...Sylvia Plath at Yaddo 1959...

Yaddo: The Grand Manor (1959 - all poems that follow are also attributed to the same year):
"...The fir tree's thick with grackles.  Gold carp loom in the pools."

The Manor Garden:
"History Nourishes these broken flutings, These crowns of acanthus, And the crow settles her garments."

Selected excerpts: A Poem for a Birthday:
I. Who
"This shed's fusty as a mummy's stomach: Old tools, handles and rusty tusks.  I am at home here among the dead heads."
II. Dark House
"This is a dark house, very big.  I made it myself, Cell by cell from a quiet corner....It is warm and tolerable In the bowel of the root."
III. Maenad
"This month is fit for little.  The dead ripen in the grapeleaves.  A red tongue is among us.  Mother, keep out of my barnyard, I am becoming another."
IV. The Beast
"...Fido Littlesoul, the bowel's familiar.  A dustbin's enough for him.  The dark's his bone.  Call him any name, he'll come to it."
V. Flute Notes form a Reedy Pond
"This is not death, it is something safer."
VI. Witch Burning

 

A draft of  'Ariel'.

"It is easy to blame the dark: the mouth of a door, The cellar's belly...What large eyes the dead have!  I am intimate with a hairy spirit."
VII. The Stones
"Drunk as a foetus I suck at the paps of darkness."

The Colossus:
"Counting the red stars and those of plum-color.  The sun rises under the pillar of your tongue.  My hours are married to shadow."

Sylvia Plath spent a fall in Yaddo from early September to before Thanksgiving of 1959.

Flora on the Yaddo Grounds

Dark Wood, Dark Water:
"This wood burns a dark Incense.  Pale moss drips In elbow-scarves, beards From the archaic Bones of the great trees."

Mushrooms:
"Overnight, very Whitely, discreetly, Very quietly Our toes, our noes Take hold on the loam, Acquire the air."