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    Winter Trees
    Winter Trees
    Winter Trees
    Ebook60 pages31 minutes

    Winter Trees

    By Sylvia Plath

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    About this ebook

    "Nearly all the poems here have the familiar Plath daring, the same feel of bits of frightened, vibrant, indignant consciousness translated instantly into words and images that blend close, experienced horror and icy, sardonic control." — New Statesman

    "A book that anyone seriously interested in poetry now must have . . . Sylvia Plath’s immense gift is evident throughout."— Guardian

    The poems in Winter Trees, published posthumously in 1972, form part of the collection from which the Ariel poems were chosen.


    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHarperCollins
    Release dateNov 15, 2016
    ISBN9780062669476
    Winter Trees
    Author

    Sylvia Plath

    Sylvia Plath was born in 1932 in Massachusetts. Her books include the poetry collections The Colossus, Crossing the Water, Winter Trees, Ariel, and Collected Poems, which won the Pulitzer Prize. A complete and uncut facsimile edition of Ariel was published in 2004 with her original selection and arrangement of poems. She was married to the poet Ted Hughes, with whom she had a daughter, Frieda, and a son, Nicholas. She died in London in 1963.

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    Reviews for Winter Trees

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    • 2/5
      I wanted to like this more than I did. There were snippets and sections I enjoyed, and a couple of poems stood out. But as a whole piece, it does seem like the leftovers were shoved together.

      The poems were generally too abstract for my tastes, but that seems consistent with her illness.

      After looking through some of her more famous poems, I wouldn't recommend starting with this collection. It wasn't bad, I just don't think it's her best work.

      "There are the clothes of a fat woman I do not know.
      There is my comb and brush. There is an emptiness.
      I am so vulnerable suddenly.
      I am a wound walking out of hospital.
      I am a wound they are letting go.
      I leave my health behind. I leave someone
      Who would adhere to me: I undo her fingers like bandages: I go."
    • 5/5
      Winter Trees is the last collection of Plath's poems, written in the last months of her life and while many were printed in various magazines previously, some were published here for the first time. Oddly enough, it's my first collection of Plath poetry -- I've read her prose before and some of her poems here and there but never a full collection before this one. I enjoyed that she doesn't use standard rhyme and meter here but is pretty much free form. Her poems are dark but also witty at times, and my favorite poems from this collection were "For a Fatherless Son" and "Child."Also published here is a radio play Three Women written for and produced by the BBC. It is Plath's first and only piece of dramatic writing. Billed as "a poem for three voices," this is a play more in the style of Dylan Thomas's Under Milk Wood than Tennessee Williams' A Streetcar Named Desire (i.e., it is more about the flowery language and spoken word than about having a three- or five-act plot complete with climax, denouement, etc.). The play takes place in a maternity ward, with the first voice belonging to a happily pregnant woman going into labor, the second voice to a woman experiencing yet another miscarriage, and the third voice to an unhappily pregnant woman going into labor. The juxtaposition of the three scenarios is particularly effective, more emotive, I think, than if the three stories were told separately. I was particularly taken by the sorrow of the second voice, such as when she says:I am not ugly. I am even beautiful. The mirror gives back a woman without deformity.The nurses give back my clothes, and an identity.It is usual, they say, for such a thing to happen.It is usual in my life, and the lives of others.I am one in five, something like that. I am not hopeless.I am beautiful as a statistic. Here is my lipstick.I draw on the old mouth. The red mouth I put by with my identityA day ago, two days ago, three days ago. It was a Friday.I do not even need a holiday; I can go to work today.I can love my husband, who will understand.Who will love me through the blur of my deformityAs if I had lost an eye, a leg, a tongue....I am myself again. There are no loose ends.I am bled white as wax, I have no attachments. I am flat and virginal, which means nothing has happened,Nothing that cannot be erased, ripped up and scrapped, begun again.These little black twigs do not think to bud,Nor do these dry, dry gutters dream of rain....It it I. It is I --Tasting the bitterness between my teeth.The incalculable malice of the everyday.How haunting. And I absolutely love that final line, which seems so appropriate for any host of disappointments.All and all, this slim collection is a great primer of Plath’s works and I’d recommend for anyone with an interest in poetry.

    Book preview

    Winter Trees - Sylvia Plath

    NOTE

    The poems in this volume are all out of the batch from which the Ariel poems were more or less arbitrarily chosen and they were all composed in the last nine months of Sylvia Plath’s life.

    ‘Three Women’, A Poem for Three Voices, was written slightly earlier and can be seen as a bridge between The Colos­sus and Ariel, both in the change of style from the first half to the last and in that it was written to be read aloud. Sylvia Plath has said that about this time she began to compose her poems more to be read aloud and this piece may well have played a big part in this technical development.

    T. H.

    CONTENTS

    NOTE

    WINTER TREES

    CHILD

    BRASILIA

    GIGOLO

    CHILDLESS WOMAN

    PURDAH

    THE COURAGE OF SHUTTING-UP

    THE OTHER

    STOPPED DEAD

    THE RABBIT CATCHER

    MYSTIC

    BY CANDLELIGHT

    LYONNESSE

    THALIDOMIDE

    FOR A FATHERLESS SON

    LESBOS

    THE SWARM

    MARY’S SONG

    THREE WOMEN, A Poem for Three Voices

    Acknowledgements

    About the Author

    Also by Sylvia Plath

    Copyright

    About the Publisher

    WINTER TREES

    The wet dawn inks are doing their blue dissolve.

    On their blotter of fog the trees

    Seem a botanical drawing—

    Memories growing, ring on ring,

    A series of weddings.

    Knowing neither abortions nor bitchery,

    Truer than women,

    They seed so effortlessly!

    Tasting the winds, that are footless,

    Waist-deep in history—

    Full of wings, otherworldliness.

    In this, they are Ledas.

    O mother of leaves and sweetness

    Who are these pietas?

    The shadows of ringdoves chanting, but easing nothing.

    CHILD

    Your clear eye is the one absolutely beautiful thing.

    I want to fill it with colour and ducks,

    The zoo of the new

    Whose names you meditate—

    April snowdrop, Indian pipe,

    Little

    Stalk without wrinkle,

    Pool in which images

    Should be grand and classical

    Not this troublous

    Wringing of hands, this dark

    Ceiling without a star.

    BRASILIA

    Will they occur,

    These people with torsos of steel

    Winged elbows and eyeholes

    Awaiting masses

    Of cloud to give them expression,

    These super-people!—

    And my baby a nail

    Driven, driven in.

    He shrieks in

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