It is not a very well-known fact that Sylvia Plath liked to dabble in musical theater, where she was really quite an accomplished lyricist. Some of her best work includes two songs from the unproduced musical, “Let’s Make A Dill.”

The first is a show-stopper entitled “We’re In A Pickle,” in which she is able to come up with rhymes for sixteen different pickle varieties, including:

I’ll go to work in a mercantile,
Just to provide you with a gherkin, I’ll
Show you that my looooove…iiiiis…truuuuue.

The second is “My Heart Belongs To You, Don’t Put It In A Ball Jar,” which, I understand, she later reworked into a novel of some kind. (Though I think the novel’s publisher may have made a typo on the title.)

Anyway, I recently came across another lyric that Ms. Plath had written that, as far as I know, had never been put to music. So, a friend of mine, Kathryn Bartholomew (an unabashed turophile, though that has nothing to do with this particular story) was kind enough to compose the following, which I would categorize as a “smashing little ditty.”