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)