Sylvia Plath: Sheep in Fog

The hills step off into whiteness.
People or stars
Regards me sadly, I disappoint them.

The train leaves a line of breath.
O slow
Horse the colour of rust,

Hooves, dolorous bells – 
All morning the
Morning has been blackening,

A flower left out.
My bones hold a stillness, the far
fields melt my heart.

They threaten
To let me through to a heaven
Starless and fatherless, a dark water.


Another poem in which the poet is using animals to write about something else. This was written around the turn of 1962/63, a few weeks before Plath's suicide - which makes it easy to understand the self-pity of "I disappoint them." The poem gradually comes to life, starting with the slow of "O slow horse" (the pull between slowness and a horse's physicality tells of the oppression holding the poet back), and ending in the dark heaven of "the far fields" from which the unmentioned sheep of the title have become absent.