Elm Sylvia Plath Quotes

Is it the sea you hear in me? Its dissatisfactions? Or the voice of nothing, that was your madness? Love is a shadow. How you lie and cry after it. --from "Elm", written 19 April 1962

I have suffered the atrocity of sunsets. --from "Elm", written 19 April 1962

Is it the sea you hear in me, Its dissatisfactions? Or the voice of nothing, that was you madness? --from "Elm", written 19 April 1962

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. --from "Elm", written 19 April 1962

Love is a shadow. How you lie and cry after it --from "Elm", written 19 April 1962

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.

Love is a shadow. How you lie and cry after it.

The moon, also, is merciless: she would drag me Cruelly, being barren. Her radiance scathes me. Or perhaps I have caught her.

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?

Well, one wearies of the Public Gardens: one wants a vacation Where trees and clouds and animals pay no notice; Away from the labeled elms, the tame tea-roses

She approved of the new title he’d suggested, “The Elm Speaks,” and sent him a new batch of poems on October 12: “A Birthday Present,” “The Detective,” “The Courage of Quietness” (retitled “The Courage of Shutting-Up”), “For a Fatherless Son,” “The Applicant,” “Daddy,” and her five bee poems. Moss would reject them all.

Clouds pass and disperse. / Are those the faces of love, those pale irretrievables? / Is it for such I agitate my heart? — Sylvia Plath, from “Elm,” The Collected Poems (HarperPerennial, 1992)

Think about it. Think about how we start off...as thing set thing. Like the seed of a tree planted in the ground. And then we...we grow...we grow...and at first we are a trunk...' Absolutely nothing. 'But then the tree — the tree that is our life — develops branches. And think of all those branches, departing from the trunk at different heights. And think of all those branches, branching off again, heading in often opposing directions. Think of those branches becoming other branches, and those becoming twigs. And think of the end of each of those twigs, all in different places, having started from the same one. A life is like that, but on a bigger scale. New branches are formed every second of every day. And from our perspective — from everyone's perspective — it feels like a...like a continuum. Each twig has travelled only one journey. But there are still other twigs. And there are also other todays. Other lives that would have been different if you'd taken different directions earlier in your life. This is a tree of life. Lots of religions and mythologies have talked about the tree of life. It's there in Buddhism, Judaism and Christianity. Lots of philosophers and writers have talked about tree metaphors too. For Sylvia Plath, existence was a fig tree and each possible life she could live — the happily-married one, the successful-poet one — was this sweet juicy fig, but she couldn't get to taste the sweet juicy figs and so they just rotted right in front of her. It can drive you insane, thinking of all the other lives we don't live. 'For instance, in most of my lives I am not standing at this podium talking to you about success...In most lives I am not an Olympic gold medalist.' She remembered something Mrs. Elm had told her in the Midnight Library. 'You see, doing one thing differently is very often the same as doing everything differently. Actions can't be reversed within a lifetime, however much we try...' People were listening now. They clearly needed a Mrs. Elm in their lives. 'The only way to learn is to live.