Monday, January 16, 2012

Doomsday

The idiot bird leaps out and drunken leans
Atop the broken universal clock:
The hour is crowed in lunatic thirteens.
Out painted stages fall apart by scenes
While all the actors halt in mortal shock:
The idiot bird leaps out and drunken leans.

Streets crack through in havoc-split ravines
As the doomstruck city crumbles block by block:
The hour is crowed in lunatic thirteens.

Fractured glass flies down in smithereens;
Our lucky relics have been put in hock:
The idiot bird leaps out and drunken leans.

The monkey's wrench has blasted all machines;
We never thought to hear the holy cock:
The hour is crowed in lunatic thirteens.

Too late to ask if end was worth the means,
Too late to calculate the toppling stock:
The idiot bird leaps out and drunken leans,
The hour is crowed in lunatic thirteens.

-- Sylvia Plath

"Sylvia Plath (October 27, 1932 – February 11, 1963) was an American poet, novelist and short story writer. Born in Massachusetts, she studied at Smith College and Newnham College, Cambridge before receiving acclaim as a professional poet and writer. She married fellow poet Ted Hughes in 1956 and they lived together first in the United States and then England, having two children together: Frieda and Nicholas. Following a long struggle with depression and a marital separation, Plath committed suicide in 1963.[1] Controversy continues to surround the events of her life and death, as well as her writing and legacy.

"Plath is credited with advancing the genre of confessional poetry and is best known for her two published collections: The Colossus and Other Poems and Ariel. In 1982, she became the first poet to win a Pulitzer Prize posthumously, for The Collected Poems. She also wrote The Bell Jar, a semi-autobiographical novel published shortly before her death.[2]"

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sylvia_plath

3 comments:

Toad said...

Orb's, Beyond "Mary had a little Lamb" I don't usually get poetry. Do YOU understand this "Doomsday"?

OrbsCorbs said...

I thought the title was appropriate for 2012.

To me, it's not a puzzle to crack or a code to decipher - it's a matter of what images, thoughts, emotions the poem evokes in the readers'/listeners' minds. I can't give you a precise definition of the "idiot bird" or what it means, bu to me it's a metaphor for a system out of control, drunk, idiotic. I identify with that. "Society" makes little sense to me.

Sylvia talks about the artifices of life, the painted stages collapsing one upon the other, the actors (in life - us) are dumbstruck.

The chaos progresses block by block, city by city, until all has fallen apart.

That's one vision of doomsday.

The final stanza reminds us that when the end comes, it will be too late for ruminations and rationalizations.

The recurring lines of the idiot bird and the clock crowded with lunatic thirteens are the aural "beat" of the poem. Visually. they represent madness, drunkenness, chaos, disorder, lunacy, which I assume will occur when doomsday comes.

Sylvia Plath is one of the heavy-hitters in my personal poetry pantheon. I identify with her struggles with mental illness and poetry.

I just happen to like poetry and language. If I was a visual artist, I'd probably be posting images of paintings.

Toad said...

Orb's, I like your analogy.