Well, that's mostly true, anyway.
Regarding the title of this blog: For a long time now, my thoughts have come back to this particular phrase. It just popped in my head one morning- not without a bit of familiarity, to be sure- and i went with it. Later, little nagging thoughts kept popping up: But Heather, where did you hear that? Did you hear that somewhere before? And the fact that they kept coming told me that i was probably borrowing a phrase.
As i am not one to neglect giving credit where credit is due, my brain faithfully (and subconsciously) stayed on the trail. Yesterday it dawned on me- a poem! It was in a poem i read somewhere! But where? And how long ago? Surely i don't read that much poetry (something i should change, at any rate), so perhaps it's on the bookshelf?
A-ha! It must be Sylvia Plath, i thought, and i was right:
Nick and the Candlestick
I am a miner. The light burns blue.
Waxy stalactites
Drip and thicken, tears
The earthen womb
Exudes from its dead boredom.
Black bat airs
Wrap me, raggy shawls,
Cold homicides.
They weld to me like plums.
Old cave of calcium
Icicles, old echoer.
Even the newts are white,
Those holy Joes.
And the fish, the fish -
Christ! they are panes of ice,
A vice of knives,
A piranha
Religion, drinking
Its first communion out of my live toes.
The candle
Gulps and recovers its small altitude,
Its yellows hearten.
O love, how did you get here?
O embryo
Remembering, even in sleep,
Your crossed position.
The blood blooms clean
In you, ruby.
The pain
You wake to is not yours.
Love, love,
I have hung our cave with roses,
With soft rugs -
The last of Victoriana.
Let the stars
Plummet to their dark address,
Let the mercuric
Atoms that cripple drip
Into the terrible well,
You are the one
Solid the spaces lean on, envious.
You are the baby in the barn.
(From my copy of Ariel, a collection of her last poems which was published in 1961)
And there you have it. Stanza 11, "Love, love/I have hung our cave with roses". So now i'm torn. Obviously i didn't come up with a purely original phrase. i was influenced by her prose, but to what degree?
i think i'll keep it up, all the same. it's an homage, okay? i love the words, and words belong to everyone, right? So there.
Fin.
Wednesday, November 5
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3 comments:
I don't think you have to worry. Were I to read that Plath poem without thinking of it in this context, I would definitely not make the mental jump to your poem. Anyway, I like the title of your blog. I like the poem, too; they can exist side by side.
I adore Silvia Plath, but I think silvergirl has quite improved on the original. Of course, I adore silvergirl as well, so perhaps I'm not being objects.
Anyway, it's um, oh, I don't know, an alchemical transformation, or something.
Whoa nat, whoa. ::holds up hands warily::
(Hey, i actually loved that alchemy reader you had from a class you took as an undergrad at Cal- where is that, anyway?)
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