North Berwick

...again.

A poem which I've always found extraordinary in it's humour and visual imagery is Sylvia Plath's 'Sow'. It is a poem I am so jealous of, in that I did not pen it, I did not have the liquid thought capacity that could embrace this story so rich in description and depicting and to have not written it is to feel dull beyond words.

Here is the beginning:

God knows how our neighbour managed to breed
His great sow:
Whatever his shrewd secret, he kept it hid

In the same way
He kept the sow - impounded from public stare,
Prize ribbon and pig show.

But one dusk our questions commended us to a tour
Through his lantern-lit
Maze of barns to the lintel of the sunk sty door

To gape at it:
This was no rose-and-larkspurred china suckling
with a penny slot

..........I'll not tell the rest.