By LAWRENCE VAN GELDER Published: November 1, 2006 A sonnet that Sylvia Plath wrote in college, inspired by F. Scott Fitzgerald's "Great Gatsby," has been discovered and will appear today in an online literary journal, The Associated Press reported. The previously unpublished poem "Ennui," written by Miss Plath in 1955 during her senior year at Smith College, was found by Anna Journey, a graduate student in creative writing at Virginia Commonwealth University, while researching the Plath archives at Indiana University. Ms. Journey said the sonnet, in the form of two original typed scripts with some handwritten notes, is related to the French expression l'ennui (boredom), which Miss Plath had written in her copy of "The Great Gatsby" next to the passage in which Daisy Buchanan, the woman Gatsby desires, complains, "I've been everywhere and seen everything and done everything." Ms. Journey said of Miss Plath (1932-63), "She was riffing off of Fitzgerald's passages." Beginning with the lines "Tea leaves thwart those who court catastrophe/designing futures where nothing will occur," the poem is featured in Blackbird, published online (blackbird.vcu.edu) by the English department of Virginia Commonwealth University and New Virginia Review. Gregory Donovan, an English professor at the university and co-editor of Blackbird, said the poem poked fun at people who consult tea leaves or psychics in the hope of foretelling disasters while real life itself is as dramatic and romantic as a fairy tale. --

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