Sunday Poetry: Premonitions

Doomsday

The idiot bird leaps out and drunken leans
Atop the broken universal clock:
The hour is crowed in lunatic thirteens.

Out painted stages fall apart by scenes
While all the actors halt in mortal shock:
The idiot bird leaps out and drunken leans.

Streets crack through in havoc-split ravines
As the doomstruck city crumbles block by block:
The hour is crowed in lunatic thirteens.

Fractured glass flies down in smithereens;
Our lucky relics have been put in hock:
The idiot bird leaps out and drunken leans.

The monkey's wrench has blasted all machines;
We never thought to hear the holy cock:
The hour is crowed in lunatic thirteens.

Too late to ask if end was worth the means,
Too late to calculate the toppling stock:
The idiot bird leaps out and drunken leans,
The hour is crowed in lunatic thirteens.

This was written by Plath in her early years sometime probably well before 1955. The villanelle scheme fascinated her and she employed this format many times when she was young, and continued to sometimes use a rather modofied terza rima even in her later Ariel voice.

It is included in the juvenilia section of Ted Hughs' 1980 The Collected Poems, Sylvia Plath with the caveat that Plath herself would probably never have been much concerned with its publication.