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• "Perseus" by Sylvia Plath Visit Sylvia Plath's Page Read Poem

  The Triumph of Wit Over Suffering
  Head alone shows you in the prodigious act
  Of digesting what centuries alone digest:
  The mammoth, lumbering statuary of sorrow,
  Indissoluble enough to riddle the guts
  Of a whale with holes and holes, and bleed him white
  Into salt seas.
  
  Hercules had a simple time,
  Rinsing those stables:  a baby's tears would do it.
  
  But who'd volunteer to gulp the Laocoon,
  The Dying Gaul and those innumerable pietas
  Festering on the dim walls of Europe's chapels,
  Museums and sepulchers?
  
  You.
  
  You
  Who borrowed feathers for your feet, not lead,
  Not nails, and a mirror to keep the snaky head
  In safe perspective, could outface the gorgon-grimace
  Of human agony:  a look to numb
  Limbs:  not a basilisk-blink, nor a double whammy,
  But all the accumulated last grunts, groans,
  Cries and heroic couplets concluding the million
  Enacted tragedies on these blood-soaked boards,
  And every private twinge a hissing asp
  To petrify your eyes, and every village
  Catastrophe a writhing length of cobra,
  And the decline of empires the thick coil of a vast
  Anacnoda.
  
  Imagine:  the world
  Fisted to a foetus head, ravined, seamed
  With suffering from conception upwards, and there
  You have it in hand.
  
  Grit in the eye or a sore
  Thumb can make anyone wince, but the whole globe
  Expressive of grief turns gods, like kings, to rocks.
  
  Those rocks, cleft and worn, themselves then grow
  Ponderous and extend despair on earth's
  Dark face.
  
  So might rigor mortis come to stiffen
  All creation, were it not for a bigger belly
  Still than swallows joy.
  
  You enter now,
  Armed with feathers to tickle as well as fly,
  And a fun-house mirror that turns the tragic muse
  To the beheaded head of a sullen doll, one braid,
  A bedraggled snake, hanging limp as the absurd mouth
  Hangs in its lugubious pout.
  
  Where are
  The classic limbs of stubborn Antigone?
  
  The red, royal robes of Phedre?
  
  The tear-dazzled
  Sorrows of Malfi's gentle duchess?
  
  Gone
  In the deep convulsion gripping your face, muscles
  And sinews bunched, victorious, as the cosmic
  Laugh does away with the unstitching, plaguey wounds
  Of an eternal sufferer.
  
  To you
  Perseus, the palm, and may you poise
  And repoise until time stop, the celestial balance
  Which weighs our madness with our sanity.

• "Perseus" by Sylvia Plath Visit Sylvia Plath's Page Read Poem

  The Triumph of Wit Over Suffering
  Head alone shows you in the prodigious act
  Of digesting what centuries alone digest:
  The mammoth, lumbering statuary of sorrow,
  Indissoluble enough to riddle the guts
  Of a whale with holes and holes, and bleed him white
  Into salt seas.
  
  Hercules had a simple time,
  Rinsing those stables:  a baby's tears would do it.
  
  But who'd volunteer to gulp the Laocoon,
  The Dying Gaul and those innumerable pietas
  Festering on the dim walls of Europe's chapels,
  Museums and sepulchers?
  
  You.
  
  You
  Who borrowed feathers for your feet, not lead,
  Not nails, and a mirror to keep the snaky head
  In safe perspective, could outface the gorgon-grimace
  Of human agony:  a look to numb
  Limbs:  not a basilisk-blink, nor a double whammy,
  But all the accumulated last grunts, groans,
  Cries and heroic couplets concluding the million
  Enacted tragedies on these blood-soaked boards,
  And every private twinge a hissing asp
  To petrify your eyes, and every village
  Catastrophe a writhing length of cobra,
  And the decline of empires the thick coil of a vast
  Anacnoda.
  
  Imagine:  the world
  Fisted to a foetus head, ravined, seamed
  With suffering from conception upwards, and there
  You have it in hand.
  
  Grit in the eye or a sore
  Thumb can make anyone wince, but the whole globe
  Expressive of grief turns gods, like kings, to rocks.
  
  Those rocks, cleft and worn, themselves then grow
  Ponderous and extend despair on earth's
  Dark face.
  
  So might rigor mortis come to stiffen
  All creation, were it not for a bigger belly
  Still than swallows joy.
  
  You enter now,
  Armed with feathers to tickle as well as fly,
  And a fun-house mirror that turns the tragic muse
  To the beheaded head of a sullen doll, one braid,
  A bedraggled snake, hanging limp as the absurd mouth
  Hangs in its lugubious pout.
  
  Where are
  The classic limbs of stubborn Antigone?
  
  The red, royal robes of Phedre?
  
  The tear-dazzled
  Sorrows of Malfi's gentle duchess?
  
  Gone
  In the deep convulsion gripping your face, muscles
  And sinews bunched, victorious, as the cosmic
  Laugh does away with the unstitching, plaguey wounds
  Of an eternal sufferer.
  
  To you
  Perseus, the palm, and may you poise
  And repoise until time stop, the celestial balance
  Which weighs our madness with our sanity.

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