The Rabbit Catcher by Sylvia Plath
The Rabbit Catcher by Sylvia Plath

The Rabbit Catcher

Sylvia Plath * Track #6 On Winter Trees

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The Rabbit Catcher by Sylvia Plath

Performed by
Sylvia Plath
About

This poem recounts a walk which Sylvia Plath and her husband, Ted Hughes, took together. She found several snares, set to catch rabbits, and tore them out of the ground. Hughes objected and they argued about it.
Ted Hughes wrote his version of the story in a poem also called ‘The Rabbit Catcher’ in...

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The Rabbit Catcher Annotated

It was a place of force—
The wind gagging my mouth with my own blown hair,
Tearing off my voice, and the sea
Blinding me with its lights, the lives of the dead
Unreeling in it, spreading like oil.

I tasted the malignity of the gorse,
Its black spikes,
The extreme unction of its yellow candle-flowers.
They had an efficiency, a great beauty,
And were extravagant, like torture.

There was only one place to get to.
Simmering, perfumed,
The paths narrowed into the hollow.
And the snares almost effaced themselves—
Zeros, shutting on nothing,

Set close, like birth pangs.
The absence of shrieks
Made a hole in the hot day, a vacancy.
The glassy light was a clear wall,
The thickets quiet.

I felt a still busyness, an intent.
I felt hands round a tea mug, dull, blunt,
Ringing the white china.
How they awaited him, those little deaths!
They waited like sweethearts. They excited him.

And we, too, had a relationship—
Tight wires between us,
Pegs too deep to uproot, and a mind like a ring
Sliding shut on some quick thing,
The constriction killing me also.

The Rabbit Catcher Q&A

Who wrote The Rabbit Catcher's ?

The Rabbit Catcher was written by Sylvia Plath.

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