Read the Introduction to Sylvia Plath’s Ariel and the poems up through p. 30.
Post a reply here, using “Quotation Sandwich” method whereby you quote something from the reading (with a page number, please!) and “sandwich” it between some introductory sentences and some analytical sentences. Your post need not be lengthy; I am going for some content grounded in text, here, as we move along with this poet.
Follow the blogroll to Wallis’s page and read the essay she has posted there… Please leave her a comment (she has already gotten some from people who read her post– that’s the power of the web!!!), and take note of how she structured this piece. I would like you to model the next paper I have you write on what she did, here, as they learned last year at The Mountain School.
January 3, 2011 at 11:06 PM
Did you attend university in Dublin? I recognise your name, I just can’t remember from where.
October 28, 2009 at 7:40 PM
A poem that struck me in the first 30 pages of Plath’s Ariel was “Cut” on page 25. What initially caught my eye were the first few lines, “what a thrill – / My thumb instead of an onion. / the top quite gone…” because it reminded me of Rad Smith’s poem “Crack Shot” when he describes how the old man helping him rip window trim lost his thumb. The subject matter was vaguely familiar, and it was interesting to me that both authors would mention that. What really stuck out to me in this poem though were the middle stanzas, specifically “A celebration, this is. / Out of a gap / A million soldiers run, / Redcoats, every one.” It’s striking that she seems very lighthearted about this injury, calling it a celebration, or calling her cut thumb a little pilgrim, almost affectionately. But she does refer to her blood as “Redcoats,” which fought the Americans, and so perhaps she believes her body is betraying her by fighting her in a way. The narrator clearly takes a certain delight and comfort almost in the laceration of her thumb. It would be interesting to examine her interpretations of pain or wounds in other poems.
October 28, 2009 at 2:53 PM
Frieda Hughes’s passage in the introduction to her mother’s poetry provided helpful knowledge before we dove into the first 30 pages. Frieda says, “My mother had described her Ariel manuscript as beginning with the word ‘love’ and ending with the word “spring,” and it was clearly geared to cover the ground before the breakup of the marriage to the resolution of a new life, with all agonies and furies in between.” At first, I interpreted love and spring as overall themes, but after flipping through her poems, her first poem begins with the word “love and her last poem ends with the word “spring.” Another thing that struck me in the foreword was how Sylvia came up with the title “Ariel.” She says, “for the title poem my mother simply writes, ‘Another horseback riding poem, this one called ‘Ariel,’ after a horse I’m especially fond of.’” I hope that as I continue reading through all her poems, I will see why she chose “Ariel” as the title.
The first poem that grabbed my attention was “Lady Lazarus.” I researched the meaning of Lazarus (google dictionary) and found it come from Hebrew meaning, “God has helped.” Plath creates a poem in which the narrator encounters death or tries to kill herself. Using Nazi Germany references, Plath creates dark images and a melancholy tone. She says, “A sort of walking miracle, my skin/ bright as a Nazi lampshade,/ My right foot/ A paperweight,/ My face a featureless, fine/ Jew linen.” These contradicting images “Jew linen” and “Nazi lampshade grasped my attention. It seems like the the narrator wants to be let go and the doctors keep saving her.
October 28, 2009 at 9:13 AM
We have established that Sylvia Plath endured a challenging relationship with her father. With this background knowledge, I was immediately intrigued by the fact that “Daddy” was scribbled on the front cover of Ariel. Keeping the theme of strained father-daughter relationships in mind, I stopped in my tracks upon reading “The Jailor” (p 23.) While the entire poem demands a thorough analysis, I was caught by the line, ” I imagine him Impotent as distant thunder, In whose shadow I have eaten my ghost ration.” This line makes an inevitable reference to Plath’s father. She speaks to her father’s inability to add anything to her life, comparing his uselessness to distant thunder. However despite this “impotentness”, distant thunder is still frightening, especially to a child, suggesting the ominous presence of her father in Plath’s childhood. Furthermore, Plath mentions the shadow cast by her father, a shadow that could lead to a painful childhood experience as Plath alludes to.
October 28, 2009 at 9:08 AM
I was flipping through the first thirty pages and I came across a poem that really shocked me. “The Jailor” was such a powerful and almost frightening poem which reminded me of a lot of Plath’s work in Collosus because it was very suicidal and dark. “What holes this papery day is already full of! He has been burning me with cigarettes, pretending I am a negress with pink paws.” CLearly there is a lot of violence and anger in the eyes of the attacker, which Plath points out in awful truth. The narrator in the poem has been beaten and raped and abused by this so called “Jailor” and perhaps this jailor is a symbol for her real life and how abusing it has been to her.
October 28, 2009 at 9:05 AM
When reading through the first 30 pages I read some confusing poems that seemed to make absolutely no sense. One poem that was especially confusing was “Thalidomide”. Tarun wrote about this poem and when I looked up the word I found the same definition; a way of relaxation. “Spidery, unsafe. / What glove”. I believe that Plath used this meditation way to calm herself and make herself less depressed. I believe that Plath felt like a spidery in the world, a tiny part of the world and no one cared about her. A glove is something that fits well and snug. Plath had nothing like this in her life, she was on her own.
October 28, 2009 at 8:54 AM
My favorite poem from the first 30 pages of Ariel is “Lady Lazarus.” I like the poem’s short, punchy lines in combination with a dark subject matter. The poem consistently describes Plath’s previous attempts to commit suicide. Plath uses varying line lengths and seemingly randomly spaced end rhymes: “Dying / Is an art, like everything else. / I do it extremely well. / I do it so it feels like hell.” The introduction of the short line “Dying,” in conjunction with the longer lines following, emphasizes the chaos of death. The rhyme between “well” and “hell,” which awkwardly occurs across two stanzas, also illustrates the physical as well as mental confusion and general disorder that accompanies death.
October 28, 2009 at 8:33 AM
As Ariel mentioned, the poems in this book were much more enjoyable. Plath is still writing about death here, but her words seemed to be less influenced by her German and English roots. Her poems in “Ariel” include a lot of questions. This is a change from the way she wrote in the “Colossus”.
In the foreword, Plath’s daughter says that Plath’s marital problems were a theme for this book. I thought it was interesting when Plath’s daughter said that Plath, during a reading with BBC, did not mention herself as a character in any of these poems.
October 28, 2009 at 7:13 AM
When reading the beginning of Ariel, I found the style of the poems to be very different from the Colossus. I found them much more enjoyable, and not as dark as the poems Plath wrote in the Colossus. The themes of both books are very similar, though the way in which she describes them is very different. The introduction discussed how Plath wrote these poems with a new voice. One of the poems that I really enjoyed was “Lady Lazarus”, pg 14. I believe this poem is making a biblical reference, as Lazarus in the bible is restored to life four days after his death. Much like the theme of the poem where Plath writes, “And like the cat I have nine times to die”. I found it most interesting when Plath recounts three times when she died, the first time at the age of ten being an accident, the second time she “meant to last it out and not come back at all”.
October 28, 2009 at 6:58 AM
“Cut” (25) attracted my attention. I like the short lines. She appears to have cut her thumb while cutting an onion: “What a thrill– / My thumb instead of an onion.” While preparing food, she becomes entertained by cutting her thumb detailing vividly the skin hanging and the blood. She compares the skin to “A flap like a hat” and “carpet rolls.” The blood flowing out is “a celebration.” She reverts back to a child as if playing with toy soldiers, “A million soldiers run.” When she applies the bandages: “The thin / Papery feeling,” she calls that “Saboteur” like she attacks the soldiers.
October 27, 2009 at 11:09 PM
So, did any of you read Freida Hughes’s introduction and want to comment on that? Most of your posts so far have “quotation sandwiched” the poems, and they do point us in some good directions to talk about. There is so much in Freida’s Foreword I find interesting– certainly her even-handed sense of how her father was not a villain, and how much he did to keep their mother alive for them. In a sense, she reclaims her mother’s memory from the vultures and myth-mongers who would take it over. Her description, for instance (p.xix) of the man who got all mad that the plaque should be put on the hose where she died, even though she had only lived there eight weeks.”I wanted her LIFE to be celebrated, the fact that she had existed, lived to the fullness of her ability, been happy and sad, tormented and ecstatic, and given birth to my brother and me. I think that my mother was extraordinary in her work and valiant in her efforts to fight the depression that dogged her throughout her life. She used every emotional experience as if it were a scrap of material that could be pieced together to make a wonderful dress, she wasted nothing of what she felt, and when in control of those tumultuous feelings she was able to focus and direct her incredible poetic energy to great effect.” The daughter here affirms the mother’s life, in its highs and lows, its happy and sad moments, its daunting, terrible struggle–the death came too early, yes, but there was also so much sheer life, and legacy, that survived her and that in the end is what we have, and it is a lot. “It comes down to this: Her own words describe her best, her ever-changing moods defining the way she viewed her world and the manner in which she pinned down her subjects with a merciless eye.” (Ariel, p. xx)
October 27, 2009 at 9:50 PM
The poem that really intrigues me is “The Night Dances” (page 29). On a whole, I appreciate Sylvia Plath’s ability to allow the reader to decipher a deep meaning in her poems without having to go through too much context. I haven’t really figured out the meaning of the poem but a few lines just make me go “BAM!” Not really, but you get the idea. For example, the language she uses in the poem changes temperature, literally. Line 12 states, “Cold folds of ego, the calla” while line 13 states, “Spots, and a spread of hot petals”. She does this type of contradiction a few more times, which lets me know that there is definitely some sort of meaning there. But right now I am at the point where I think that these changes in “temperature” are supposed to show confusion.
October 27, 2009 at 8:35 PM
In the poem “Elm” (page 27), written for Ruth Fainlight, Sylvia Plath dances around the subject of the pain that surrounded the end of her marriage. After earlier claiming that she knew “the bottom”, she writes “Love is a shadow./ How you lie and cry after it / Listen: these are its hooves: it had gone off, like a horse.” Plath’s reference to love galloping away could easily refer to the loss of love between her and her husband. “Galloping away” includes a sense or urgency or speed to the flight of love. Also, the idea of love being a shadow, insubstantial, directly points to Plath feeling as if she has no hold on love, or perhaps never did.
October 27, 2009 at 6:19 PM
While I was looking through “Ariel”, the poem “Thalidomide” caught my eye. I had no idea what thalidomide was so I looked at this poem out of curiosity. I looked it up and found that thalidomide is drug used as a sedative. I also saw that the drug was withdrawn from the market in the 1960s because it was linked to birth defects. It has been called one of the biggest medical tragedies of the modern times. What struck me about Plath’s poem was the structure. Every stanza except the first and last are composed of two lines. The line “of two wet eyes and a screech”(9) makes me think of a child that has just been born. Plath uses great imagery and description in this poem, but I found it difficult to uncover the poem’s true meaning.
October 26, 2009 at 8:20 PM
Sylvia Plath writes a lot about her dark feelings and her struggles in every day life. In her poem, “The Couriers” she writes about her character and her displeasure with that character. She writes, “A disturbance in mirrors,/ The sea shattering its grey one-”(6). I believe she looks in the mirror as if she is looking for her true identity and she is “disturbed” by this image which is paralleled with her personality. The second line could be a reference to the Odyssey, but I am having trouble to find its correspondence with the first line. Maybe Odysseus is also on a voyage to find his true identity? Any thoughts?
October 26, 2009 at 4:53 PM
Out of all the poems in the first thirty pages, “Cut” on page 25 captured my attention the most. It is Sylvia Plath’s first poem in Ariel that is dedicated to someone: Susan O’Neill Roe. After a little bit of online investigation, I learned that Roe was the nanny who took care of Plath’s children during the final months of her life. But the real reason that this poem interested me is because it delves more into her suicidal side, or at least a part of her that seemingly enjoys pain:
“What a thrill/My thumb instead of an onion/The top quite gone/…/a hinge/of skin/a flap like a hat/dead white/ then that red plush./”
As I mentioned earlier, Plath seemed to enjoy this bloody wound, or was at least fascinated by it. The amount of detail that she uses and way that she describes this slip of a knife shows an obsession that goes beyond normality. Perhaps this poem shows the bipolar side of Plath, the one that drove her to commit suicide?
October 25, 2009 at 5:32 PM
In the poem “Lady Lazarus” (page 15) Sylvia Plath repeats her words, which I had never seen her do before in any of her poems. On the top of the third page, the poem reads “It’s easy enough to do it in a cell./ It’s easy enough to do it and stay put.” and later in the poem it says “Beware./Beware.” Not looking at the context of the whole poem, I thought this was an interesting way to set up the poem. I hadn’t noticed in any of her other poems that she had done this, especially with lines right on top of each other, so it changes the aesthetic view of the poem.