Welcome back to the Daily Poem, a podcast from Goldberry Studios. I'm Sean Johnson, and today is

Wednesday, November 13th, 2004. Today's poem is by Sylvia Plath, and it's called Gold Mouths Cry.

I'll read it once, say a few things about it, and then read it one more time. Gold Mouths Cry.

Gold Mouths Cry Gold Mouths cry. Gold Mouths cry with the green young certainty of the bronze boy,

remembering a thousand autumns,

and how a hundred thousand leaves came sliding down his shoulder blades,

persuaded by his bronze heroic reason.

We ignore the coming doom of gold, and we are glad in this bright metal. older blades persuaded by his bronze heroic reason.

We ignore the coming doom of gold, and we are glad in this bright metal season,

even the dead laugh among the golden rod.

The bronze boy stands knee-deep in centuries, and never grieves,

remembering a thousand autumns with sunlight of a thousand years upon his lips and his eyes gone blind with leaves.

This is an earlier Plath poem that is absent some of her confessional, emotional language and imagery, but still has the kind of

remove or distance of the speaker that you might expect in a Plath poem, and it certainly is

preoccupied with some of the same themes that she's often writing about mortality, impermanence. It opens with an irony, a surprising

twist or flip gold that we think of typically as this precious metal which famously does not

rust, endures forever, is the thing of impermanence here.

And she must be interacting with Robert Frost's poem, Nothing Gold Can Stay, which is already

several decades old when she writes her poem. And there, nature's first green is gold, is the opening line, and we have gold and green

paired here, too.

Gold mouths cry with the green young certainty of the bronze boy.

And so immediately, what we think of as permanence, the gold is subverted. And I think that is in keeping

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