Phyllis McGinley: the alter ego to Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton

• The 5:32
• She said, If tomorrow my world were torn in two,
• Blacked out, dissolved, I think I would remember
• (As if transfixed in unsurrendering amber)
• This hour best of all the hours I knew:
• When cars came backing into the shabby station,
• Children scuffing the seats, and the women driving
• With ribbons around their hair, and the trains arriving,
• And the men getting off with tired but practiced motion.

• Yes, I would remember my life like this, she said:
• Autumn, the platform red with Virginia creeper,
• And a man coming toward me, smiling, the evening paper
• Under his arm, and his hat pushed back on his head;
• And wood smoke lying like haze on the quiet town,
• And dinner waiting, and the sun not yet gone down. 

• Ballade of Lost Objects
• Where are the ribbons I tie my hair with?
• Where is my lipstick? Where are my hose —
• The sheer ones hoarded these weeks to wear with
• Frocks the closets do not disclose?
• Perfumes, petticoats, sports chapeaus,
• The blouse Parisian, the earrings Spanish —
• Everything suddenly up and goes.
• And where in the world did the children vanish?

• This is the house I used to share with
• Girls in pinafores, shier than does.
• I can recall how they climbed my stairs with
• Gales of giggles on their tiptoes.
• Last seen wearing both braids and bows
• (And looking rather Raggedy-Annish),
• When they departed nobody knows —
• Where in the world did the children vanish?

• Two tall strangers, now I must bear with,
• Decked in my personal furbelows,
• Raiding the larder, rending the air with
• Gossip and terrible radios.
• Neither my friends nor quite my foes,
• Alien, beautiful, stern and clannish,
• Here they dwell, while the wonder grows:
• Where in the world did the children vanish?

• Prince, I warn you, under the rose,
• Time is the thief you cannot banish.
• These are my daughters, I suppose.
• But where in the world did the children vanish?

• Daylight Savings Time
• In spring when maple buds are red,
• We turn the clock an hour ahead;
• Which means, each April that arrives,
• We lose an hour out of our lives.

• Who cares? When autumn birds in flocks 
• Fly southward, back we turn the clocks,
• And so regain a lovely thing 
• That missing hour we lost in spring.

Phyllis McGinley (1905-1978) was an American poet whose works were infused with a balanced mix of humor, satire, and whimsy, especially in her treatment of suburban life. In 1961, she won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. A popular poet of her day, McGinley wrote for a wide range of periodicals, from the middlebrow Ladies Home Journal to the highbrow The New Yorker. Often seen as the alter ego of contemporary feminist poets such as Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton – whose works expressed a bitter dissatisfaction with domestic life, Phyllis McGinley embraced her life as a “housewife poet.” For McGinley, true power comes to a woman through her place as the germinating principle of the family structure – and criticized feminists of her day for accepting roles imposed on them by false masculine expectations.