Night Walk Poem by Sylvia Plath

By Sylvia Plath
October 4, 1958

Flintlike, her feet struck
 such a racket of echoes from the steely street,
tacking in moon-blued crooks from the black
 stone-built town, that she heard the quick air ignite
  its tinder and shake

a firework of echoes from wall
 to wall of the dark, dwarfed cottages.
But the echoes died at her back as the walls
 gave way to fields and the incessant seethe of grasses
  riding in the full

of the moon, manes to the wind,
 tireless, tied, as a moon-bound sea
moves on its root. Though a mist-wraith wound
 up from the fissured valley and hung shoulder-high
  ahead, it fattened

to no family-featured ghost,
 nor did any word body with a name
the blank mood she walked in. Once past
 the dream-peopled village, her eyes entertained no dream,
  and the sandman’s dust

lost lustre under her footsoles.
 The long wind, paring her person down
to a pinch of flame, blew its burdened whistle
 in the whorl of her ear, and, like a scooped-out pumpkin crown,
  her head cupped the babel.

All the night gave her, in return
 for the paltry gift of her bulk and the beat
of her heart, was the humped, indifferent iron
 of its hills, and its pastures bordered by black stone set
  on black stone. Barns

guarded broods and litters
 behind shut doors; the dairy herds
knelt in the meadow, mute as boulders;
 sheep drowsed stoneward in their tussocks of wool; and birds,
  twig-sleeping, wore

granite ruffs, their shadows
 the guise of leaves. The whole landscape
loomed absolute, as the antique world was
 once, in its earliest sway of lymph and sap,
  unaltered by eyes,

 enough to snuff the quick
 of her small heat out. But before the weight
of stones and hills of stones could break
 her down to mere quartz grit in that stony light,
  she turned back.

The New Yorker
Published in the print edition of the October 11, 1958, issue.