Winter Landscape, with Rooks

"Conversation Among the Ruins"

Winter Landscape, with Rooks written by Sylvia Plath

"Pursuit"

Poem composed in 1956; include as entry 2 in The Collected Poems, edited by Ted Hughes

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Winter Landscape, with Rooks Water in the millrace, through a sluice of stone, plunges headlong into that black pond where, absurd and out-of-season, a single swan floats chaste as snow, taunting the clouded mind which hungers to haul the white reflection down. The austere sun descends above the fen, an orange cyclops-eye, scorning to look longer on this landscape of chagrin; feathered dark in thought, I stalk like a rook, brooding as the winter night comes on. Last summer's reeds are all engraved in ice as is your image in my eye; dry frost glazes the window of my hurt; what solace can be struck from rock to make heart's waste grow green again? Who'd walk in this bleak place? 1956