Your clear eye is the one absolutely beautiful thing.
I want to fill it with color and ducks,
The zoo of the new
Whose name you meditate--
April snowdrop, Indian pipe,
Little

Stalk without wrinkle,
Pool in which images
Should be grand and classical

Not this troublous
Wringing of hands, this dark
Ceiling without a star.

This is one of those poems I am often tempted to call the best in the English language. Though “free verse,” the meter and sound are carefully structured to support the poem’s literal and emotional content. I haven’t seen any piece of writing that more poignantly and subtly expresses both the hope for a new beginning that a child inspires and the foreboding that the hurtful constructions of the adult world will shape each new life and re-enact themselves. I wish I had the leisure to describe this in more detail…

I found a bio of Plath at
http://metalab.unc.edu/cheryb/women/Sylvia-Plath–bio and a shorter but better-formatted one at http://www.poets.org/LIT/poet/splath.htm

— Dan Percival