The Collected Poems 1956 Conversation Among the Ruins Through portico of my elegant house you stalk With your wild furies, disturbing garlands of fruit And the fabulous lutes and peacocks, rending the net Of all decorum which holds the whirlwind back. Now, rich order of walls is fallen; rooks croak Above the appalling ruin; in bleak light Of your stormy eye, magic takes flight Like a daunted witch, quitting castle when real days break Fractured pillars frame prospects of rock; While you stand heroic in coat and tie, I sit Composed in Grecian tunic and psyche-knot, Rooted to your black look, the play turned tragic: With such blight wrought on our bankrupt estate, What ceremony of words can patch the havoc? Winter Landscape, with Rooks Water in the millrace, through a sluice of stone, plunges headlong into that black pond where, absurd and out-of-season, a single swan floats chaste as snow, taunting the clouded mind which hungers to haul the white reflection down. The austere sun descends above the fen, an orange cyclops-eye, scorning to look longer on this landscape of chagrin; feathered dark in thought, I stalk like a rook, brooding as the winter night comes on. Last summer's reeds are all engraved in ice as is your image in my eye; dry frost glazes the window of my hurt; what solace can be struck from rock to make heart's waste grow green again? Who'd walk in this bleak place? The Collected Poems . Copyright © by Sylvia Plath. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved. Available now wherever books are sold. Excerpted from Collected Poems by Sylvia Plath All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
