Top 12 Sylvia Plath Poems Perfect for Late Night Reading

Sylvia Plath was a famous American poet who lived from 1932 to 1963. She wrote many poems that people still love today. 

Plath's poems often talk about deep feelings and hard times in life. She had a way of using words that made readers feel strong emotions.

Plath's poems are good for reading at night when everything is quiet. They can make you think about life in new ways. Some of her poems are sad, while others are full of energy. 

According to ResearchGate, Sylvia Plath's poem collection, Ariel has been cited in over 3,000 scholarly articles and academic papers since its publication in 1965.

This list of 12 poems and quotes shows the best of Plath's work. They can help you understand why she is still an important poet many years after she died.

Sylvia Plath's poems often resonate deeply with readers, especially late at night when emotions are heightened. Many people find themselves staying up late, captivated by her words:

"When the clock strikes midnight"

"And Sylvia Plath's words keep you awake"

Sylvia Plath short poems

Sylvia Plath’s short poems pack a lot of emotion and meaning into just a few lines. They often explore deep feelings and clear images, making each poem powerful and memorable despite its brevity. 

Plath’s concise style shows her talent for expressing complex ideas simply and beautifully.

1. Daddy 

Written in: 1962

You do not do, you do not do

Any more, black shoe

In which I have lived like a foot

For thirty years, poor and white,

Barely daring to breathe or Achoo.

Daddy, I have had to kill you.

You died before I had time——

Marble-heavy, a bag full of God,

Ghastly statue with one gray toe

Big as a Frisco seal

And a head in the freakish Atlantic

Where it pours bean green over blue

In the waters off beautiful Nauset.

I used to pray to recover you.

Ach, du.

In the German tongue, in the Polish town

Scraped flat by the roller

Of wars, wars, wars.

But the name of the town is common.

My Polack friend

Says there are a dozen or two.

So I never could tell where you

Put your foot, your root,

I never could talk to you.

The tongue stuck in my jaw.

It stuck in a barb wire snare.

Ich, ich, ich, ich,

I could hardly speak.

I thought every German was you.

And the language obscene

An engine, an engine

Chuffing me off like a Jew.

A Jew to Dachau, Auschwitz, Belsen.

I began to talk like a Jew.

I think I may well be a Jew.

The snows of the Tyrol, the clear beer of Vienna

Are not very pure or true.

With my gipsy ancestress and my weird luck

And my Taroc pack and my Taroc pack

I may be a bit of a Jew.

I have always been scared of you,

With your Luftwaffe, your gobbledygoo.

And your neat mustache

And your Aryan eye, bright blue.

Panzer-man, panzer-man, O You——

Not God but a swastika

So black no sky could squeak through.

Every woman adores a Fascist,

The boot in the face, the brute

Brute heart of a brute like you.

You stand at the blackboard, daddy,

In the picture I have of you,

A cleft in your chin instead of your foot

But no less a devil for that, no not

Any less the black man who

Bit my pretty red heart in two.

I was ten when they buried you.

At twenty I tried to die

And get back, back, back to you.

I thought even the bones would do.

But they pulled me out of the sack,

And they stuck me together with glue.

And then I knew what to do.

I made a model of you,

A man in black with a Meinkampf look

And a love of the rack and the screw.

And I said I do, I do.

So daddy, I’m finally through.

The black telephone’s off at the root,

The voices just can’t worm through.

If I’ve killed one man, I’ve killed two——

The vampire who said he was you

And drank my blood for a year,

Seven years, if you want to know.

Daddy, you can lie back now.

There’s a stake in your fat black heart

And the villagers never liked you.

They are dancing and stamping on you.

They always knew it was you.

Daddy, daddy, you bastard, I’m through.

Summary

In this poem she expresses her intense feelings of anger and pain toward her father. She compares him to a Nazi and a vampire, reflecting her struggle to break free from his influence and the impact he had on her life. Ultimately, she declares she is done with him, symbolizing her attempt to find closure and independence. 

2. Poppies in October 

Written in: 1965

Even the sun-clouds this morning cannot manage such skirts.

Nor the woman in the ambulance

Whose red heart blooms through her coat so astoundingly —

A gift, a love gift

Utterly unasked for

By a sky

Palely and flamily

Igniting its carbon monoxides, by eyes

Dulled to a halt under bowlers.

O my God, what am I

That these late mouths should cry open

In a forest of frost, in a dawn of cornflowers.

Summary

This poem describes the stunning beauty of the morning and the unexpected gift of a woman's vibrant life, even in a moment of emergency. It reflects on the speaker's awe and wonder at the natural world and life's fleeting moments.

3. The Applicant 

Written in: 1961

First, are you our sort of a person?

Do you wear

A glass eye, false teeth or a crutch,

A brace or a hook,

Rubber breasts or a rubber crotch,

Stitches to show something’s missing? No, no? Then

How can we give you a thing?

Stop crying.

Open your hand.

Empty? Empty. Here is a hand

To fill it and willing

To bring teacups and roll away headaches

And do whatever you tell it.

Will you marry it?

It is guaranteed

To thumb shut your eyes at the end

And dissolve of sorrow.

We make new stock from the salt.

I notice you are stark naked.

How about this suit——

Black and stiff, but not a bad fit.

Will you marry it?

It is waterproof, shatterproof, proof

Against fire and bombs through the roof.

Believe me, they'll bury you in it.

Now your head, excuse me, is empty.

I have the ticket for that.

Come here, sweetie, out of the closet.

Well, what do you think of that?

Naked as paper to start

But in twenty-five years she'll be silver,

In fifty, gold.

A living doll, everywhere you look.

It can sew, it can cook,

It can talk, talk, talk.

It works, there is nothing wrong with it.

You have a hole, it’s a poultice.

You have an eye, it’s an image.

My boy, it’s your last resort.

Will you marry it, marry it, marry it.

Summary

This poem talks about a person being offered a perfect but artificial life partner, complete with false parts and promises. The poem evaluates societal expectations and the idea of a perfect, emotionless marriage.

Sylvia Plath poems about love

Sylvia plath’s poems about love explore deep and complex emotions. Through her writing, she captures the beauty, pain, and intensity of love. Her work reveals both the joy and struggle that come with loving and being loved.

4. Mad Girl’s Love Song 

Written in: 1953

I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead;

I lift my lids and all is born again.

(I think I made you up inside my head.)

The stars go waltzing out in blue and red,

And arbitrary blackness gallops in:

I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead.

I dreamed that you bewitched me into bed

And sung me moon-struck, kissed me quite insane.

(I think I made you up inside my head.)

God topples from the sky, hell's fires fade:

Exit seraphim and Satan's men:

I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead.

I fancied you'd return the way you said,

But I grow old and I forget your name.

(I think I made you up inside my head.)

I should have loved a thunderbird instead;

At least when spring comes they roar back again.

I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead.

(I think I made you up inside my head.)

Summary

This poem expresses deep sadness and longing, as the speaker feels like they have lost someone they loved so much that it feels like they made them up. Closing their eyes makes the world disappear, but opening them brings everything back, making them question reality.

5. Love Letter 

Written in: 1956

Not easy to state the change you made.

If I'm alive now, then I was dead,

Though, like a stone, unbothered by it,

Staying put according to habit.

You didn't just tow me an inch, no-

Nor leave me to set my small bald eye

Skyward again, without hope, of course,

Of apprehending blueness, or stars.

That wasn't it. I slept, say: a snake

Masked among black rocks as a black rock

In the white hiatus of winter-

Like my neighbors, taking no pleasure

In the million perfectly-chisled

Cheeks alighting each moment to melt

My cheeks of basalt. They turned to tears,

Angels weeping over dull natures,

But didn't convince me. Those tears froze.

Each dead head had a visor of ice.

And I slept on like a bent finger.

The first thing I was was sheer air

And the locked drops rising in dew

Limpid as spirits. Many stones lay

Dense and expressionless round about.

I didn't know what to make of it.

I shone, mice-scaled, and unfolded

To pour myself out like a fluid

Among bird feet and the stems of plants.

I wasn't fooled. I knew you at once.

Tree and stone glittered, without shadows.

My finger-length grew lucent as glass.

I started to bud like a March twig:

An arm and a leg, and arm, a leg.

From stone to cloud, so I ascended.

Now I resemble a sort of god

Floating through the air in my soul-shift

Pure as a pane of ice. It's a gift.

Summary 

In this poem, the speaker describes a transformation from being lifeless like a stone to becoming alive and growing like a budding twig. They feel like they've changed from something heavy and cold into something light and pure, almost like a god floating through the air.

6. The Moon and the Yew Tree 

Written in: 1961

This is the light of the mind, cold and planetary.

The trees of the mind are black. The light is blue.

The grasses unload their griefs at my feet as if I were God,

Prickling my ankles and murmuring of their humility.

Fumy spiritous mists inhabit this place

Separated from my house by a row of headstones.

I simply cannot see where there is to get to.

The moon is no door. It is a face in its own right,

White as a knuckle and terribly upset.

It drags the sea after it like a dark crime; it is quiet

With the O-gape of complete despair. I live here.

Twice on Sunday, the bells startle the sky –

Eight great tongues affirming the Resurrection.

At the end, they soberly bong out their names.

The yew tree points up. It has a Gothic shape.

The eyes lift after it and find the moon.

The moon is my mother. She is not sweet like Mary.

Her blue garments unloose small bats and owls.

How I would like to believe in tenderness –

The face of the effigy, gentled by candles,

Bending, on me in particular, its mild eyes.

I have fallen a long way. Clouds are flowering

Blue and mystical over the face of the stars.

Inside the church, the saints will be all blue,

Floating on their delicate feet over cold pews,

Their hands and faces stiff with holiness.

The moon sees nothing of this. She is bald and wild.

And the message of the yew tree is blackness –

blackness and silence.

Summary

This poem describes a dark and mysterious place filled with sadness and silence. The speaker reflects on the cold, distant light of the moon and the somber presence of a yew tree, feeling disconnected and lost.

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Sylvia Plath poems about death

Sylvia Plath's poems often explore the theme of death, reflecting her deep and complex feelings about life and mortality. 

Through her powerful and emotional writing, she captures the pain and beauty of facing the end. Her work offers a unique and effective look at how death affects our thoughts and emotions.

7. Lady Lazarus 

Written in: 1962

I have done it again.

One year in every ten

I manage it——

A sort of walking miracle, my skin

Bright as a Nazi lampshade,

My right foot

A paperweight,

My face a featureless, fine

Jew linen.

Peel off the napkin

O my enemy.

Do I terrify?——

The nose, the eye pits, the full set of teeth?

The sour breath

Will vanish in a day.

Soon, soon the flesh

The grave cave ate will be

At home on me

And I a smiling woman.

I am only thirty.

And like the cat I have nine times to die.

This is Number Three.

What a trash

To annihilate each decade.

What a million filaments.

The peanut-crunching crowd

Shoves in to see

Them unwrap me hand and foot——

The big strip tease.

Gentlemen, ladies

These are my hands

My knees.

I may be skin and bone,

Nevertheless, I am the same, identical woman.

The first time it happened I was ten.

It was an accident.

The second time I meant

To last it out and not come back at all.

I rocked shut

As a seashell.

They had to call and call

And pick the worms off me like sticky pearls.

Dying

Is an art, like everything else.

I do it exceptionally well.

I do it so it feels like hell.

I do it so it feels real.

I guess you could say I’ve a call.

It’s easy enough to do it in a cell.

It’s easy enough to do it and stay put.

It’s the theatrical

Comeback in broad day

To the same place, the same face, the same brute

Amused shout:

‘A miracle!’

That knocks me out.

There is a charge

For the eyeing of my scars, there is a charge

For the hearing of my heart——

It really goes.

And there is a charge, a very large charge

For a word or a touch

Or a bit of blood

Or a piece of my hair or my clothes.

So, so, Herr Doktor.

So, Herr Enemy.

I am your opus,

I am your valuable,

The pure gold baby

That melts to a shriek.

I turn and burn.

Do not think I underestimate your great concern.

Ash, ash—

You poke and stir.

Flesh, bone, there is nothing there——

A cake of soap,

A wedding ring,

A gold filling.

Herr God, Herr Lucifer

Beware

Beware.

Out of the ash

I rise with my red hair

And I eat men like air.

Summary 

In the poem Lady Lazarus, Sylvia Plath describes her struggles with death and rebirth. She compares herself to a phoenix rising from the ashes, suffering pain and coming back stronger each time. She also highlights the fascination and cruelty of those who witness her suffering.

8. Tulips 

Written in: 1961

The tulips are too excitable, it is winter here.

Look how white everything is, how quiet, how snowed-in.

I am learning peacefulness, lying by myself quietly

As the light lies on these white walls, this bed, these hands.

I am nobody; I have nothing to do with explosions.

I have given my name and my day-clothes up to the nurses

And my history to the anesthetist and my body to surgeons.

They have propped my head between the pillow and the sheet-cuff

Like an eye between two white lids that will not shut.

Stupid pupil, it has to take everything in.

The nurses pass and pass, they are no trouble,

They pass the way gulls pass inland in their white caps,

Doing things with their hands, one just the same as another,

So it is impossible to tell how many there are.

My body is a pebble to them, they tend it as water

Tends to the pebbles it must run over, smoothing them gently.

They bring me numbness in their bright needles, they bring me sleep.

Now I have lost myself I am sick of baggage——

My patent leather overnight case like a black pillbox,

My husband and child smiling out of the family photo;

Their smiles catch onto my skin, little smiling hooks.

I have let things slip, a thirty-year-old cargo boat

stubbornly hanging on to my name and address.

They have swabbed me clear of my loving associations.

Scared and bare on the green plastic-pillowed trolley

I watched my teaset, my bureaus of linen, my books

Sink out of sight, and the water went over my head.

I am a nun now, I have never been so pure.

I didn’t want any flowers, I only wanted

To lie with my hands turned up and be utterly empty.

How free it is, you have no idea how free——

The peacefulness is so big it dazes you,

And it asks nothing, a name tag, a few trinkets.

It is what the dead close on, finally; I imagine them

Shutting their mouths on it, like a Communion tablet.

The tulips are too red in the first place, they hurt me.

Even through the gift paper I could hear them breathe

Lightly, through their white swaddlings, like an awful baby.

Their redness talks to my wound, it corresponds.

They are subtle : they seem to float, though they weigh me down,

Upsetting me with their sudden tongues and their color,

A dozen red lead sinkers round my neck.

Nobody watched me before, now I am watched.

The tulips turn to me, and the window behind me

Where once a day the light slowly widens and slowly thins,

And I see myself, flat, ridiculous, a cut-paper shadow

Between the eye of the sun and the eyes of the tulips,

And I have no face, I have wanted to efface myself.

The vivid tulips eat my oxygen.

Before they came the air was calm enough,

Coming and going, breath by breath, without any fuss.

Then the tulips filled it up like a loud noise.

Now the air snags and eddies round them the way a river

Snags and eddies round a sunken rust-red engine.

They concentrate my attention, that was happy

Playing and resting without committing itself.

The walls, also, seem to be warming themselves.

The tulips should be behind bars like dangerous animals;

They are opening like the mouth of some great African cat,

And I am aware of my heart: it opens and closes

Its bowl of red blooms out of sheer love of me.

The water I taste is warm and salt, like the sea,

And comes from a country far away as health.

Summary 

She describes her experience in a hospital room, where she finds peace in her isolation. The red tulips, a gift, disrupt this calm with their vividness, symbolizing the intrusion of life and emotion into her desire for emptiness and stillness.

9. Ariel 

Written in: 1962

Stasis in darkness.

Then the substanceless blue

Pour of tor and distances.

God’s lioness,

How one we grow,

Pivot of heels and knees!—The furrow

Splits and passes, sister to

The brown arc

Of the neck I cannot catch,

Nigger-eye

Berries cast dark

Hooks—

Black sweet blood mouthfuls,

Shadows.

Something else

Hauls me through air—

Thighs, hair;

Flakes from my heels.

White

Godiva, I unpeel—

Dead hands, dead stringencies.

And now I

Foam to wheat, a glitter of seas.

The child’s cry

Melts in the wall.

And I

Am the arrow,

The dew that flies

Suicidal, at one with the drive

Into the red

Eye, the cauldron of morning.

Summary

This poem describes a powerful transformation, with clear imagery of a journey through darkness to light. The speaker feels a deep connection with nature and experiences a sense of freedom and release, ending with a striking image of merging with the dawn.

Sylvia Plath poems about loneliness

Sylvia Plath’s poems often explore feelings of loneliness and isolation. Her work clearly captures the deep sense of being alone and the emotional struggles that come with it. Through her powerful and honest writing, Plath provides a moving look into the experience of loneliness.

10. Edge 

Written in: 1963

The woman is perfected.

Her dead

Body wears the smile of accomplishment,

The illusion of a Greek necessity

Flows in the scrolls of her toga,

Her bare

Feet seem to be saying:

We have come so far, it is over.

Each dead child coiled, a white serpent,

One at each little

Pitcher of milk, now empty.

She has folded

Them back into her body as petals

Of a rose close when the garden

Stiffens and odors bleed

From the sweet, deep throats of the night flower.

The moon has nothing to be sad about,

Staring from her hood of bone.

She is used to this sort of thing.

Her blacks crackle and drag.

Summary 

This poem, "Edge," describes a woman who has died, seemingly content and accomplished. Her lifeless body is compared to a Greek statue, and her children are portrayed as serpents coiled beside her, indicating a terrible and final end.

11. Morning Song 

Written in: 1960

Love set you going like a fat gold watch.

The midwife slapped your footsoles, and your bald cry

Took its place among the elements.

Our voices echo, magnifying your arrival. New statue.

In a drafty museum, your nakedness

Shadows our safety. We stand round blankly as walls.

I’m no more your mother

Than the cloud that distills a mirror to reflect its own slow

Effacement at the wind’s hand.

All night your moth-breath

Flickers among the flat pink roses. I wake to listen:

A far sea moves in my ear.

One cry, and I stumble from bed, cow-heavy and floral

In my Victorian nightgown.

Your mouth opens clean as a cat’s. The window square

Whitens and swallows its dull stars. And now you try

Your handful of notes;

The clear vowels rise like balloons.

Summary 

In this poem, a mother reflects on the moment of her baby's birth, feeling a mix of awe and distance. She describes the baby’s arrival and her own feelings of being overwhelmed and disconnected, as if she’s just an eyewitness to the new life.

12. Pheasant 

Written in: 1962

You said you would kill it this morning.

Do not kill it. It startles me still,

The jut of that odd, dark head, pacing

Through the uncut grass on the elm's hill.

It is something to own a pheasant,

Or just to be visited at all.

I am not mystical: it isn't

As if I thought it had a spirit.

It is simply in its element.

That gives it a kingliness, a right.

The print of its big foot last winter,

The trail-track, on the snow in our court

The wonder of it, in that pallor,

Through crosshatch of sparrow and starling.

Is it its rareness, then? It is rare.

But a dozen would be worth having,

A hundred, on that hill-green and red,

Crossing and recrossing: a fine thing!

It is such a good shape, so vivid.

It's a little cornucopia.

It unclaps, brown as a leaf, and loud,

Settles in the elm, and is easy.

It was sunning in the narcissi.

I trespass stupidly. Let be, let be.

Summary 

This poem describes a pheasant that the speaker finds both surprising and captivating. The bird's presence, with its clear colors and graceful movements, feels special and almost royal. The speaker appreciates the pheasant’s beauty and rarity, finding joy in its simple existence.

Plath's writing tackles complex themes and intense feelings. As readers delve into her work, they often discover the profound emotional depth within:

"Trying to understand Sylvia Plath's themes"

"Realizing it's a deep dive into raw emotion"

Sylvia Plath quotes

Following are the top 12 quotes of her:

About love

1. “Ever since I was small I loved feeling somebody comb my hair. It made me go all sleepy and peaceful.”
2. “Yes, I want the world's praise, money, and love, and am furious with anyone...getting ahead of me.” 
3. “There must be quite a few things a hot bath won't cure, but I don't know many of them. Whenever I'm sad I'm going to die, or so nervous I can't sleep, or in love with somebody I won't be seeing for a week, I slump down just so far and then I say: ‘I'll go take a hot bath.’”
4. “I am jealous of those who think more deeply, who write better, who draw better, who ski better, who look better, who live better, who love better than I.”
5. “There I went again, building up a glamorous picture of a man who would love me passionately the minute he met me, and all out of a few prosy nothings.”
6. “‘If you love her,’ I said, ‘you'll love somebody else someday.’”

About life

7. “Of course, I didn't believe in life after death or the virgin birth or the Inquisition or the infallibility of that little monkey-faced Pope or anything, but I didn't have to let the priest see this, I could just concentrate on my sin, and he would help me repent.” 
8. “And by the way, everything in life is writable if you have the outgoing guts to do it, and the imagination to improvise.”
9. “Life has been a combination of fairy-tale coincidence and joie de vivre and shocks of beauty together with some hurtful self-questioning.” 
10. “With me, the present is forever, and forever is always shifting, flowing, melting. This second is life. And when it is gone it is dead. But you can't start over with each new second. You have to judge by what is dead.”
11. “I felt myself melting into the shadows like the negative of a person I'd never seen before in my life.”
12. “I told him I believed in hell, and that certain people, like me, had to live in hell before they died, to make up for missing out on it after death, since they didn't believe in life after death, and what each person believed happened to him when he died.”

Famous Sylvia Plath books 

These are some famous books of Sylvia Plath:

1. The Bell Jar (1963)
2. Ariel (1965)
3. The Colossus and Other Poems (1960)
4. Letters Home (1975)
5. The Journals of Sylvia Plath (1982)
6. Sylvia Plath: The Collected Poems (1981)

Conclusion

Sylvia Plath's poems are perfect for late-night reading because they talk about deep feelings in a powerful way. Her words can make you think about love, life, and even sad things. 

When everything is quiet at night, these poems can help you understand your own feelings better. Some poems are short, while others are longer, but they all have strong emotions. 

Reading Plath's work can be like looking into someone's heart and mind. If you want to explore big ideas and feelings through poetry, try reading some of Sylvia Plath's poems before bed. So why not pick up one of her books tonight and start your own late-night poetry?

FAQs

1. Who was Sylvia Plath?

Sylvia Plath was an American poet and writer who lived from 1932 to 1963. She is famous for her powerful poems and her novel, “The Bell Jar”.

2. What topics does Sylvia Plath write about?

Sylvia Plath's poems often talk about personal feelings, mental health, and struggles with identity. She wrote about her own experiences and emotions.

3. Why are Sylvia Plath's poems important?

Sylvia Plath's poems are important because they offer a deep and personal look into her feelings and struggles. Her unique way of writing has inspired many people and changed how poetry is viewed.

4. How did Sylvia Plath's life affect her poems?

Sylvia Plath's own life, including her struggles with mental health and her personal relationships, deeply influenced her poems. Her work reflects her personal experiences and emotions.

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