Ariel

Ariel is the second published collection of Sylvia Plath poems; it appeared two years after her suicide. Famously, her husband Ted Hughes exchanged some of the poems Plath had intended to include for others and made changes in the order. The result is, to my mind, uneven. It contains some excellent poems, among them “The Moon and the Yew Tree,” “Sheep in Fog,” and “Ariel.” Then there are a few I don’t understand (“The Couriers,” for instance). And I’m not sure what to make of two of the most famous poems in the collection, “Lady Lazarus” and “Daddy.” The first is often read as prefiguring her suicide, but I read it instead as the declamation of the survivor of a suicide attempt. Admittedly, it’s disturbing show more because of the expectance of more attempts, yet overall the voice is exultant. Yet I found the conflation of the speaker’s persona with a concentration camp victim disturbing. This note is repeated in “Daddy.” To my taste, Plath dealt more successfully with complicated feelings arising from the early loss of one’s father in “Colossus,” the title poem of her first collection.
When her submission for the Yale Younger Poets contest (a collection that predated Colossus) failed to win the prize, she journaled: “How ironic, that all my work to overcome my easy poeticisms merely convinces them that I am rough, anti-poetic, unpoetic. My God” (found in Heather Clark, Red Comet, page 563).
This strikes me as the typical dilemma of a gifted poet. The essential first step is immersion in the tradition, which you must break free of to find your own voice. The work in the transition phase may be less pleasing than that of the apprenticeship. I wonder whether, if Plath’s suicide had been thwarted, we’d think of both Colossus and Ariel as products of her journeyman phase, on the way to the mastery I believe she was capable of?
In these years, Plath had the mixed blessing of her own live-in model, tutor, and rival, Ted Hughes. He challenged and encouraged her in her development. But the price was that she shook off the voice of models such as Theodore Roethke to take on the voice of Hughes, which is what some of the less successful poems here strike me as showing. Nevertheless, when I leaf through the collection again, I find much to admire here. show less

Is there any book more irritating? It just gets right down under your skin like someone sharpened a bitterness stick and just wants to poke you with it over and over. (I think someone did.) Sometimes I wake up in the morning and the first thing I think is, "You do not do, you do not do any more black shoe." and then the second thing I think is, "Fuck you, Sylvia Plath."

So many of my favorite writers have stuggled with the suicidal urge, but like bees who labor for next year's hive, these despairing souls leave works of honey behind. I found her lesser known poems to be as rich as the ones included in all the anthologies.

In the poem "Totem" Plath, in her unique voice, conflates the metaphor of life as a train journey with the reassembly of the self upon waking at dawn:

"There is no terminus, only suitcases

Out of which the same self unfolds like a suit
Bald and shiny, with pockets of wishes,

Notions and tickets, short circuits and folding mirrors."

This passage is remarkable because it is so different from the disparate stack of images - of butchers, snakes, and spiders - built around the theme of show more encroaching death which is the rest of the poem.

"The Rival" is more focused, a thing of devastating beauty and sadness:

"I wake to a mausoleum; you are here,
Ticking your fingers on the marble table, looking for cigarettes,
Spiteful as a woman, but not so nervous,
And dying to say something unanswerable."

Betrayed by her husband, she must endure his silent presence because his mind is elsewhere, thinking of Her - the rival.

Plath, having had her life blown to bits by Hughes's infidelity, falls into the stasis of narcissism, a rickety coping mechanism, and, turning away from the universe, writes in the poem "Years":

"Eternity bores me,
I never wanted it."

Her pain was monumental, her poetry eloquent. Read softly, but carry a big ice-cold beverage. show less

Ariel is the collection of poems written in the final months of Plath’s life, as selected and published posthumously by her estranged husband, Ted Hughes. They are of course somber, but have the honesty important for any type of writing, and are executed with skill.

There is a starkness and a pervasive sense of isolation here, and while Plath describes the world around her so well, it’s with detachment and there is a sense that she already has one foot out the door. Many have stared down into the same abyss at varying distances from the edge, and while reading these poems I couldn’t help but feel what a shame this is. Perhaps the depth of feeling and depression are inseparable from Plath and part of what made her great, but it show more doesn’t make it any less a tragedy.

There are hints of feminism, as in “The Applicant” where she describes the view of a wife, provided she is “our sort of person”: “A living doll, everywhere you look. / It can sew, it can cook, / It can talk, talk, talk.” And in “Lesbos”, to a girlfriend she has other thoughts about, while “doped and thick from my last sleeping pill”, filled with hatred of marital life with an “impotent husband”: “I should wear tiger pants, I should have an affair. / We should meet in another life, we should meet in air, / Me and you.” But then later, sadly: “I say I may be back. / You know what lies are for. / Even in your Zen heaven we shan’t meet.”

Plath speaks through her poems and yet one feels hopelessness and frustration, and the idea that she feels like this line from “The Munich Mannequins”: “Voicelessness. The snow has no voice.” She has not lived up to her own high expectations or society’s; from “Sheep in Fog”: “The hills step off into whiteness. / People or stars / Regard me sadly, I disappoint them.”

The denial of one’s attachment to the world is a recurring theme, starting with “Morning Song”, this about her own babies: “I’m no more your mother / Than the cloud that distils a mirror to reflect its own slow / Effacement at the wind’s hand.” It continues on when she’s part of a group in “The Bee Meeting”, and yet so removed, an isolated observer, starting with a question “Who are these people….”, and ending with another, “why am I cold?” Later in “Paralytic” she writes of her wants and desires gone from the perspective of a paralytic in an iron lung. Everywhere it’s stepping back, stepping back, floating upwards, drifting away.

This ain’t cheery stuff, folks. What was a bit shocking was her “seeing herself” as a concentration camp victim more than once, the ultimate dehumanization, including in the poem “Daddy”, which sears on the page and ends with this line: “Daddy, daddy, you bastard, I’m through.” Plath’s father died when she was eight and she never got over it, and apparently pours out her anger here not for having been abused in some way, but for the simple fact that he died and left her. I won’t excerpt that one in its entirety, but it’s the poem I would recommend starting with.

Quotes:
On action, from “Years”:
“O God, I am not like you
In your vacuous black,
Stars stuck all over, bright stupid confetti.
Eternity bores me,
I never wanted it.

What I love is
The piston in motion –
My soul dies before it.
And the hooves of the horses,
Their merciless churn.”

On love, from “Elm”:
“Clouds pass and disperse.
Are those the faces of love, those pale irretrievables?
Is it for such I agitate my heart?”

On purity and fragility, from “Fever 103”:
“I am too pure for you or anyone.
Your body
Hurts me as the world hurts God. I am a lantern –

My head a moon,
Of Japanese paper, my gold beaten skin
Infinitely delicate and infinitely expensive.” show less

This volume was probably my first introduction to adult poetry (that is, poetry not written for kids) when I was in college. I was swept under Plath's spell immediately. Her gift of language is riveting. The fact that her life was cut short by her own hand leaves with many feelings; one of them is that, had she chosen to live, she would have gone on to find freedom and support in what was then the nascent women's liberation movement. But that's not how it worked out, to the great loss of not only her family, but to the culture as well.

No te entendía nada. Me desilusionaba pensando que quizá te puse en un altar antes de tiempo. Pero el tiempo y el ir observándote detenidamente, bebiendo de cada una de tus líneas, hizo que cada vez te volvieras más sobrecogedoras. Como si me hubieran agarrado el corazón en un puño fiero, y solo sintiera la opresión de un pecho vacío. Un pecho ajeno al mío que no le salían ni las lágrimas, por que en la intensidad de todo ello, solo eras una niña que se mecía dentro de los versos y que solo buscaba el haber sido querida y entendida. Estoy destrozada.

poetry just might not be my thing, since my favorite poems in this collection were the light-hearted ones towards the end. for the most part, this collection embodies plath's grief over her father (the motif of bees appearing numerous times) as well as her all-consuming depression, which is likened to the jewish experience during the holocaust. it's certainly pretty charged at points, emotionally speaking, but the abstract nature of a lot of it likely went over my head. i think it takes a certain type of person to appreciate poetry, and i don't yet have that kind of patience in me.