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Two Views of a Cadaver Room

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1

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The day she visited the dissecting room

They had four men laid out, black as burnt turkey,

Already half unstrung. A vinegary fume

Of the death vats clung to them;

The white-smocked boys started working.

The head of his cadaver had caved in,

And she could scarcely make out anything

In that rubble of skull plates and old leather.

A sallow piece of string held it together.

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In their jars the snail-nosed babies moon and glow.

He hands her the cut-out heart like a cracked heirloom.

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2

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In Brueghel’s panorama of smoke and slaughter

Two people only are blind to the carrion army:

He, afloat in the sea of her blue satin

Skirts, sings in the direction

Of her bare shoulder, while she bends,

Finger a leaflet of music, over him,

Both of them deaf to the fiddle in the hands

Of the death’s-head shadowing their song.

These Flemish lovers flourish; not for long.

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Yet desolation, stalled in paint, spares the little country

Foolish, delicate, in the lower right hand corner.

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dos visitas de una sala de cadáveres

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  1

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  El día en que ella visitó la sala de disección

  tenían cuatro hombres tumbados, negros como pavos quemados,

  a medio despedazar. Rezumaban un vapor

  avinagrado como de cubetas mortuorias;

  los chicos de las batas blancas comenzaron a trabajar.

  La cabeza de su cadáver se había hundido

  y ella apenas podía reconocer nada

  entre el caos de cráneos y pellejos rancios.

  Un raquítico trozo de cuerda lo sujetaba.

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  En sus frascos, criaturas con nariz de caracol miran ensimismadas y brillan.

  Y él le entrega el corazón roto como una herencia resquebrajada.

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  2

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  En la panorámica de Brueghel de humo y matanza

  sólo dos personas no ven los montones de carroña.

  Él, a flote en el mar de azul satén

  de sus faldas, canta en la dirección

  de su espalda desnuda, mientras ella se inclina

  sobre él, con una partitura entre los dedos,

  ajenos ambos al violín en manos

  de la muerte cuya cabeza ensombrece su canción.

  Florecen estos amantes flamencos; no por mucho tiempo.

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  Mas la desolación, detenida en la pintura, perdona al pequeño paisaje

  distraído, delicado, desde el borde inferior derecho.

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Sylvia Plath

1960

de EL COLOSO

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‘Two Views of a Cadaver Room’ appears in The Colossus and Other Poems,

and uses imagery that recurs throughout Plath’s work, such as foetuses and skulls.

The poem is divided into two formally similar parts, each consisting of eleven lines.

In the first section, the speaker portrays a dissecting room and the cadavers within it.

The second section describes Breugel’s painting The Triumph of Death, in which an

army of skeletons advances across a charred landscape. In a corner of the painting,

two lovers are oblivious to the chaos that surrounds them.

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Bruegel “the Elder”, Pieter

The Triumph of Death

Ca. 1562

Oil

Panel

117 cm x 162 cm

Flemish

Allegory

Royal Collection (acquired by Queen Isabel Farnesio, 1746-1759;

Collection of Isabel Farnesio, Royal Palace of La Granja de San Ildefonso, Segovia,

“Cuarto bajo-pieza segunda inmediata a la galería”, 1766, [s. nº.];

La Granja Palace, 1774; La Granja Palace, 1794, [s. nº.]). Prado Museum, 1827

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