Sylvia Plath reads “November Graveyard“

Sylvia Plath reading her poem “November Graveyard“ The scene stands stubborn: skinflint trees Hoard last leaves, won’t mourn, wear sackcloth, or turn To elegiac dryads, and dour grass Guards the hard-hearted emerald of its grassiness However the grandiloquent mind may scorn Such poverty. So no dead men’s cries Flower forget-me-nots between the stone Paving this grave ground. Here’s honest rot To unpick the elaborate heart, pare bone Free of the fictive vein. When one stark skeleton Bulks real, all saints’ tongues fall quiet: Flies watch no resurrections in the sun. At the essential landscape stare, stare Till your eyes foist a vision dazzling on the wind: Whatever lost ghosts flare, Damned, howling in their shrouds across the moor Rave on the leash of the starving mind Which peoples the bare room, the blank, untenanted air.