But I… betrayed the thing I saw, and wronged my own life
For which I pleaded. Passioned to exalt
The artist’s instinct in me at the cost
of putting down the woman’s, I forgot
No perfect artist is developed here
From any imperfect woman. Flower from root,
And spiritual from natural, grade by grade
In all our life.
Elizabeth Barrett Browning
‘Tis said that women have been bruised to death
And yet, if once they loved, that love of theirs
Could never be drained out with all their blood:
I’ve heard such things and pondered. Did I indeed
Love once; or did I only worship? Yes,
Perhaps, O friend, I set you up so high
Above all actual good or hope of good
or fear of evil, all that could be mine,
I haply set you above love itself…
What was in my thought?
To be your slave, your help, your toy, your tool.
To be your love…I never thought of that:
To give you love…still less. I gave you love?
I think I did not give you anything:
I was but only yours, — upon my knees,
all yours, in soul and body, in head and heart.
It may be I’m not as strong as other women are,
who, torn and crushed, are not undone form love.
It may be I am colder than the dead,
Who, being dead, love always.
Elizabeth Barrett Browning
Letter in November
Love, the world
Suddenly turns, turns color. The streetlight
Splits through the rat’s tail
Pods of the laburnum at nine in the morning.
It is the Arctic,
This little black
Circle, with its tawn silk grasses – babies hair.
There is a green in the air,
Soft, delectable.
It cushions me lovingly.
I am flushed and warm.
I think I may be enormous,
I am so stupidly happy,
My Wellingtons
Squelching and squelching through the beautiful red.
This is my property.
Two times a day
I pace it, sniffing
The barbarous holly with its viridian
Scallops, pure iron,
And the wall of the odd corpses.
I love them.
I love them like history.
The apples are golden,
Imagine it —-
My seventy trees
Holding their gold-ruddy balls
In a thick gray death-soup,
Their million
Gold leaves metal and breathless.
O love, O celibate.
Nobody but me
Walks the waist high wet.
The irreplaceable
Golds bleed and deepen, the mouths of Thermopylae.
Sylvia Plath
On Friday night I fainted for the very first time. I was standing outside of a pub talking to a pair of friends and I started to get dizzy and sweaty. I thought: Oh great, I’m gonna barf — so I volleyed a goodbye over my shoulder and started speedwalking toward my car. Meanwhile, the dizzy continued, I began sweating profusely, a buzz swelled in my ears, my vision dimmed — I felt my knees buckle — and then I came to on the pavement, the right side of my body scraped and brusied at regular intervals from ankle to cheekbone. I pushed myself up and sat down on a nearby stone bench. Then I threw up violently for several minutes.
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Oh, what can I say, what can I say to help you through this?
