Wuthering Heights by Sylvia Plath

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The horizons ring me like faggots,
Tilted and disparate, and always unstable.
Touched by a match, they might warm me,
And their fine lines singe
The air to orange
Before the distances they pin evaporate,
Weighting the pale sky with a soldier color.
But they only dissolve and dissolve
Like a series of promises, as I step forward.

There is no life higher than the grasstops
Or the hearts of sheep, and the wind
Pours by like destiny, bending
Everything in one direction.
I can feel it trying
To funnel my heat away.
If I pay the roots of the heather
Too close attention, they will invite me
To whiten my bones among them.

The sheep know where they are,
Browsing in their dirty wool-clouds,
Gray as the weather.
The black slots of their pupils take me in.
It is like being mailed into space,
A thin, silly message.
They stand about in grandmotherly disguise,
All wig curls and yellow teeth
And hard, marbly baas.

I come to wheel ruts, and water
Limpid as the solitudes
That flee through my fingers.
Hollow doorsteps go from grass to grass;
Lintel and sill have unhinged themselves.
Of people and the air only
Remembers a few odd syllables.
It rehearses them moaningly:
Black stone, black stone.

The sky leans on me, me, the one upright
Among all horizontals.
The grass is beating its head distractedly.
It is too delicate
For a life in such company;
Darkness terrifies it.
Now, in valleys narrow
And black as purses, the house lights
Gleam like small change.

one of my favourite poems from her. That weird moment when we begin to feel walking in the fields and hills: nature somehow wants to destroy us, as we are week and small and alienated from it and we aren’t the part of it anymore. Sometimes I also can feel the power of the wind when it blows into my ears and nostrils, exploring the inside of my skull, slipping into my veins, stealing my thoughts and trying to annihilate me gradually, but I turn my back to it: you are threatening me, but you’re not powerful enough yet to kill me.

4 comments

  1. Beautiful…Thanks for sharing…really loved the song….I have read some such a similar poem, on the comments you wrote

    but I turn my back to it: you are threatening me, but you’re not powerful enough yet to kill me

    I will share it soon…

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