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Poetics of the Mind

Poetics of the Mind is a collection of poetry from both famous and new who have lived with mental health disruptions and share that experience in their work. We hope you’re able to immerse yourself in the words and worlds of these poets.

The Colossus
BY SYLVIA PLATH
I shall never get you put together entirely,
Pieced, glued, and properly jointed.

Mule-bray, pig-grunt and bawdy cackles
Proceed from your great lips.
It’s worse than a barnyard.
Perhaps you consider yourself an oracle,
Mouthpiece of the dead, or of some god or other.
Thirty years now I have labored
To dredge the silt from your throat.
I am none the wiser.
Scaling little ladders with glue pots and pails of lysol
I crawl like an ant in mourning
Over the weedy acres of your brow
To mend the immense skull plates and clear
The bald, white tumuli of your eyes.
A blue sky out of the Oresteia
Arches above us. O father, all by yourself
You are pithy and historical as the Roman Forum.
I open my lunch on a hill of black cypress.
Your fluted bones and acanthine hair are littered
In their old anarchy to the horizon-line.
It would take more than a lightning-stroke
To create such a ruin.
Nights, I squat in the cornucopia
Of your left ear, out of the wind,
Counting the red stars and those of plum-color.
The sun rises under the pillar of your tongue.
My hours are married to shadow.
No longer do I listen for the scrape of a keel
On the blank stones of the landing.
Sylvia Plath was born in Boston, Massachusetts, on October 27, 1932. Her mental health impacted her poetry as the depressive Plath committed suicide in 1963, She garnered accolades after her death for the novel The Bell Jar, and the poetry collections The Colossus and Ariel.