The Bell Jar



Distortion descends in this fatal haven
 Palpable as an irreverent dream
 Wisdom supreme, electric it seems
 Go on then, I shall quote the raven

 The dykes broke and the darkness seized
 Like a lover who knows to descend
 When ungovernable truth, deadens the roots
 Masking itself artlessly

 Lady Lazarus sleeps in a landscape of snow
 Bland and stopped as a dead baby sleeping
 Ariel's plea, under the mirror-like sea
 Lies behind the stores of the past

 The vulnerable are always with us,
 In their acres of misgivings and doubts
 Partial to rain, the rebirth in pain
 The psychic regenerate route

 Unpublished words are as no words at all
 The writer breathes in the reading
 The ritualizing of print, awakens the flint
 And the colossus can stand proud and tall

 The stifling lure, of new fabled cures
 Supplementing the suppliants needs
 Yet dread as she was, it was only because
 For her art she could only bleed

 In the bell jar, mischievous minds
 Can't contain their plans of escaping
 When it descends, look to no end
 Hope goes on, waiting and waiting

 Like heresy's need to be free
 The soul cannot live as a slave
 When the mind is a master, whose sadist ways
 Points directly to the mouth of the grave.

for:Sylvia Plath
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Submitted on September 30, 2013

Modified on March 05, 2023

1:05 min read
5

Quick analysis:

Scheme AXXA XBXC XDEX XXXX CDXC XXXX XDBD EFXF
Closest metre Iambic pentameter
Characters 1,201
Words 214
Stanzas 8
Stanza Lengths 4, 4, 4, 4, 4, 4, 4, 4

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