I Am Vertical
But I would rather be horizontal.
I am not a tree with my root in the soil
Sucking up minerals and motherly love
So that each March I may gleam into leaf,
Nor am I the beauty of a garden bed
Attracting my share of Ahs and spectacularly painted,
Unknowing I must soon unpetal.
Compared with me, a tree is immortal
And a flower-head not tall, but more startling,
And I want the one's longevity and the other's daring.
Tonight, in the infinitesimal light of the stars,
The trees and flowers have been strewing their cool odors.
I walk among them, but none of them are noticing.
Sometimes I think that when I am sleeping
I must most perfectly resemble them—
Thoughts gone dim.
It is more natural to me, lying down.
Then the sky and I are in open conversation,
And I shall be useful when I lie down finally:
The the trees may touch me for once, and the flowers have time for me.
Notes
Margaret Atwood's A Sad Child explores the difficulty of living with feelings we cannot simply overcome. Sylvia Plath's I Am Vertical takes that unease into the body itself. The speaker envies trees and flowers for their effortless belonging to the natural world, while her own upright existence feels strangely disconnected from it. There is something deeply lonely about wanting to belong to the earth and finding that consciousness keeps you apart. We spend much of our lives trying to establish ourselves as distinct individuals, giving shape and meaning to our existence. Yet this very awareness of being separate can become a source of alienation. Plath imagines a moment when the boundaries between the self and the natural world might finally disappear, when the body can surrender its constant effort to remain someone. October's decay finds a peculiar tenderness in this desire to become horizontal. The trees continue growing, the flowers bend toward the soil, and the human body longs for the same quiet belonging. Perhaps what makes mortality so unsettling is also what makes it strangely intimate: the earth we spend our lives standing upon is the place to which we eventually return. #SylviaPlath #Women #mortality #Poetry #existentialism