a table or a chair

her [Sylvia Plath's] attitude to her verse was artisanlike: if she couldn't get a table out of the material, she was quite happy to get a chair, or even a toy. The end product for her was not so much a successful poem, as something that had temporarily exhausted her ingenuity.

—Ted Hughes, in his introduction to The Collected Poems by Sylvia Plath, edited by Ted Hughes (Harper & Row, 1981)