The formal Sylvia Plath

Color Record No. 18, Side A:

and—Sylvia Plath, in form:

The Death of Myth-Making

By Sylvia Plath

Two virtues ride, by stallion, by nag,

   To grind our knives and scissors:

Lantern-jawed Reason, squat Common Sense

One courting doctors of all sorts,

   One, housewives and shopkeepers.

The trees are lopped, the poodles trim,

   The laborer’s nails pared level

Since those two civil servants set

Their whetstone to the blunted edge

   And minced the muddling devil

Whose owl-eyes in the scraggly wood

   Scared mothers to miscarry,

Drove the dogs to cringe and whine,

And turned the farmboy’s temper wolfish,

   The housewife’s, desultory.