"Ariel" is a poem written by the American poet Sylvia Plath. It was written on her thirtieth birthday, October 27, 1962, [1] and published posthumously in the collection Ariel in 1965. [2] Despite the poem's ambiguity, it is understood to describe an early morning horse-ride towards the rising sun. Scholars and literary critics have applied various methods of interpretation to "Ariel". [3]
"Ariel" is composed of ten three-line stanzas with an additional single line at the end, and follows an unusual slanted rhyme scheme. Literary commentator William V. Davis notes a change in tone and break of the slanted rhyme scheme in the sixth stanza which marks a shift in the theme of the poem, from being literally about a horse ride, to more of a metaphoric experience of oneness with the horse and the act of riding itself. [3]
It has been speculated that, being written on her birthday as well as using the general theme of rebirth, "Ariel" acted as a sort of psychic rebirth for the poet. [3] The poem, written just five months before her eventual suicide, thus, not surprisingly given its name as well, is one of her Ariel poems. "Ariel" was the name of the horse Plath rode at a riding school on Dartmoor in Devon. [4] Ted Hughes, Plath's husband, comments:
ARIEL was the name of the horse on which she went riding weekly. Long before, while she was a student at Cambridge (England), she went riding with an American friend out towards Grantchester. Her horse bolted, the stirrups fell off, and she came all the way home to the stables, about two miles, at full gallop, hanging around the horse’s neck. [5]
Plath had a ritual late in her life that consisted of waking up before dawn, writing poetry before handling household chores and other drudgery for the rest of the day. Literary critic Kathleen Lant argues this routine is outlined in the second half of "Ariel", [3] beginning with these lines:
White
Godiva, I unpeel --
Dead hands, dead stringencies.
This stanza, she argues, outlines her pre-dawn poetry writing, for in the poem these actions take place before the sun has risen, and because she is interpreting Plath's poetic "undressing" as an erotic metaphor for her undressing the structure to which she adhered before Ariel and The Colossus . [3] This is seemingly further supported by another critic who argues that by "unpeeling" these dead "stringencies" she is taking off the Latinate diction which she had previously characterized much of her oeuvre of poetry, [3] which some have argued as an earlier attempt to define herself a poetic identity. [3] Thus, in this stanza she begins to undress her poetry, and then, as she continues, Plath begins to reach her climax, and undergo a sort of poetic orgasm in the next lines: [3]
And now I
Foam to wheat, a glitter of seas.
As she begins to fully thrust all this power and all of herself into these words and begin to form her new identity she becomes interrupted by her waking children, [3] as portrayed in the next lines: "The child's cry/Melts in the wall." and from then on she begins to fly "Suicidal" into the chores and drudgery that consumed the rest of her day, [3] the "red/Eye, the cauldron of morning(/mourning)."
The series of transformations she undergoes in this poem, as well as the actions she takes lend serious ground for feminist discussion. [3] In the finale of the poem, as she builds up speed and tries to form herself a new identity, the i sound is repeated to represent the "I" of her identity: [3]
The child's cry
Melts in the wall.
And I
Am the arrow,
The dew that flies
Suicidal, at one with the drive
Into the red
Eye, the cauldron of morning.
The words containing the i sound, cry, I, flies, suicidal, drive, Eye, all represent her thrusting her 'I'dentity into reality. [3] From a feminist view point though, this poem is troubled. Earlier in the poem her "I"ness is repressed, for the "Nigger-eye" represents her "Nigger-"I"", [3] for she is still repressed by her father or male dominance in general, [3] as espoused in "Daddy". [6] As the poem progresses, she begins a series of transformations out of this repressed self. First in the poem she becomes a stallion, a masculine image, the image of her repressor. [3] Then as she picks up speed she becomes an arrow, a penetrating force which alongside her becoming "one with the drive" suggests she is becoming her rapist (her father) in order to prevent her submission and kill her father. [3] Finally though, she loses this identity and breaks down into water, which Freud (who she was read up on) defines as a feminine symbol, [3] as well as being a purifying substance.
As stated above, the final "I"'s of the poem represent her "I"ness building up speed and force as she attempts to create herself a new identity through her Ariel poems. You can take all the lenses, the autobiographical, the feminist, the Freudian, and all others, and put them together, and view them as her attempt to take all the parts of her, her repression, her anger, her femininity, her creativity, and all else and forcefully drive them into existence with this poem in an attempt at "psychological reintegration". The subject itself, Ariel, can be seen as representing several different things, all symbolizing a different side of her, besides Ariel, her horse, which she rode every week and which had become a part of her, they are:
All these different Ariels representing different sides of her, the autobiographical references, as well as the feminist actions she describes, all are carried by the powerful "i" sound thrusting itself in the second half, driven into the dawn, into the sunlight, to try to create a new, unique identity, but ultimately fail to do so as she both evaporates into the sun as her final transformation, water, flies suicidal into it, and as the "cauldron of morning" represents all her specific identifiable parts all melting together into a uniform, homogeneous mixture in the cauldron of "morning".
Literary essayist William Davis describes "Ariel" as one of Plath's "most highly regarded, most often criticized, and most complicated poems". [3] The poem has been critiqued by numerous literary figures [3] and remains immortalized as the title poem to her most famous collection Ariel.
Sylvia Plath was an American poet, novelist, and short story writer. She is credited with advancing the genre of confessional poetry and is best known for two of her published collections, The Colossus and Other Poems (1960) and Ariel (1965), and also The Bell Jar, a semi-autobiographical novel published shortly before her suicide in 1963. The Collected Poems was published in 1981, which included previously unpublished works. For this collection Plath was awarded a Pulitzer Prize in Poetry in 1982, making her the fourth to receive this honour posthumously.
Edward James Hughes was an English poet, translator, and children's writer. Critics frequently rank him as one of the best poets of his generation and one of the twentieth century's greatest writers. He was appointed Poet Laureate in 1984 and held the office until his death. In 2008 The Times ranked Hughes fourth on its list of "The 50 greatest British writers since 1945".
Confessional poetry or "Confessionalism" is a style of poetry that emerged in the United States during the late 1950s and early 1960s. It is sometimes classified as a form of Postmodernism. It has been described as poetry of the personal or "I", focusing on extreme moments of individual experience, the psyche, and personal trauma, including previously and occasionally still taboo matters such as mental illness, sexuality, and suicide, often set in relation to broader social themes.
Sylvia is a 2003 British biographical drama film directed by Christine Jeffs and starring Gwyneth Paltrow, Daniel Craig, Jared Harris, and Michael Gambon. It tells a story based on the real-life romance between prominent poets Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes. The film begins with their meeting at Cambridge in 1956 and ends with Sylvia Plath's suicide in 1963.
The Rape of Lucrece (1594) is a narrative poem by William Shakespeare about the legendary Roman noblewoman Lucretia. In his previous narrative poem, Venus and Adonis (1593), Shakespeare had included a dedicatory letter to his patron, the Earl of Southampton, in which he promised to compose a "graver labour". Accordingly, The Rape of Lucrece has a serious tone throughout.
Ariel was the second book of Sylvia Plath's poetry to be published. It was first released in 1965, two years after her death by suicide. The poems of Ariel, with their free-flowing images and characteristically menacing psychic landscapes, marked a dramatic turn from Plath's earlier Colossus poems.
Birthday Letters is a 1998 poetry collection by English poet and children's writer Ted Hughes. Released only months before Hughes' death, the collection won multiple prestigious literary awards, including the Whitbread Book of the Year, the Forward Poetry Prize for Best Collection, and the T.S. Eliot Prize for Poetry in 1999. This collection of eighty-eight poems is widely considered to be Hughes's most explicit response to the suicide of his estranged wife Sylvia Plath in 1963, and to their widely discussed, politicized, and "explosive" marriage. Prior to Birthday Letters, Hughes had only explicitly mentioned Plath once before, in a poem titled 'Heptonstall Cemetery' from his 1979 collection Remains of Elmet.
"Daddy" is a poem written by American confessional poet Sylvia Plath. The poem was written on October 12, 1962, four months before her death and one month after her separation from Ted Hughes. It was published posthumously in Ariel during 1965 alongside many other of her poems leading up to her death such as "Tulips” and "Lady Lazarus."
"Two Lovers and a Beachcomber by the Real Sea" is a poem written by Sylvia Plath that was first published in 1955, the year she graduated from Smith College summa cum laude. An abstract poem about an absent lover, it uses clear, vivid language to describe seaside scenery, with "a grim insistence" on reality rather than romance and imagination.
"Lady Lazarus" is a poem written by Sylvia Plath, originally included in Ariel, which was published in 1965, two years after her death by suicide. This poem is commonly used as an example of her writing style. It is considered one of Plath's best poems and has been subject to a plethora of literary criticism since its publication. It is commonly interpreted as an expression of Plath's suicidal attempts and thoughts.
"The Munich Mannequins" is a poem by Sylvia Plath which recounts Plath's experience of insomnia on a trip to the title German city. The poem is famous for its opening line and for referring to conservative Munich as the "morgue between Paris and Rome."
"Mad Girl's Love Song" is a poem written by Sylvia Plath in villanelle form that was published in the August 1953 issue of Mademoiselle, a New York based magazine geared toward young women. The poem explores a young woman's struggle between memory and madness. She wrote this poem as a third-year undergraduate at Smith College and described it as being one of her favorite poems that she had written. However, the poem was never republished or found in any of Plath's later collections during her lifetime. After her suicide, "Mad Girl's Love Song" appeared in the afterword of the reprint of The Bell Jar.
"Tulips" is a poem by American poet Sylvia Plath. The poem was written in 1961 and included in the collection Ariel published in 1965. The poem is written in nine stanzas in sixty-three lines.
In neo-Freudian psychoanalysis, the Electra complex, as proposed by Carl Jung in his Theory of Psychoanalysis, is a girl's psychosexual competition with her mother for possession of her father. In the course of her psychosexual development, the complex is the girl's phallic stage; a boy's analogous experience is the Oedipus complex. The Electra complex occurs in the third—phallic stage —of five psychosexual development stages: the oral, the anal, the phallic, the latent, and the genital—in which the source of libido pleasure is in a different erogenous zone of the infant's body.
Sylvia Plath (1932–1963) was an American author and poet. Plath is primarily known for her poetry, but earned her greatest reputation for her semi-autobiographical novel The Bell Jar, published pseudonymously weeks before her death.
The Colossus and Other Poems is a poetry collection by American poet Sylvia Plath, first published by Heinemann, in 1960. It is the only volume of poetry by Plath that was published before her death in 1963.
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"Sylvia’s Death" is a poem by American writer and poet Anne Sexton (1928–1974) written in 1963. "Sylvia's Death" was first seen within Sexton's short memoir “The Barfly Ought to Sing” for TriQuarterly magazine. The poem was also then included in her 1966 Pulitzer Prize winning collection of poems Live or Die. The poem is highly confessional in tone, focusing on the suicide of friend and fellow poet Sylvia Plath in 1963, as well as Sexton’s own yearning for death. Due to the fact that Sexton wrote the poem only days after Plath’s passing within February of 1963, "Sylvia’s Death" is often seen as an elegy for Plath. The poem is also thought to have underlying themes of female suppression, suffering, and death due to the confines of domesticity subsequent of the patriarchy.
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