aplathaday

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“I wish to cry. Yet, I laugh, and my lipstick leaves a red stain like a bloody crescent moon on the top of the beer can.”

Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath (via introspectivepoet)

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Seriously. There’s people who know which way she parted her hair!

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On February 11, 1963 Sylvia Plath committed suicide. Fifty years after her death, her poetry continues to haunt and inspire millions of readers, including myself. Today, I hope many of you will pick up Ariel or The Bell Jar or any other Plath book and remember not just her tragically short life but her brilliant and electrifying work. That is certainly what I intend to do.

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Happy 80th birthday, Sylvia Plath!

Sylvia Plath

27 October 1932 - 11 February 1963

A Birthday Present

What is this, behind this veil, is it ugly, is it beautiful?  It is shimmering, has it breasts, has it edges?  I am sure it is unique, I am sure it is what I want.  When I am quiet at my cooking I feel it looking, I feel it thinking  'Is this the one I am too appear for,  Is this the elect one, the one with black eye-pits and a scar?  Measuring the flour, cutting off the surplus,  Adhering to rules, to rules, to rules.  Is this the one for the annunciation?  My god, what a laugh!'  But it shimmers, it does not stop, and I think it wants me.  I would not mind if it were bones, or a pearl button.  I do not want much of a present, anyway, this year.  After all I am alive only by accident.  I would have killed myself gladly that time any possible way.  Now there are these veils, shimmering like curtains,  The diaphanous satins of a January window  White as babies' bedding and glittering with dead breath. O ivory!  It must be a tusk there, a ghost column.  Can you not see I do not mind what it is.  Can you not give it to me?  Do not be ashamed--I do not mind if it is small.  Do not be mean, I am ready for enormity.  Let us sit down to it, one on either side, admiring the gleam,  The glaze, the mirrory variety of it.  Let us eat our last supper at it, like a hospital plate.  I know why you will not give it to me,  You are terrified  The world will go up in a shriek, and your head with it,  Bossed, brazen, an antique shield,  A marvel to your great-grandchildren.  Do not be afraid, it is not so.  I will only take it and go aside quietly.  You will not even hear me opening it, no paper crackle,  No falling ribbons, no scream at the end.  I do not think you credit me with this discretion.  If you only knew how the veils were killing my days.  To you they are only transparencies, clear air.  But my god, the clouds are like cotton.  Armies of them. They are carbon monoxide.  Sweetly, sweetly I breathe in,  Filling my veins with invisibles, with the million  Probable motes that tick the years off my life.  You are silver-suited for the occasion. O adding machine-----  Is it impossible for you to let something go and have it go whole?  Must you stamp each piece purple,  Must you kill what you can?  There is one thing I want today, and only you can give it to me.  It stands at my window, big as the sky.  It breathes from my sheets, the cold dead center  Where split lives congeal and stiffen to history.  Let it not come by the mail, finger by finger.  Let it not come by word of mouth, I should be sixty  By the time the whole of it was delivered, and to numb to use it.  Only let down the veil, the veil, the veil.  If it were death  I would admire the deep gravity of it, its timeless eyes.  I would know you were serious.  There would be a nobility then, there would be a birthday.  And the knife not carve, but enter  Pure and clean as the cry of a baby,  And the universe slide from my side.

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Sylvia Plath reading Lady Lazarus

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“I feel good with my husband: I like his warmth and his bigness and his being-there and his making and his jokes and stories and what he reads and how he likes fishing and walks and pigs and foxes and little animals and is honest and not vain or fame-crazy and how he shows his gladness for what I cook him and joy for when I make him something, a poem or a cake, and how he is troubled when I am unhappy and wants to do anything so I can fight out my soul-battles and grow up with courage and a philosophical ease. I love his good smell and his body that fits with mine as if they were made in the same body-shop to do just that. What is only pieces, doled out here and there to this boy and that boy, that made me like pieces of them, is all jammed together in my husband. So I don’t want to look around any more: I don’t need to look around for anything.” ― Sylvia Plath

Sylvia Plath, in The Journals of Sylvia Plath

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You are a dream; I hope I never meet you.

Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals (via proustitute)

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Wear your love of literature on your sleeve - literally - with our Novel Tee in Esther. Shop our Out of Print tees.

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Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

Submitted by joannaxue. 

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I talk to God but the sky is empty.

Sylvia Plath, from a letter to Richard Sassoon, 19 February 1950 (via proustitute)

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“If I were a man, I could write a novel about this; being a woman, why must I only cry and freeze, cry and freeze?”

Sylvia Plath, in The Journals of Sylvia Plath (via volcanoes)

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If I sit still and don’t do anything, the world goes on beating like a slack drum, without meaning. We must be moving, working, making dreams to run toward; the poverty of life without dreams is too horrible to imagine.

Sylvia Plath, The Journals of Sylvia Plath

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So many people are shut up tight inside themselves like boxes, yet they would open up, unfolding quite wonderfully, if only you were interested in them.

Sylvia Plath (via rosettes)

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fuckyeahsylviaplath:

fluidfidelity:

I got a tattoo the other day :) “I am I am I am” from The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath. The text is in Sylvia Plath’s handwriting from her other book, Ariel.

This is beautiful <3

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elleandsplendour:

My third.