REGRET
When your eyes are full of tears,
but you cannot cry,
when you think you’ve conquered your fears,
but can only sigh.
When you rise to the occasion,
and hold yourself together,
in rain or shine or stormy weather,
and your heart beats fast,
and faster still,
as if you’re running up the steepest hill.
Memories tumble out,
and stop you dead,
and you cry at last,
for all that you left unsaid.
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John Marks
Sat 7th Jun 2025 17:23
Thank YOU Yanma Hidayah for taking the trouble to write with such intelligence and perspicacity about 'Regret'. Plath beat us both to it!
“Always with the queer regret, blurring all the other summers into a fine nostalgic brew - distilling all the tart sweetnesses into this one, with the sea of music skipping over the time, and the feeling in you very warm and it is our town, we all together, very sweet, all summer light, sometimes almost tearful because it is so moving all the time. The fluid color, the fluid sound, towards its ending... And now I am sitting here crying almost because suddenly I am knowing in my head and feeling in my guts what those words mean when I did not know the full impact of them in the beginning, but merely their mystic beauty.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath