written as an undergraduate, 18 or 19?
but that essential timidity and seeking of 'safety' by the american women on these (autism ed.) message boards
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Ennui
Tea leaves thwart those who court catastrophe,
designing futures where nothing will occur:
cross the gypsy’s palm and yawning she
will still predict no perils left to conquer.
Jeopardy is jejune now: naïve knight
finds ogres out-of-date and dragons unheard
of, while blasé princesses indict
tilts at terror as downright absurd.
The beast in Jamesian grove will never jump,
compelling hero’s dull career to crisis;
and when insouciant angels play God’s trump,
while bored arena crowds for once look eager,
hoping toward havoc, neither pleas nor prizes
shall coax from doom’s blank door lady or tiger.
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actually if she had a been older when she wrote this she might have
leaned towards the inversions of life whereby seeking safety, doom's blank door rips you apart, not to mention the selfish ferocity of these these selfsame women following the illusion of conventional life and thier attempts to preserve the illusion
what is sad to me is that this poem is before her electroconvulsive treament and shows a sinew, complexity and energy that was never realised in later poetry. janet frame has the same curtailment
and clawing your back
did you not notice?
“ descant from the borders of hebetude ”
lorelei by sylvia plath
this is actually quite a good poem to teach people to read a poem, you can see plath is really autistic if you look at the phrase in the subject header for this section, you have to look up words to understand the poem
“ hebetude ” means dullness of mind and lorelei is best looked up in wikipedia
poor woman, she knew what had happened to her brain
It is no night to drown in:
A full moon, river lapsing
Black beneath bland mirror-sheen,
The blue water-mists dropping
Scrim after scrim like fishnets
Though fishermen are sleeping,
The massive castle turrets
Doubling themselves in a glass
All stillness. Yet these shapes float
Up toward me, troubling the face
Of quiet. From the nadir
They rise, their limbs ponderous
With richness, hair heavier
Than sculptured marble. They sing
Of a world more full and clear
Than can be. Sisters, your song
Bears a burden too weighty
For the whorled ear's listening
Here, in a well-steered country,
Under a balanced ruler.
Deranging by harmony
Beyond the mundane order,
Your voices lay siege. You lodge
On the pitched reefs of nightmare,
Promising sure harborage;
By day, descant from borders
Of hebetude, from the ledge
Also of high windows. Worse
Even than your maddening
Song, your silence. At the source
Of your ice-hearted calling --
Drunkenness of the great depths.
O river, I see drifting
Deep in your flux of silver
Those great goddesses of peace.
Stone, stone, ferry me down there.
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interesting to hear a poet outside their poems, sorta demystifies them a bit
there's something i don't quite like about her, not sure what it is
too conformist, a snob ?
anyway, all that work to then kill yourself
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possibly her imagery doesn't hit or bite enough
conceptually sound but not quite
her popularity should be a warning
empty heads persuing eggshell fragments
just the usual i guess
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she took a lot of her concepts from audens “as i walked out one evening”
and she really is writing prose
all the same her best poems are genius
but just lacking something, maybe true poetic density
images that shut down the brain
her's sorta dribble
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janet frame and sylvia plath both have the same fault, that of being unecessarily obscure
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in the interview part 2 she says that in ariel she had to read the poems aloud to understand them, but in colossus they were not written to be read aloud and she didn't like those poems anymore
i notice ennui reads ok aloud and can only put this loss of theory of mind down to the ECT which ruined her