Spinster

Now this particular girl

During a ceremonious april walk

With her latest suitor

Found herself, of a sudden, intolerably struck

By the bird's irregular babel

And the leaves' litter.

 

By this tumult afflicted, she

Observed her lover's gestures unbalance the air,

His gait stray uneven

Through a rank wilderness of fern and flower;

She judged petals in disarray,

The whole season, sloven.

 

How she longed for winter then!-

Scrupulously austere in its order

Of white and black

Ice and rock; each sentiment within border,

And heart's frosty discipline

Exact as a snowflake.

 

But here - a burgeoning

Unruly enough to pitch her five queenly wits

Into vulgar motley-

A treason not to be borne; let idiots

Reel giddy in bedlam spring;

She withdrew neatly.

 

And round her house she set

Such a barricade of barb and check

Against mutinous weather

As no mere insurgent man could hope to break

With curse, fist, threat

Or love, either.

 

-- Sylvia Plath --

Done