Admonition

If you dissect a bird

To diagram the tongue

You'll cut the chord

Articulating song.

If you flay a beast

To marvel at the mane

You'll wreck the rest

From which the fur began.

If you pluck out the heart

To find what makes it move,

You'll halt the clock

That syncopates our love.

Sylvia Plath

Sylvia Plath (born October 27, 1932, Boston, Massachusetts, U.S.—died February 11, 1963, London, England) American poet whose best-known works, such as the poems “Daddy” and “Lady Lazarus” and the novel The Bell Jar, starkly express a sense of alienation and self-destruction closely tied to her personal experiences and, by extension, the situation of women in mid-20th-century America. She saw her world in the flame of the ultimate substance and the ultimate depth. And this is the distinction of her language, that every word is Baraka: the flame and the rose folded together. Poets have often spoken about this ideal possibility but where else, outside these poems, has it actually occurred? If we have the discrimination to answer this question, we can set her in her rightful company.”

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