All The Dead Dears Poem by Sylvia Plath

All The Dead Dears

Rating: 4.8


Rigged poker -stiff on her back
With a granite grin
This antique museum-cased lady
Lies, companioned by the gimcrack
Relics of a mouse and a shrew
That battened for a day on her ankle-bone.

These three, unmasked now, bear
Dry witness
To the gross eating game
We'd wink at if we didn't hear
Stars grinding, crumb by crumb,
Our own grist down to its bony face.

How they grip us through think and thick,
These barnacle dead!
This lady here's no kin
Of mine, yet kin she is: she'll suck
Blood and whistle my narrow clean
To prove it. As I think now of her hand,

From the mercury-backed glass
Mother, grandmother, greatgrandmother
Reach hag hands to haul me in,
And an image looms under the fishpond surface
Where the daft father went down
With orange duck-feet winnowing this hair —-

All the long gone darlings: They
Get back, though, soon,
Soon: be it by wakes, weddings,
Childbirths or a family barbecue:
Any touch, taste, tang's
Fit for those outlaws to ride home on,

And to sanctuary: usurping the armchair
Between tick
And tack of the clock, until we go,
Each skulled-and-crossboned Gulliver
Riddled with ghosts, to lie
Deadlocked with them, taking roots as cradles rock.

COMMENTS OF THE POEM
Edward Kofi Louis 24 August 2016

Crumb by crumb! Thanks for sharing this poem with us.

1 0 Reply
Seamus O Brian 24 August 2016

Chillingly incise imagery that lays bear the uncocooned vulnerability of our own mortality.

1 0 Reply
Malcolm Two 24 August 2016

Very nice poem. Thanks for sharing it with us

0 0 Reply
Chinedu Dike 16 March 2022

An interesting piece written with clarity of thought and mind. A beautiful work of art...

0 0 Reply
Sylvia Frances Chan 15 March 2022

This poem still mesmerizes me, honestly beautiful poem.

0 0 Reply
Sylvia Frances Chan 27 May 2021

.3) This antique museum-cased lady, what a poem! Though only a poem, all is so visible and we can feel the eerie atmosphere here. Brilliant!

0 0 Reply
Sylvia Frances Chan 27 May 2021

2) This poem is so beautiful, poignant, like a thriller, but unforgivable, typical November woman. She has 'devoured' me again (now) Breathtaking!

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Sylvia Frances Chan 27 May 2021

1) Typical Sylvia Plath, also my favourite poet of the lurid kind, unlike Keats or Yeats, but she continues to be called Sylvia Plath, because she writes so plastic, elastic, torpedoing her victims into the depths, always that fierce tone,

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Sylvia Plath

Sylvia Plath

Jamaica Plain, Massachusetts
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