Having bitten on life

Running rest-day ...

... and today's picture is of a fascinating volume I have in my poetry-collection, which isn't strictly poetry!

It's an edited volume of Sylvia Plath's journals from between 1950-1962 ... not the easiest of reads, but truly fascinating if you like Plath's (and Ted Hughes') poetry.

The volume was published in 2000, after Ted Hughes' death in 1998, and does contain fragments of Plath's poetry; but I've always been drawn to a Louis MacNeice poem which is quoted at the start of the journals:


Aubade

Having bitten on life like a sharp apple
Or, playing it like a fish, been happy,

Having felt with fingers that the sky is blue
what have we after that to look forward to?

Not the twilight of the gods but a precise dawn
of sallow and grey bricks, and newsboys crying war.

---

Life as tragedy indeed.