On the Difficulty of Conjuring Up a Dryad

Tags

Creation, Poetry

The Dryad, Evelyn de Morgan (1884-1885)

“On The Difficulty Of Conjuring Up A Dryad”

by Sylvia Plath

Ravening through the persistent bric-a-brac

Of blunt pencils, rose-sprigged coffee cup,

Postage stamps, stacked books’ clamor and yawp

Neighborhood cockcrow — all nature’s prodigal backtalk,

The vaunting mind

Snubs impromptu spiels of wind

And wrestles to impose

Its own order on what is.


‘With my fantasy alone,’ brags the importunate head,

Arrogant among rook-tongued spaces,

Sharp greens, finned falls, ‘I shall compose a crisis

To stun sky black out, drive gibbering mad

Trout, cock, ram,

That bulk so calm

On my jealous stare,

Self-sufficient as they are.’


But no hocus-pocus of green angels

Damasks with dazzle the threadbare eye;

‘My trouble, doctor, is: I see a tree,

And that damn scrupulous tree won’t practice wiles

To beguile sight:

E.g., by cant of light

Concoct a Daphne;

My tree stays tree.


‘However I wrench obstinate bark and trunk

To my sweet will, no luminous shape

Steps out radiant in limb, eye, lip,

To hoodwink the honest earth which pointblank

Spurns such fiction

As nymphs; cold vision

Will have no counterfeit

Palmed off on it.

‘No doubt now in dream-propertied fall some moon-eyed,

Star-lucky sleight-of-hand man watches

My jilting lady squander coin, gold leaf stock ditches,

And the opulent air go studded with seed,

While this beggared brain

Hatches no fortune,

But from leaf, from grass,

Thieves what it has.’