This is a small poetry club that started as a poetry email exchange between two friends. Our goal is to read a poem everyday, and this blog is one way to help keep us accountable. There is only one valid rule in poetry club: there are no rules in poetry club. Read any poem, in any order, with any or no interactions. You decide. We only suggest you read poetry!
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19 Jul 2020: "A Birthday Present" by Sylvia Plath
"A Birthday Present" by Sylvia Plath
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.
The more we listen to her read her own poems the more I realize the madness. The tone of the poems. And I circle back on what it was like to start to realize David Foster Wallace's battle with depression and anxiety. It's almost this "veil" itself that Plath speaks of here. That balance between the gift of a brilliant mind and the curse to exercise it. A Chasm. The perfect paradox lived out in a life.
ReplyDeleteI kept wondering about the play on birthday as if she means that her death-day would be a new birth of some sort- the true birthday that she would rather celebrate. A coming home of kinds.
Wow! So dark.
DeleteAlthough very much like the other poems, this one stands out. The irony of her desired present, and the repetition of the veil and rules.
Maybe I like it more because this poem is more straight forward. Not too literal or abstract, my Goldy Lock zone of language and ideas to keep me engaged. What do you think? Is this poem easier to grasp? Do you like her harder or easier poems better?
I think that her poems can so easily go both ways. The reader, quite often, can feel like they have a perfect grasp on the first stanza and absolutely nothing on the 2nd and 3rd and 4th, etc...but then she jumps back into relation further on down and it makes sense again. Some of her shorter poems she is more consistent with one idea on the whole, so the grasp is easier to hold. I think what I love the absolute most about Plath are her one-liners, whether short or long or jumpy or not....she can hold me the entire time because those lines are always worth waiting for. I just compiled a list of my favorite quotes from the Bell Jar and it's the same way- although the story is much easier to follow that some of her more abstract poems, it is quite basic until....she gives you 1-2 sentences that make every other word in the book worth it. It is the most fascinating style of writing...
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