a found poem: The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath
To write is a kind of madness when God is without meaning
the mind slack with solitude
and the letters are always teetering on the edge
of the pink sky. But poetry—shaping the spirit of desire without fear—
is the world to me. It is beating the drum
of the human imagination
making dreams—instead of death—a moving synthesizing force.
It is wanting more
than the horrible black truth.
What I must always do: anything that sprouts words.
What I fear most, I think, is the death of the imagination. When the sky outside is merely pink, and the rooftops merely black: that photographic mind which paradoxically tells the truth, but the worthless truth, about the world. It is that synthesizing spirit, that “shaping” force, which prolifically sprouts and makes up its own worlds with more inventiveness than God which I desire. If I sit still and don’t do anything, the world goes on beating like a slack drum, without meaning. We must be moving, working, making dreams to run toward; the poeverty of life without dreams is too horrible to imagine: it is that kind of madness which is worst: the kind with fancies and hallucinations would be a bosch-ish relief. I listen always for footsteps coming up the stairs and hate them if they are not for me. Why, why, can I not be an ascetic for a while, instead of always teetering on the edge of wanting complete solitude for work and reading, and, so much, so much, the gestures of hands and words of other human beings. Well, after this Racine paper, this Ronsard-purgatory, this Sophocles, I shall write: letters and prose and poetry, toward the end of the week; I must be stoic till then.
