Ariel

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Here are some of the passages from Ariel that I think of most often. I have always assumed that the title poem is about having sex with Ted Hughes, though I found out recently that it's also about her horse. It ends like this: ...White Look, let's get this straight. I am a tree, you are a woman. We can never be together, not in the way you'd like, anyway. Plus, you're kind of irritating. Sylvia Plath has been, and probably always will be, a poet whom words hits me harder than many others’ ever will. Many of the poems in this collection are very familiar to me: I’ve shed tears over them, adored them, resented them, analyzed them to death and absorbed their every message in my heart over the course of years now. However, this was my first time reading this collection as a whole, as opposed to fragmented pieces over time. In Ariel, the beauty of craft remains even as it reveals the fissures growing in the poet’s psyche. According to the Penguin Companion to American Literature: Ariel is only a selection from a mass of work Plath left. Some of the other pomes have been printed here and there, some have been recorded, some exist only in manuscript. It is to be hoped that all this remaining verse will soon be published. As it is, this book is a major literary event.

Ariel (poetry collection) - Wikipedia

They are difficult, uncertain poems, some extremely obscure and all primarily dependent on central images. Formal rhythm and the logic of rational statement are both dispensed with, the main principle of organization being a free-association technique. Then there is the moon imagery and the aura of inevitability. “ I simply cannot see where there is to get to.” The line, uttered with deadpan acumen, foreshadows the decree of finality in “Edge,” her final poem. “ Her bare/Feet seem to be saying:/We have come so far, it is over.” The bare feet that prophesy this end are the feet of the girl who walks through the moonlit landscape like God. Sylvia Plath is raw, brutal and bitter. That's a fact I suppose, right? But you see even in her darkest poem (for me) Lady Lazarus she manages to end the poem with an inspiring, uplifting way.

Poetry in Extremis — an analysis of Ariel

Also, you can listen Sylvia Plath reading it here There are also other poems she reads from the collection of Ariel, look it up if you haven't already. You really shouldn't have taken the kittens and given them to the neighbours without a by-your-leave. I think I am going to pour sulphuric acid on your head while you are sleeping. I'll do it tonight. Yes.

Ariel by Sylvia Plath, First Edition - AbeBooks Ariel by Sylvia Plath, First Edition - AbeBooks

The restored edition of Ariel is the group of poems that Sylvia Plath left as a manuscript at the time of her death by suicide in 1963. The originally published Ariel was edited by her former husband, Ted Hughes, who substituted some of her other poems written in the last months of her life. The forward by their daughter, Frieda Hughes, discusses the strengths and weaknesses of each grouping of poems, trying to be fair to each parent.

All of these last verses were intensely personal, nearly all were about dying. So when her death finally came it was prepared for and, in some degree, understood. Some poems were difficult to open, difficult to find their meaning, but that just means repeated readings might open them. Upon analyzing the collection of poems along with considering her other work, it is concluded that like her other poems, "Ariel" is "highly autobiographical, psychological and confessional poem." [5] Additional poems in her manuscript [ edit ]

Ariel Poem Summary and Analysis | LitCharts Ariel Poem Summary and Analysis | LitCharts

The Colossus(1960) and the posthumous Ariel(1965) show a remarkable development. The first is a largely personal poetry, intense and delicately rendered, usually dealing with the relationship of the poet and a perceived object from which she seeks illumination, ‘that rare, random descent.’ In the first tercet of the poem, the reader is given a very brief description of the situation in which the speaker has found herself. (While it is probable that the speaker is Plath herself, it is not 100% certain.) It’s a problematic collection on a number of levels; racial slurs are used fast and loose and on more than one occasion, Plath makes an audacious claim of solidarity with the Jews of the Holocaust. Whilst her imagery and word choice are stunningly original, I could not help but find some strains and devices a little repetitive, namely triadic repetitions e.g. ' wars, wars, wars'. Plath’s poetry, considered part of the “confessional movement,” was influenced by Robert Lowell as well as by her friend, the poet Anne Sexton, who also explored dark themes and death in her work (and who, like Plath, committed suicide). Of course then there's Daddy, Elm, Ariel, A birthday present, Letter in November which I love. Some are bitter some are less dark. I have read those poems so many times and I still can't get enough.

More about Ariel by Sylvia Plath

In “The Moon and the Yew Tree” Sylvia Plath presents, not a vision of the picturesque English churchyard outside her bedroom window, but a mental landscape with more melancholy, more solemnity, more Gothic gloom than any representation of physical reality could ever have. Ariel was the second book of Sylvia Plath's poetry to be published. It was originally published in 1965, two years after her death by suicide. Depression had been a constant companion, leading to a life of struggle that was reflected in her work. Some exotic birds aren’t meant to be caged. It would be a sin not to allow their colorful feathers to be spread and fly away. Sylvia escaped from a colorless world to soar the skies of eternity, tingeing them with burning bright celestial pathways that enlighten the firmament of those who, from time to time, dare to look up to the floors of heaven and allow themselves to be consumed by the flames of blazing and immortal art.