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November 8th, 2009 - we have 234 poets, 8,023 poems and 17,880 comments.
Sylvia Plath - Face Lift

You bring me good news from the clinic,
Whipping off your silk scarf, exhibiting the tight white
Mummy-cloths, smiling: I'm all right.
When I was nine, a lime-green anesthetist
Fed me banana-gas through a frog mask.  The nauseous vault
Boomed with bad dreams and the Jovian voices of surgeons.
Then mother swam up, holding a tin basin.
O I was sick.

They've changed all that.  Traveling
Nude as Cleopatra in my well-boiled hospital shift,
Fizzy with sedatives and unusually humorous,
I roll to an anteroom where a kind man
Fists my fingers for me.  He makes me feel something precious
Is leaking from the finger-vents.  At the count of two,
Darkness wipes me out like chalk on a blackboard. . .
I don't know a thing.

For five days I lie in secret,
Tapped like a cask, the years draining into my pillow.
Even my best friend thinks I'm in the country.
Skin doesn't have roots, it peels away easy as paper.
When I grin, the stitches tauten.  I grow backward.  I'm twenty,
Broody and in long skirts on my first husband's sofa, my fingers
Buried in the lambswool of the dead poodle;
I hadn't a cat yet.

Now she's done for, the dewlapped lady
I watched settle, line by line, in my mirror—
Old sock-face, sagged on a darning egg.
They've trapped her in some laboratory jar.
Let her die there, or wither incessantly for the next fifty years,
Nodding and rocking and fingering her thin hair.
Mother to myself, I wake swaddled in gauze,
Pink and smooth as a baby.

Added: on February 8th, 2009 at 1:33 AM | Viewed: 8705 times | Comments and analysis of Face Lift by Sylvia Plath Comments (16)


Face Lift - Comments and Information

Poet: Sylvia Plath (Sylvia Plath Art)
Poem: Face Lift
Volume: Crossing the Water
Year: Published/Written in 1961
Poem of the Day: Jul 16 2006

Comment 16 of 16, added on May 16th, 2009 at 12:25 PM.

I believe Plath is slightly jealous and slightly confused by this women, who is making such a show of her operation, "whipping off your silk scalf".
The face lift provides the woman with a quick fix solution to her problems; Plath has no quick fix to hers.

Beth from United Kingdom
Comment 15 of 16, added on March 23rd, 2009 at 6:10 PM.

There was nothing " wonderful " about this poem,nor the author.Slvia Plath was an example of how " not " to express yourself,especially through the selfish act of suicide.The poem itself is like a lot of Plath's work,vague to the untrained eye yet expressive,and always too self absorbed.Perhaps if she spent more time in therapy with a good psychiatrist or pastor she would still be alive.Perhaps her son would have not have killed himself as well...Vain poetry from a vain woman,who not only damned herself but her son now as well.

Gary from United States
Comment 14 of 16, added on February 8th, 2009 at 1:33 AM.

Sylvia was a very troubled young woman, and i think that only she could explain the real meanings to her poems.

Zoe from Australia

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