Today’s poem is chosen and introduced by our Head of English, Mr Fernandes.
We had the joys of Dickinson yesterday, so lets go with another excellent American woman.
Many of you will have encountered Sylvia Plath before. She was born on October 27, 1932, in Boston, Massachusetts. She studied at Smith College in the US and at Cambridge. She published her first collection of poetry (Colossus) in 1960.
We will look at one of her feminist poems, in which she imagines women, suffering great inequality, as quietly and discreetly emerging to take hold. Counter-arguments might look for more defiant action, but there is power in the soft fists that insist, heaving everything in their path, eventually even the paving.
Can anyone find the Biblical reference? Do we think that Plaths hopes for women in 1960 have been fully realised in 2020?
Mushrooms (1960)
Overnight, very
Whitely, discreetly,
Very quietly
Our toes, our noses
Take hold on the loam,
Acquire the air.
Nobody sees us,
Stops us, betrays us;
The small grains make room.
Soft fists insist on
Heaving the needles,
The leafy bedding,
Even the paving.
Our hammers, our rams,
Earless and eyeless,
Perfectly voiceless,
Widen the crannies,
Shoulder through holes. We
Diet on water,
On crumbs of shadow,
Bland-mannered, asking
Little or nothing.
So many of us!
So many of us!
We are shelves, we are
Tables, we are meek,
We are edible,
Nudgers and shovers
In spite of ourselves.
Our kind multiplies:
We shall by morning
Inherit the earth.
Our foot’s in the door.
