April soft and cold: Croak and wither

Today’s entry for National Poetry Month is from Sylvia Plath.

If you have any inclination whatsoever towards clinical depression, I don’t recommend Plath. (You probably also want to stay away from Doris Lessing. Just sayin’.)

Plath is pretty much the poster child for the creative woman who had the life sucked out of her and her creativity by getting hooked up with a creative man who exploited her gifts even as he disrespected them. In her case it was English poet Ted Hughes.

She reminds me a lot of Zelda Fitzgerald, actually. Neither Plath nor Fitzgerald had the emotional strength or the community support to tell her husband to get stuffed. Both died prematurely.

Fitzgerald spent most of her last years in a mental hospital. She was burnt to death in locked in a room while awaiting electroshock therapy when a fire broke out.

At age 30, Plath committed suicide by sealing the rooms between herself and her two small sleeping children, and turning on the gas in the oven.

Listen—poetry is not for the weak-willed.

Anyway, I could have given you “April 18”, which is pretty grim (you know that any poem that starts out “the slime of all my yesterdays/rots in the hollow of my skull” is not going anywhere close to Disneyland), or “Lady Lazarus” (“…my skin/Bright as a Nazi lampshade…”), or others. But let’s try something that—while plaintive—is more in the natural scheme of things.

I mean—poets’ two major subjects seem to be love and death, so fair enough.

“Frog Autumn”

Summer grows old, cold-blooded mother.

The insects are scant, skinny.

In these palustral homes we only

Croak and wither.

Mornings dissipate in somnolence.

The sun brightens tardily

Among the pithless reeds.

Flies fail us. the fen sickens.

Frost drops even the spider. Clearly

The genius of plenitude Houses

himself elsewhere. Our folk thin

Lamentably.