights that would have otherwise remained unseen.
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