Letter in November

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This poem by Sylvia Plath originally appeared in the April 1963 edition of The London Magazine, alongside six other poems of hers.

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Love, the world
Suddenly turns, turns colour. The streetlight
Splits through the rat’s-tail
Pods of the laburnum at nine in the morning.
It is the Arctic,

This little black
Circle, with its tawn silk grasses—babies’ hair.
There is a green in the air,
Soft, delectable.
It cushions me lovingly.

I am flushed and warm.
I think I may be enormous,
I am so stupidly happy,
My Wellingtons
Squelching and squelching through the beautiful red.

This is my property.
Two times a day
I pace it, sniffling
The barbarous holly with its viridian
Scallops, pure iron,

And the wall of old corpses.
I love them.
I love them like history.
The apples are golden,
Imagine it—

My seventy trees
Holding their gold-ruddy balls
In a thick grey death-soup,
Their million
Gold leaves metal and breathless.

O love, O celibate.
Nobody but me
Walks the waist-high wet.
The irreplaceable
Golds bleed and deepen, the mouths of Thermopylae.

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Sylvia Plath was a renowned poet and writer best known for her collection, Ariel and the novel The Bell Jar.