Ariel by Sylvia Plath

I wrote this critique last semester of college. I'm sort of proud of it and so was my professor. Score! So, in keeping with my literary blog, am posting the following:

Critiquing, much less reading Ariel is a chore. It is a dying woman's elegy, a world where critics could never exist or matter. Ariel acts as a lens into Plath's only retreat from unhappiness. Though the poems are filled with a desire for death, they are full of energy and life. it is overwhelming to anybody familiar with Plath's life to experience this vivacity she has for her art.

Beyond the succulence of the personal content included in these poems, their construction is nearly flawless. One of the difficulties critics have had regarding Ariel is the tendency to focus on the content and the effectiveness of Plath's use of her personal life. Because the biographical information is so important to the reading and the legend of Ariel, people have difficulty looking beyond it. But after doing so, the book becomes a true portfolio of poetic genius. Sylvia Plath used the energy of words like nobody else:

One cry, and I stumble from bed, cow-heavy floral
In my Victorian nightgown.
Your mouth opens clean as a cat's. The window square

Whitens and swallows its dull stars. And now you try
Your handful of notes;
The clear vowels rise like balloons.

Considering her personal life, the energy in her poems is magnificent. It's as if Plath put all of her vivacity into writing and therefore had none left for her own life. She gathers so much momentum through the use of not only word choice, but line formatting, which are especially apparent in "Paralytic":

My God the iron lung

That loves me, pumps
My two
Dust bags in and out,
Will not

Let me relapse
While the day outside glides by ticker tape

After reading this, I feel suffocated and anguished, which was no doubt intended. The real pinnacle in this passage is the last line. The length reflects the world around her; it "glides."

Two of Plath's most effective tools are unarguably rhyme and repetition. These both have become a little passe in recent years - about the past two hundred - but the best poems use rhyme and repetition provocatively. The rhyme isn't cliche; it's ironic and unsettling. See this excerpt from "Daddy":

There's a stake in your fat, black heart
And the villagers never liked you.
They are dancing and stamping on you.
They always knew it was you.
Daddy, daddy, you bastard, I'm through.

The end rhyme is of the nursery order, and the contrast between the rhyme and the content is almost too much to handle. It is wonderfully appealing, the idea of schoolyard songs about "Daddy," the "bastard." And "you" is repeated in three consecutive lines. One of the most important rules for rhyming is not to repeat words, be innovative. but Plath is obstinate, and she knows how to break the rules with ease. She doesn't just call "Daddy" "you bastard;" he is "you," "you," "you," "you" "bastard." The repetition is mischievous; it reveals a sardonic anger, not self-loathing. It speeds up the poem, invigorates it. Plath's voice is always victorious, which gives Ariel a mammoth serving of irony. Plath saw victory in death, in suicide. It's a completely unfathomable thought, but she uses it to the greatest, most perturbing effect and catapults her work to a monument of poetic fierceness.

Plath also energizes her collection by flipping the mood like a light switch. Most poets have a difficult time changing moods and themes from one poem to the next in a collection of novel-size. Plath not only changes from poem to poem, but even stanza to stanza, even line to line. Ariel is so fun to read because it is manic:

How can I let them out?
It is the noise that appalls me most of all,
The unintelligible syllables.
It is like a Roman mob,
Small, taken one by one, but my god, together!

She wants to let the bees out, but they appall her, they fascinate her. "The Arrival of the Bee Box" is a whirlwind of temptation. The whole of Ariel tends to mirror this poem, and it garners as many feelings from us as the bee box does from Plath.

Ariel does contain a lot of sad content, but Plath contrasts it with overpowering energy throughout. She even lends her vigor to a few elated poems like "Letter in November," so there is plenty of variety within the book. Ariel stands as such a great piece, because the poems are not mundane. With the book filled with musings on death, it could have easily been uninteresting, but instead it serves as a shocking and completely memorable collection of one of the greatest poet's last works.