Sylvia Plath

The Munich Mannequins Perfection is terrible, it cannot have children.
Cold as snow breath, it tamps the wombWhere the yew trees blow like hydras,
The tree of life and the tree of lifeUnloosing their moons, month after month, to no purpose.
The blood flood is the flood of love,The absolute sacrifice.
It means: no more idols but me,Me and you.
So, in their sulfur loveliness, in their smilesThese mannequins lean tonight
In Munich, morgue between Paris and Rome,Naked and bald in their furs,
Orange lollies on silver sticks,Intolerable, without minds.
The snow drops its pieces of darkness,Nobody’s about. In the hotels
Hands will be opening doors and settingDown shoes for a polish of carbon
Into which broad toes will go tomorrow.O the domesticity of these windows,
The baby lace, the green-leaved confectionery,The thick Germans slumbering in their bottomless Stolz.
And the black phones on hooksGlittering
Glittering and digesting

Voicelessness. The snow has no voice

My favorite line in this piece is

“orange lollies on silver sticks”

I don’t know why, but that image, put with the cold, icy, snowy setting written into the beginning, really leaves an impression on me.

Sulfur smiles also resonates, particularly since it makes that fact that they smile on the outside but that only covers the noxious inside very clear and real to me as a reader.

To me, this feels ‘timeless’, as in set outside of time. It feels like the author set the world on pause, near midnight while it snows, and wanders in and around this darkened city while commenting on the futility of life.

For life is a search for perfection- everyone wants something better, something more,

but when we reach perfection, there is nothing more to do, nothing more to gain or chase or exist for,

so we don’t. and everything stops.