INTRODUCTION
The poetry of Sylvia Plath exploded into the cultural consciousness shortly after
her death, leaving a wake of critics and readers grappling to understand and label the
shockingly original poems she left the world. The voice hallmarking Plath’s genius, the
Ariel voice, is one of exquisite control. Plath expertly harnesses the powers of language,
imagery, and emotion to lead her readers through the maze of her complicated intellect.
Orchestrating reaction for her desired effect, Plath is a poet at the helm of the poetic
experience. The Ariel voice is presumed to date from 1961-1963, chronologically
assessing her most famous works with the last years of her life. Yet this voice, so
powerful and so controlled, is not, as many critics contend, a sudden burst that exploded
from the poet; rather, the emergence of Plath’s true voice is the result of years of
meticulous study throughout the course of Plath’s maturation as an artist. Through this
development of her unique voice, Plath further sought to explore the other voices and
roles contained in her poetry, and the final resolution of self that is achieved within the
Ariel poems.
The examination of Plath’s earliest writings—journal entries, letters, poems, short
stories—all reveal hints of the voice that would later iconize Plath’s name. A meticulous
journal writer, the entries dating from her youth into her adulthood record the poet’s
struggle with the latent agents hindering her poetic progress. Stymied by writer’s block
and the styles of other poets, Plath first sought to create poems in the forms of the poets
she admired. These attempts, while often unremarkable except for flashes of language,
image, tone, discern Plath’s remarkable eye for detail, producing poems tangled in, as
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Pamela A. Smith records, “a crossword puzzle challenge of sound and poetic structure”
(328). The talent was clearly within Plath from the earliest days of her writing,
germinating through the course of her writing career with her experimentations with the
casts of other poets and styles of those she admired. Her journals thus became the key
source for Plath’s creative energy, garnering strength and confidence until finally
emerging as a poet fully at home within her own writing.
After the breakthrough poem “The Stones” in late 1959, the voice of Plath’s
genius erupted into her writing. Once Plath began to really write, the poems spilled forth
from her pen to the page with remarkable ferocity and imagination. The voice trapped
within the cages she built for herself was finally free to speak. It is through “The Stones”
that Plath’s voice fully emerges: the poem is the literal process of a rebirth, with the
speaker being dissected and then literally pieced together as the “jewelmaster drives his
chisel to pry / Open one stone eye” and she simply waits, knowing “there is nothing to
do. / I shall be good as new” (20-21, 44-45). “The Stones” begins a ritualistic process in
Plath’s poetry of her speaker’s repeatedly dissecting themselves and casting off their
other “selves” to emerge new and fresh, “pink and smooth as a baby” (“Face Lift” 32).
Plath must reconcile the selves within her, either by shedding the ugliness, or by escaping
from the multiple roles—wife, mother, poet—she must fulfill. The process of rebirth,
and essentially self-effacement, eventually leads to the complete annihilation of the self,
as in “Lady Lazarus.” Plath’s speaker must first reconcile the roles of the “others” in her
poetry, both her other roles and the figures haunting her, before annihilating the self and
rising “out of the ash” as the mythologized phoenix (82).
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For Plath, after having exhausted the different processes of self-effacement,
simply being reborn is not enough of a transformation. Plath cannot continue the return
to the pureness of infancy, because the phantoms invading her poetic mind are becoming
too much of a force. Hence the complete annihilation of “Lady Lazarus” serves to create
a new mythological “self” for Plath to inhabit that, at last, transcends life. As Plath
achieves this final and lasting reclamation of self, the resolution of the demons plaguing
her must then be reconciled for Plath to truly be free. The journey for resolution thus
parallels the final reclamation of self in that Plath’s speaker must first take on different
selves to expand her control and power and then cast them aside to emerge as the force,
“the arrow,” flying through her poetry. This descent into the depths of herself is not a
descent into madness, but a controlled unbridling of hysterical emotion. The freedom
permitted by Plath’s reclamation of self allows the poet to delve into the complex role of
the phantoms haunting her—her father, her mother, Ted Hughes—and to at last cast aside
their controlling presences. It is thus evident, through the examination of Plath’s Ariel
voice and the journey for the true self within it, that Plath’s poetry is the journey of the
poet towards absolute resolution, seeking it out and finally finding it in her long awaited
“stasis in darkness” (“Ariel” 1).
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CHAPTER I
THE JOURNEY INTO THE ARIEL VOICE
Words are the poet’s final declaration: long after style, form, and symbol, the
words, defiantly claiming their place on the page, are the poet’s glimpse of eternity. The
poet’s pen graces the page, painting a picture and, if a poet is truly great, the voice breaks
through the words and stands alone above the page. Poets struggle their entire careers to
find their own unique voice; even after finding one voice, then the journey begins to find
another. Sylvia Plath’s life collided, crashed, and stumbled over her own voice
throughout her poetic career, always skillfully, sometimes masterfully, and occasionally,
as Plath evolved, brilliantly. The morning of February 11, 1963, Sylvia Plath, at the age
of 30, was found dead, having finally ended her struggle with life. On her desk, in a plain
black-bound journal, lay her voice. In the final gesture of her art, Plath left behind her
brilliant declaration in over 40 haunting poems simply titled Ariel and other poems. The
journal contained the unbounded voice of Plath’s rebirth as an artist and the resurrection
of her freedom as the chains that had held her captive before were finally gone. As her
death resounded and her final collection of poems was published, it became clear that
although Plath was dead, her voice was very much alive.
The mythology of Plath began almost as quickly as she died. With the
publication of her final collection of poems, the inflicted iconic status of Plath exploited
the very poetry she created: Plath became a character in her own life, with her suicide
taking on a life of its own. The face of the poet behind the pen blurred as Plath became
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symbolized and exploited as a poet of suicide, a poet of depression, a poet of confession,
but never simply a poet. Yet behind these assumptions and imaginings, the Ariel voice is
distinctly Plath, refusing to be categorized and refusing to be ignored.
Startlingly original, Plath’s searing words have stormed into the cultural
consciousness as Plath’s voice continues to become louder and louder as generations of
critics and readers continue to be consumed by understanding and labeling Plath.
Alternately martyr or scapegoat, heroine or victim, the mission to probe into Plath’s life
and piece her back together consumes those relating to her poetry. Frieda Hughes,
Plath’s daughter, relates, “Since she died my mother has been dissected, analyzed,
reinterpreted, reinvented, fictionalized, and in some cases completely fabricated” (xx).
The Sylvia Plath of creation never comes back together as completely whole: wounds are
left open, scars unpainted, smiles unnoticed. Some aspect of Plath’s life is always
missing from these attempts. Plath was never a woman completely consumed by one
abstraction, whether it be death, depression, her father, Ted Hughes, or her poetry. Plath
was, as many have underestimated, a woman of many roles—wife, mother, daughter,
poet, American, British—living an intense life and feeling all emotions intensely. Plath’s
life is the domestic colliding with the artistic, with no emotion left unexplored. It must
thus be inferred that Plath was consumed by life, with its ups and downs, and joys and
tears; the voice of Ariel is one that knows all sides of the spectrum, having journeyed to
and through hell to know the experience on the other side. In her own journal, Plath
confides, “My health is making stories, poems, novels, of experience: that is why, or,
rather, that is why it is good, that I have suffered & been to hell, although not to all hells.
I cannot live for life itself: but for the words which stay the flux” (Journals 286). The
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Ariel voice is one that already knows the worst and has emerged triumphant, has already
endured the journey and knows the path, and has already lived so that she may be reborn.
As a meticulous journal writer, Plath recorded her day-to-day happenings from
her early youth to the days leading to her death. These journals reveal the poet’s daily
happenings, emotions, and struggles to become the poet she yearned to be. A crucial key
to understanding the mind of the poet, these journals serve as documentation of the
development of the voice that emerged as distinctly Plath. The journals flesh out the
voice of the young woman writing through her journey into adulthood, marriage, and
motherhood. Written with such diligence and attention to detail, the journal entries
reveal the poet’s search for its Ariel voice.
As the 1960s dawned and the timeline of Plath’s final collection begins, the
journals vanish as a second voice. Hughes, in the aftermath of her suicide, destroyed the
journal entries from the last months of her life, further feeding into the mystery of the
mythology of Plath. Hughes’ foreward to Plath’s Journals explains he destroyed the
manuscript to protect his children from reading it and because “in those days I regarded
forgetfulness as an essential part of survival” (qtd. in Bassnett 18). It is perhaps this
“forgetfulness” that best serves the reading of Plath’s final poems. The Ariel voice arises
proud, defiant, and unbridled: the focus is not the suicide, but the words that emerge
through the haze of her mythologized life as the true Sylvia Plath. Anne Sexton,
similarly titled “confessional” because of her startlingly personal poems, rejected any
notion of “finding out” anything about Plath’s death: “Never mind last diggings. They
don’t matter. What matters is her poems. These last poems stun me. They eat time”
(qtd. in Bassnett 20).
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The Ariel voice, presumed to date from 1961-1963, is a voice that arose from her
craft with an urgency of freedom and force, “eating time” as Sexton implies and placing
her poetry on a plane all its own. Thus as time constraints are removed it becomes
increasingly clear through the examination of Plath’s earlier works and journal entries
that the distinct voice of Ariel is evident at certain points throughout her writing career.
This voice, so distinctly her own and so brazenly unconstrained, germinates throughout
the life of her writing. The mastery, the technique, the controlled unbridling of her
emotions finds its root in her journals, her writing processes, and certain phases of poetic
understandings as Plath took on many other poetic voices until her own was perfectly
crafted. Looking specifically to her journals, Plath documented her struggles to adapt
herself and find her own talents so well that it is clear she was indeed paving her own
way.
As early as 1951, Plath was revealing the potential that later formed itself into her
distinct voice: “The wind has blown a warm yellow moon up over the sea; a bulbous
moon, which sprouts in the soiled indigo sky, and spills bright winking petals of light on
the quivering black water” (Journals 87). Furthering her examination of that excerpt in
the next journal entry, Plath goes on to reveal, “I am at my best in illogical, sensuous
description” (87). Her self-critical eye then analyzes her specific metaphorical
implications of the moon, which later becomes a common metaphor in her Ariel poems,
the “soiled indigo sky,” and its “bright winking petals of light” which spill on the
“quivering black water.” After writing she analyzes each word and how the words
combined create movement and build a scene through their images. However, as Plath
continues to fine-tune the passage written above, she then reveals one of the many latent
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hindrances hushing her Ariel voice: “My trouble? Not enough free thinking, fresh
imagery. Too much subconscious clinging to clichés and downtrodden combinations.
Not enough originality. Too much blind worship of modern poets and not enough
analysis and practice” (88).
Indeed, while Plath’s clear gift of originality and poetic arrangement were evident
in her early journal entries, these gifts were kept hidden as she studied and wrote poetry
throughout her college years. The poetic voice of Plath’s college years is generally one
of imitation, a voice she was urged by professors and peers to further develop. Thus T.S.
Eliot and W.H. Auden became markers of Plath’s creative success and she strove to
manipulate her voice and structure to become more like those she admired. While the
poems reveal a great talent for form, diction, rhyme, and internal structure, the bulk of the
poems do not hint at the Ariel voice that would come streaming out of her in later years.
Further, despite these writings winning her many awards and the publication of some of
the poems, her early college poetry was often considered “too derivative, too highly
schooled, too timid” (Wagner-Martin 85). Plath caged herself in walls of form and
structure that deviated from the “illogical, sensuous description” that Plath celebrated in
her journal writings. Looking to her journals as a key source instead of her early
“professional” poems, the journals thus offer, as critic Anita Helle states, writings “that
startle with exacting powers of observation, passion, visual memory, (. . .) there is
something edgy and sophisticated in Plath’s awareness of the possibilities of her writtenness, of the eye of the reader upon her” (636). This acute awareness of the “eye of the
reader upon her” hindered the revelation of a true poetic voice as timidity and paranoia
betrayed her gift. Plath was too fearful of rejection, too plagued by self-doubt to
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acknowledge the voice emerging in bubbles throughout her journals, thus she took on the
masks of the poets who inspired her and the structures of the poems that haunted her.
In 1956, the same year of her graduation from college, Plath earned the Glascock
Prize for her poem, “Two Lovers and a Beachcomber by the Real Sea.” This poem,
typically classified with her Juvenilia poetry, dates a very early hinting of the Ariel voice
within her poetry. Plath writes beyond her years, in a voice echoing the calm coolness of
1963’s “The Edge,” and deftly uses imagery and sound to convey tone and emotion:
“Thoughts that found a maze of mermaid hair/ Tangling in the tide’s green fall/ Now fold
their wings like bats and disappear/ Into the attic of the skull” (5-8). The familiar allusive
imagery seamlessly weaves into the poem as the beachcomber “squats among the wrack
of kaleidoscopic shells probing fractured Venus” and the lovers watch the time go by, the
sun rise and set, as “No little man lives in the exacting moon” (13-15, 23). Time is upon
the lovers and cannot be escaped: “A grain of sand is all we have” (20).
While the flashes of Plath’s brilliance continue to occur, the constraints of the
latent agents suppressing Plath’s inner voice press harder and harder upon her throughout
the 1950s into the next decade. Plath’s life strove for a balance of the range of emotions
within her experience. Her whirlwind meeting and relationship with Ted Hughes sparked
a fire within her that demanded inspiration and constant fuel for burning. As the
pressures of her desired artistic success weighed upon her, Plath knew her continued
writing was “as necessary for the survival of my haughty sanity as bread is to my flesh”
(Journals 157). Going on to say in the same 1951 journal entry: “I must be lean & write
& make worlds beside this to live in…” (157). The worlds of creation in her younger
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years no longer filled Plath’s needs: Plath’s move from the world of imagined creation
marked a pivotal point in Plath’s evolution as a poet.
Plath’s union with Hughes fueled a well of emotions within Plath as she took on
the role of wife and cast her role as poet to the side. It is at this point that Plath’s scathing
self-criticism and self-contempt moved to the forefront and her poetry receded to the
background. As her personal life soared, her pen froze at the page and she became
consumed by writers’ block: “I am stymied, stuck, at a stasis. Some paralysis of the head
has got me frozen” (Journals 272-73). Plath eagerly sought Hughes’ approval and
attention as fuel for her poetry. Helplessly watching the ease with which Hughes created
and wrote, Plath accepted Hughes’ ideas, directions, subjects, and titles for her writing.
Thus through this creative charge, Plath continued to create as she manipulated words
and form to fit the pre-structured style formatted by Hughes (Wagner-Martin 89-90).
While this process continually gave life to Plath’s craft, the dependency on Hughes for
poetic ideas “psychologically, cast[ed] herself as Hughes’ student or apprentice (. . .)
[which] forced Plath into a secondary—even a tertiary—role as poet” (Wagner-Martin
91). Similar to her college years, Plath was only structuring a new cage that tangled her
talent in someone else’s cast.
Plath’s 1956 poem, “The Shrike,” marks another hallmark of Plath’s Ariel voice.
Hinting of her later tone and imagery, “The Shrike” details an “earth-wife” in bed beside
her husband who nightly transforms himself through his dreams “to wing, sleepfeathered, the singular air” and experience a world she will never know (4-6). Symbolic
of Plath’s internal struggle with her poetic demons against the easeful flowing writing of
Hughes, Plath’s narration seamlessly and eagerly makes the shift from the bed to liking
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the “earth-wife” to the shrike “with taloned fingers, shaking in her skull’s cage” (11-12).
Plath reveals a speaker unafraid of violence and the ugly side of poetry as “she must wait
in rage/ Until bird-racketing dawn/ When her shrike-face/ Leans to peck open those
locked lids, to eat/ Crowns, palace, all/ That nightlong stole her male” (15-20). “The
Shrike,” told in a narrative voice without the “I” speaker of the Ariel poems, reveals
Plath’s hesitancy in her early poetry and awareness of the “eye of the reader upon her.”
Plath controls her poem’s effect by removing the internalized “I” voice, yet the message
of “The Shrike” is just as impacting as “Daddy” and “Lady Lazarus,” as its speaker
triumphs over the dream-elevated husband “with red beak/ Spike and suck out/ Last
blood-drop of that truant heart” (21-23). The voice here is triumphant of its kill and
reborn through the blood spilled.
While Plath created “The Shrike,” she likewise created “The Wishing Box” in
short story form. Written the same year, “The Wishing Box” reveals a mirroring freedom
to that achieved in the final lines of “The Shrike.” “The Wishing Box” thus takes on the
same plot structure of the preceding poem: the characters, still assuming third person
narratives, are named Agnes and Harold, and the husband still achieves a dream-world of
grandeur that the envious wife cannot create for herself. Placing this plot in a short story
form allows Plath to develop beyond the poetic confines. The dramatic imagery of the
startling twenty-three line poem spreads itself out in the pages of the story as Plath’s
meticulously detailed eye develops the tension of the couple’s relationship and the
growing resentment at the root of the nighttime dreamscapes. The emotions are the
same: Agnes is a jealous earth-bound wife that will not experience her husband’s dream
world. Yet the short story expands itself, revealing Plath’s poignant imaginative voice as
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Harold’s dreams include images of “a beautiful desert, all reds and purples, with each
grain of sand like a ruby or sapphire shooting light” and “a white leopard with gold spots
(. . .) standing over a bright blue stream” (Plath 205). Echoing the “illogical, sensuous
descriptions” of Plath’s journal writings, Harold’s dreams are throbbing with rich
technicolor and the poets of his wife’s admiration—William Blake, Robert Frost, and
Williams Carlos Williams. Agnes cannot even compare to this world: her dreams
“appalled her: dark glowering landscapes peopled with ominous unrecognizable figures”
(205). The short story makes room for the tension to build and build as Agnes fears
revealing the dull shame of her “fragmented scenes of horror” to her husband, dwelling in
his “royal baroque splendor” (206). The plot again mirrors Plath’s creative struggle as
her protagonist has lost her imaginative voice and recalls in desperation the easeful days
of wonderful creation of her youth.
The story continues with Agnes maddened and driven to insomnia, consumed by
the overwhelming need to reach her husband’s creative world. As in “The Shrike,”
Plath’s heroine lies in bed “twisting her fingers like nervous talons in the sheets” as her
husband obliviously drifts into a blissful sleep beside her (210). The talons of the shrike
persona are revealed, yet the final fate is much different than its poetic counterpart.
Reflective of Plath’s later works, the final freedom for the protagonist is internal: it is
through herself that she finds her own redemption. Swallowing a bottle of sleeping pills,
Agnes dies with a “slight, secret smile of triumph” as her dream world finally becomes
her reality, and she “at last” finds herself “waltzing with the dark, red-caped prince of her
early dreams” (210). Plath’s heroine triumphs at last over her husband: death brings the
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final freedom. As such, Plath’s voice is evolving to the plane separate from Hughes and
her earthly status as wife and homemaker.
The clear surfacing revelations indicative of the Ariel voice present a Plath in
progress. The short stories and essays convey a poet very much in the midst of her own
creation: these are just another example of the emerging voice and the forms in which it
struggled to come through. Writing in the Introduction of the collected Johnny Panic and
the Bible of Dreams: Short Stories, Prose, and Diary Excerpts, Hughes declared her short
stories and essays “all are the circling flames which the poetry (. . .) eventually jumped
into” (5). These stories never reach the emotional intensity of the poems: the Ariel voice
is immediate, harshly declarative, and unapologetic. While clearly surfacing the themes
and plots that will haunt the triumphant poems of her genius, these stories lack the
structure that truly gives life to the voice. Of “The Wishing Box,” Plath reflects in her
journal that “the real world in it isn’t real enough. It is too much fable” (Journals 497).
“The Wishing Box,” while written in the third person and focused on the creative
inferiority of the wife, is a story of a woman who only attains freedom through her own
death, laid out as a spectacle for her husband to witness as her final triumph. The
triumph is clear, but Plath’s critical eye notes while it is “a good idea,” the sacrifice must
be viscerally felt—not made into fable as overt fiction. Plath is constructing and
perfecting her voice. This story is, as Hughes alludes, circling the dancing flames of the
Ariel voice, feeding into its strength and shunning the reader’s eye upon its creator.
“The Fifty-ninth Bear” is another such story that creates itself in the glow of the
Ariel fire. Written in 1959, “The Fifty-ninth Bear” pairs another husband and wife in a
scene of counting bears as they travel through campsites. Plath’s metaphorically vivid
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language is again present in lines such as, “Guilt diffused through the crowd like a drop
of vermilion dye in a tumbler of clear water, staining them all” (Plath 106). Although
Plath herself felt “disgust” with the story and felt that “none of the deep emotional
undercurrents” of the characters were “gone into or developed,” this story is still integral
to the emergence of the Ariel voice (Journals 501). It marks a continuing documentation
of thematic development: the couple counts the bears and on the “last bear, her bear, the
fifty-ninth” the neglectfully preoccupied husband is killed presumably because she wills
it so. The husband hears, in his last moments, “a shrill cry—of terror, or triumph, he
could not tell” (114). Plath once again frames a story in which the triumph is sought for
and achieved and, as with “The Shrike,” that triumph is reached through the killing of the
husband.
“The Fifty-ninth Bear” also reiterates the fading focus of the reader’s eye upon
her. She is creating for the sake of creating; and while the “I” voice of the Ariel poems is
yet to emerge, the censor she placed on her craft in earlier years is moving to the
background. This stage of her writing alarmed some of those connected to her: Plath’s
college friend Luke Meyers reacted, “I found the story unsettling…I was surprised she
made a story of the killing of a husband for her husband and their friends to see” (qtd. in
Wagner-Martin 88-89). These reactions and the considerations of the people reading her
works no longer worried the mind of the writer; the consuming mind of the writing
process and the art continued to gather its intensity in Plath’s journals. Essentially
Plath’s own criticisms of her works, either in the reality depicted as fable or the
emotional undercurrent unexplored, were only fuel for the fire her voice fed on: “I must
write about the things of the world with no glazing. I know enough about love, hate,
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catastrophe to do so” (Journals 485). Written in 1959, this documents Plath’s sacrifice
for her craft. Plath’s habit of writing and rewriting, editing and rejecting serves the very
meticulous process of discovering that which is beneath her own surface. The writings
during this time ignore the poetic trappings of those she admired in her youth, striving
instead to reveal, however starkly, the truth she feels she is demanded to reveal.
As Plath gained confidence in her thematic subject matter, she remained quieted
in the speaking voice of her art. Hiding behind third person creations, Plath began the
process of shedding the other poetic voices in her head, those of the poets she admired
and that of Ted Hughes. Plath’s earlier work serves as an escape from the perplexing
conditions of her real life and, as such, she essentially gave herself, as critic Pamela A.
Smith states, “a crossword puzzle challenge of sound and poetic structure. In The
Colossus, the intellect, that puzzle-solving logic, overrules emotion” (328). Indeed it is
clear in the poetry leading up to the 1960 publication of her collection The Colossus that
Plath is very much in the process of making her way through the maze of her intellect.
This tug of war leads to the clear dominance of her intellect through the bulk of her early
poetry, yet it is continually evident that the strength of the Ariel voice lies just beneath
the surface. Declaratively stating in the “I” voice of 1956’s “November Graveyard,”
Plath’s speaker announces, “I do not expect a miracle/ Or an accident/ To set the sight on
fire/ In my eye” (4-7). Plath is declaring ownership within her own poetry, not expecting
an external solution to the poetic “crossword puzzle challenge” she has created for
herself.
The “I” persona so distinctive in the Ariel voice continues to appear intermittently
throughout the poems of The Colossus and other such writings of the time. “Full Fathom
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Five,” written in 1958, pre-anticipates Plath’s later poetry. Beginning the process of
conjuring her father within her poetry, “Full Fathom Five” depicts a “father-sea-god
muse” through hesitant and fearful eyes. The father here is an “old man” with “white
hair, white beard, far-flung, / A dragnet, rising, falling, as waves/ Crest and trough” (1, 46). Described as a mythic character, the father threatens to overwhelm the daughter as
his “dragnet” hair stretches out “miles long” and “extend[s] the radial sheaves” (5, 6-7).
Very different from the boldly declarative “I” of “Daddy,” “Full Fathom Five” presents a
speaker on the brink of her self-discovery. Yet there is a pointed hesitancy in the poem’s
structure, as critic Jahan Ramazani reiterates, “Plath protects herself with a coldly formal
tone, diction, and syntax, nearly freezing the poem’s momentum with clotted alliterations
and impeded rhythms” (1145). Plath, while still caged in the walls of her youth’s studied
structure, is emerging from the thematic confines dictated by the poetic conventions of
imitation. Indeed, this poem clearly lays the internal structure for the later questioning
and then demanding voice that haunts the Ariel poems.
“Full Fathom Five” keeps the father-figure at a distance: Plath’s speaker “cannot
look much” at him because she is frightened and his “dangers are many” (17, 16). The
unpredictability of his reappearances occur with the tide’s rise and fall, moving the “I” to
only “half-believe” his existence. The mythic ghost-like figure is unattainable in his
“labyrinthine tangle” as, Ramazani states, “he holds within his web (…) the secret story
of his daughter’s origins, he retains absolute power over her, preventing her from turning
fear into rebellion or from drawing strength from her occluded origins” (1145). The final
lines of the poem carry an implication of guilt, anger, and fear: she walks alive, yet
exiled, on his “kingdom’s border,” as the uncertainty of her father’s life stalks her
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existence. In the end, she assumes the fault of his death, and perhaps her own, as she
finally declares, “Father, this thick air is murderous. / I would breathe water” (43-44).
This line haunts the poem before it is even uttered; there is an anticipation of its ghost
and a tension building throughout. Plath’s “I” leaves the unmistakable imprint of her
later voice.
The poems comprising the bulk of The Colossus are often critically rebuked or
glazed over as Ariel consumes the focus of the study of Plath’s career. Robert Lowell
found “none of [the poems] sank very deep into my awareness” and Plath admitted
shortly before her death in a BBC interview that “they, in fact, quite privately bore me”
(qtd. in Axelrod 76). Yet the creation of these poems forcibly streamed themselves from
Plath’s evolving creativity: these poems were Plath’s escape to sanity and escape to a
salvation. In a journal entry dating late 1958, Plath reiterates her gnawing need for
acknowledgement, “I felt if I didn’t write nobody would accept me as a human being.
Writing, then, was a substitute for myself: if you don’t love me, love my writing & love
me for my writing. It is also much more: a way of ordering and reordering the chaos of
experience” (Journals 448). Indeed Plath’s tangled crossword puzzle of emotional order
allowed the unraveling of her previous chains to categorically have a purpose as her
narrative flow became internalized and the veils of her poetry lowered into the
unflinching realm of her imagination. Plath continued to write and the bubbles of her
awaiting genius continued to rise. It is almost startling to read some of the early poems
so often overlooked from The Colossus era; and while Plath’s brutally critical eye does
reveal a truth in that these poems lack the roaring flame of the later poems, they still
register an emotional spark quite unexpected throughout the read. “Moonrise,” also dated
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1958, begins quietly, with its speaker sitting “doing nothing” just like the “grub-white
mulberries” (3, 1). Then Plath’s descriptive eye takes hold and she transcribes, “This
park is fleshed with idiot petals” (4). It is this attention to word choice and juxtaposing
descriptions (“fleshed,” “idiot petals”) that gives Plath’s poetic voice a maturation of
style that belies the poem’s actual date.
Plath offers herself as a poet of controlled form, manipulating her masks so to
bury the inner fire threatening to rage out of control. Kathleen Spivack, a fellow student
in Robert Lowell’s 1958 poetry seminar class, recalls Plath’s poems as “very tightly
controlled, formal, impenetrable” and “without the feeling that was later to enter them”
(214). Plath’s manipulation thus transferred to those reading her poetry: Plath’s early
poetry can be contrived, rigid, controlled, yet there is an indiscernible need to dig deeper
with the assurance that there is something to find once there. There is a ghost haunting
these poems, and as quickly as it seems to be caught, it changes again and buries itself
deeper. “The word, defining, muzzles,” Plath begins “Poems, Potatoes,” as the
“imagined lines/ can only haunt” and “they/ shortchange me continuously” (1, 3-4, 9).
Plath is upon her creation, but the web of poetic confines choke the air she tries again and
again to breathe.
Recalling a particular discussion of Plath’s “Sow,” Lowell describes the poem as
“perfect, almost. (. . .) There really is not much to say.” But something nags the poem
beneath the surface as his words trail off: “But. I don’t know. There’s something about
it” (qtd. in Spivack 215). Alas the poem’s first lines give way to the “something” Lowell
awaits and does not reach: “God knows how our neighbor managed to breed/ His great
sow: / Whatever his shrewd secret, he kept it hid/ In the same way/ He kept the sow—
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impounded from public stare,/ Prize ribbon and pig show” (1-6). Plath’s journals and
poem excerpts reiterate this notion: Plath is keeping a shrewd secret from those reading
these poems, revealing her poetry in her journals and tempting readers with the surprising
hints of the voice that will later find a home in Ariel.
The hallmarking “illogical, sensuous description” of her writing continues to
thrive in her journals as her poetry remains tightly bound to structure. A journal entry
from late 1958 reveals this free-form, “The ash bits from the black wired box seiving the
red-brick chimney soot are winking and somersaulting down, bright white like
snowflakes in the shadow of the building, caught by the sun” (Journals 450). This scene
is described simply, without weighted words of a thesaurus glory and echoes of other
styles: Plath’s voice here is her own, in a simple description of a scene she enjoyed. The
Ariel voice is fine-tuning itself as the separate elements that make up its force are
gathering the strength to finally appear as one.
“Electra on Azalea Path” is another crucial step in the evolution of Plath’s poetic
voice. As with “Full Fathom Five,” “Electra on Azalea Path” presents the father figure as
a ghostly image that the “I” of the poem is desperately trying to reach. The intensity of
the declarative voice in “Daddy” is not yet present here, but the speaker is very much in
search of the triumphant resolution that “Daddy” offers. This 1959 poem is thus a crucial
step in the journey toward “Daddy”: this is the poem that begins the search, begins the
need to know who to blame. Her father’s memory overlaps reality and the truth she
manufactured “small as a doll in my dress of innocence” as “I lay dreaming your epic,
image by image” (11-12). Plath’s speaker wakes to find the gravestone of her father,
adorned with “plastic evergreens” and the imitation petals dripping red. The father
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mythologized in youth, and in “Full Fathom Five,” is in question as Plath’s “I” is unable
to discern fiction from fact, dream from reality. The voice here is still timid and
questioning, as she reasons “my mother said; you died like any man. / How shall I age
into that state of mind” (40-41). Yet the speaker here, while grappling with changing
fact, is still a voice growing louder as she declares, “I am the ghost of an infamous
suicide, / My own blue razor rusting in my throat” (42-43). “Electra on Azalea Path” is a
quiet promise of a later declaration as it ends begging for a “pardon” for “the one who
knocks for pardon at/ Your gate, father—your hound-bitch, daughter, friend” (44-45).
Anticipating the fury that is to come within Ariel, Plath’s speaker is asking for a pardon
with the quiet hush of her future self-revelation: “It was my love that did us both to
death” (46).
As with the emerging figure of the father, the later Ariel image of the bee presents
itself in another 1959 poem, “The Beekeeper’s Daughter.” Addressing her father’s
position studying bees throughout his career is a further shift in acknowledging the
demons tormenting the artist (Bassnett 5). This is important in that it further reveals
Plath’s progression as a poet; the subject matter of her poetry is taking on a much more
personal face as the “I” voice is gathering strength and the accusatory “You” is given a
name. The descriptive language of “The Beekeeper’s Daughter” echoes the “illogical,
sensuous description” celebrated in her journal writings: “A garden of mouthings.
Purple, scarlet-speckled, black/ The great corollas dilate, peeling back their silks” (1-2).
The language is rich with color and alliteration, taking on a sexual tone as the ambivalent
relationship of father and daughter, beekeeper and queen bee struggle within the confines
of the poem. “The Beekeeper’s Daughter” relies heavily on the texture of the poem: that
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which is beneath the surface and that which can be inferred from the building allusions.
The bee within Plath’s poems is yet another critical development towards the Ariel voice;
the subject matter is growing more personal and the literal is taking on metaphorical
implications: Plath’s life is becoming art. “The Beekeeper’s Daughter” is the spark
leading to the flame that presents itself in the autumn of 1962 with the sequence of five
bee poems written in the culminating voice of the Ariel genius (Bassnett 90).
Building on the groundwork laid by “Full Fathom Five” and “Electra on Azalea
Path,” the voice of “The Colossus” reveals another evolution within the “I” voice of the
poem. Plath’s speaker is gathering strength through the framework of each: the timid and
fearful voice of “Full Fathom Five” moves into the questioning voice of “Electra on
Azalea Path” and finally to the voice of the title poem of The Colossus. There is a
mocking sarcasm as Plath’s “I” likens the father figure to a crumbling statue, “O father,
all by yourself/ You are pithy and historical as the Roman Forum” (17-18).
Searching for an understanding between the living and the dead, the speaker searches the
noises from his “great lips” for a meaning, but hears only “mule-bray, pig-grunt and
bawdy cackles” (3-4). There is anger that the undecipherable mutterings have no
meaning—Plath’s speaker is searching for an understanding of herself that she feels only
her father can provide. Thus the disgust intertwines with the mockery as the mutterings
are declared to be “worse than a barnyard” (5). The “father-sea-god muse” and ancient
hero constructed in the previous poems are gone as that image becomes ridicule:
“Perhaps you consider yourself an oracle, / Mouthpiece of the dead, or of some god or
other” (6-7). Yet Plath’s speaker’s anger also directs itself inward as she likens herself to
“scaling little ladders with gluepots and pails of Lysol” as she “crawl[s] like an ant in
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mourning/ Over the weedy acres of your brow” (11-13). The figure of myth from her
childhood no longer exists and the compensation for that ideological loss is one that
leaves her still searching, still returning to the grave of the remains.
The figure that Plath’s speaker has tried to “put together entirely, / Pieced, glued,
and properly jointed” will never be: even after thirty years of laboring “to dredge the silt
from your throat. I am none the wiser” (1-2, 9). The attempts to reconfigure and
understand her father are a waste as the mythology and history of the man blur and the
reality is understood, “My hours are married to shadow” (28). The figure conjured in
“Full Fathom Five,” “Electra on Azalea Path,” and even “The Beekeeper’s Daughter” is a
part of the shadow the speaker of “The Colossus” is now married to: she cannot escape
the ghost she has created. What is so important is the tone of “The Colossus”—Plath’s
“I” is no longer sentimental and mournful of the loss. Instead, the tone is one of sarcastic
indignation in which the guilt of the earlier poems has transformed into rage. However,
Plath distances herself from the experience of the poem through the careful structure and
specific imagery. The emotions still bubble through the confined structure: the “I” of the
poem is calculatedly confronting her anger, allowing the emotions of loss, bitterness, and
disgust to flow through her so that she might travel through all sides of the spectrum.
“The Colossus” is a defining point in Plath’s career for many reasons—imagery,
language, style—yet the poem’s greatest impact is its confrontation of tone, the emotional
register of experience that lights the final match that ignites the Ariel flame.
The confrontation of emotions presented in “The Colossus” leaves the “I” voice
of Plath’s poetry in a new state of limbo. Writing in her journal, November 1959, Plath
reveals, “I wonder about the poems I am doing. They seem moving, interesting, but I
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wonder how deep they are. The absence of a tightly reasoned and rhythmed logic bothers
me. Yet frees me” (Journals 521). It is this freedom that allows the creation of “The
Stones,” the final poem in Plath’s sequential “Poem for a Birthday.” The poem begins
with the speaker lost and alone having fallen “out of the light” as “the flat blue sky-circle/
Flew off like the hat of a doll” (5, 3-4). Plath herself reveals of the poem, “The speaker
has utterly lost her sense of identity and relationship to the world. She imagines herself,
quite graphically, undergoing the process of rebirth, like a statue that has been scattered
and ground down, only to be pieced together centuries later” (qtd. in Wagner-Martin
93-94). Plath’s speaker is thus like the father-figure in “The Colossus,” a broken statue
that will never be put back together entirely. Plath’s “I” voice is continuing to make her
way through the haze of experience: her mythologized dream world of reality has been
shattered through the journey of her earlier poems.
Entering “the stomach of indifference, the wordless cupboard,” Plath’s speaker
becomes “a still pebble,” alone, vulnerable, and worn down to the core (6, 8). She thus
begins the process of her own resurrection: “the jewelmaster drives his chisel to pry/
Open one stone eye” and “little children come/ To trade their hooks for hands” (20-21,
36-37). The process of her rebirth is a literal piecing together of parts as the memory of
Plath’s 1953 visit to a mental hospital and experience with shock treatments is recalled.
Awaking to the “after-hell,” Plath’s speaker finds herself in, as Plath details, “a nightmare
vision (. . .) [that] gradually softens, as she recovers, and accepts the frightening, yet new,
ties of love which will heal her and return her, whole again, to the world”
(Wagner-Martin 94). “The Stones” is brazenly autobiographical with Plath finally
shedding her youthful fear of the “eye of the reader upon her” as she claims herself in her
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poetry. The Ariel voice is here, piecing itself together and finding the true Plath hidden at
the core. Commenting further, Hughes reveals “The Stones” “is clearly enough the first
eruption of the voice that produced Ariel. It is the poem where the self, shattered in 1953,
suddenly finds itself whole” (qtd. in Smith 333). “The Stones” is essentially a poem of
rebirth and resurrection, even as the speaker’s “mendings itch” there is a final certain
declaration that “I shall be good as new” (44, 45). Plath has confronted the emotions
caged within her earlier poetry and let them go inside her, thus awaking to the “after-hell”
of the experience. The heroine of “The Wishing Box” in her final sleep with the “slight,
secret smile of triumph” has been resurrected; the “shrewd secret” hiding beneath the
poetic structure of “Sow” is climbing to the surface. Plath’s voice emerges from the
pages of “The Stones” with such declaration and authority that it is clear the voice of
Ariel has finally been born.
Written in November 1959, “The Stones” awakens Plath to the world her poetry
will later inhabit. A journal entry of the same month states, “I have experienced love,
sorrow, madness, and if I cannot make these experiences meaningful, no new experience
will help me” (Journals 530). The internalization of Plath’s poetry into herself and her
experiences is crucial, yet it is only through the foundational work of The Colossus and
other earlier works that this internalization can occur. John Fredrick Nims argues in his
essay “The Poetry of Sylvia Plath: A Technical Analysis” that Plath’s poetry is of
“timeless excellence” and advises readers to “forget Ariel for a while; study The
Colossus. Notice all the stanza forms, all the uses of rhythm and rhyme, notice how the
images are chosen and related; how deliberately sound is used (. . .) without the drudgery
of The Colossus, the triumph of Ariel is unthinkable” (qtd. in Bassnett 35). Within this
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“drudgery” there are the flashes of brilliance that later develop into the voice of Ariel:
these are the poems that “eat time” as Ariel exists on a plane all its own. Thus the
germination of the later genius is clearly evident through Plath’s early journal entries,
short stories, and poems. It is only after Plath faces herself and resurrects herself that her
genius can find its voice. Ted Hughes, thirty years after Plath’s death, finally revealed
the achievement of Plath’s voice, “The shock of Sylvia’s writing, when she really began
to write, was that she was doing the very opposite of what she would have normally have
considered a proper thing to write about . . .What she’d done was to reclaim her entire
psychology” (qtd. in Wagner-Martin 94). Plath emerges from the early work of her
career triumphant, resolute, with pen in hand as her final declaration prepares itself to be
made.
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CHAPTER II
THE RECLAMATION OF SELF IN THE ARIEL POEMS
The journey of Sylvia Plath into the reclamation of her voice is meticulously
documented throughout her creative career. With the two journeys of life and art
occurring simultaneously, Plath’s life is explicitly bound in her art: not as merely
confessional as so many critics contend, but that in the emotions, the experiences, and the
struggles of Plath’s life flesh out the mastery of her voice. Plath’s voice reaches far
beyond the relation of experience and the telling of life. The Ariel voice is a haunting
declaration, a voice with so many facets that it is almost easier for critics and readers to
assume its meaning in one dimension—depression, feminism, anger, suicide—than to let
the poetry and all of its daring complexities resonate within themselves. Plath is giving
voice to the journey of her life, laying claim to the emotions running through the current
of the human experience. It is Plath’s refusal to hold her reader’s hand through her
poetry that startles so many: her writing is starkly beautifully, intensely imagined, and
brazenly honest. Plath will not be turned back against, she will not be ignored, and she
will not be forgotten. Plath exhibited great genius in her short life, revealing a depth
within her singular voice that defies definition, defies convention, and continues to leave
the world reeling. Plath’s poetry challenges those that read it: taking advantage of the
tension she wields with her language, her style, and her form to illicit her desired
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reaction. This genius is not something that simply exploded out of the poet: she spent her
artistic career gathering strength, fine-tuning her craft, mastering the voices of the poets
before her so that her voice could defiantly stand on its own.
The Ariel poems, hallmarking her unique voice, astounded the artistic community.
Fellow poet and former mentor Robert Lowell grasped at words to describe his reaction:
“There is a peculiar, haunting challenge to these poems. (. . .) In her lines, I often hear
the serpent whisper, ‘Come, if only you had the courage, you too could have my
rightness, audacity and ease of inspiration’” (xv). The Ariel voice is one that dares its
reader to react: the poems are so viscerally felt and compellingly constructed that the
poems come alive off the page. The imagery coils itself around the reader’s mind as the
words echo long after the poem is read. Sylvia Plath’s voice is one that stands above her
poetry—proud, defiant, challenging, refusing to be ignored.
The journals and earlier works of Sylvia Plath reveal a poet in the quest of selfdiscovery, shaping and reshaping her craft, and finally emerging as wholly herself. The
Ariel voice is the hallmark of Plath’s poetic legacy, yet this voice reverberates throughout
her entire creative process—journals, letters, poetic fragments, and short stories. The
Ariel voice is the voice of experience, writing in her journal in late 1959, “How much of
life I have known: love, delusion, madness, hatred, murderous passions” (Journals 512).
The Ariel voice is one that has harnessed these passions, understanding their control and
manipulating her power over her own experiences in order to reclaim her self and
artistically demand the authority her earlier poems hinted at. The literal process of
rebirth in 1959’s “The Stones” is the breakthrough poem of Plath’s resurrection as an
artist. As her “mendings itch,” she waits, realizing “there is nothing to do,” knowing that
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another force is in control and, soon enough, “I shall be good as new” (44-45). It is
through this detailed process of rebirth that Plath emerges as wholly herself, not born
again as something new and surprising, but as the resurrection and reclamation of her true
self, the self germinating throughout the course of her entire creative career. The poems
of the Ariel voice—written with such control, deliberation, and power—reveal a poet at
home within her poetic structure. These poems are, as Robert Lowell declared, her
“appalling and triumphant fulfillment” (xvi).
The fulfillment of Plath’s artistic genius is evident in the rush of creative output
that flowed from her pen to the page in the years after 1960 until her death in early 1963.
The journey, so meticulously detailed in Plath’s journals and poems pre-dating Ariel, is
one towards a voice unburdened by the external world, the awareness, as Anita Helle
states, “of the eye of the reader upon her” (636). Indeed, Plath writes in her own journal
in 1959, “I write as if an eye were upon me. That is fatal” (Journals 511). The
reclamation of her self, as outlined in “The Stones,” is thus the shedding of these other
selves—the other voices inside her head and the other eyes upon her craft. Going on to
write in the same journal entry, “To write for itself, to do things for the joy of them.
What a gift of the gods” (Journals 512). The Ariel voice is a voice writing for itself, for
the sake of the craft, and for its “triumphant fulfillment.”
The assumption that Plath’s voice exploded onto the page in the years directly
preceding her suicide is one that cheapens and devalues the actual poetic mastery Plath
accomplishes in the Ariel poems. What makes these poems so “appalling,” as Lowell
asserts, is not their surprising appearance in Plath’s catalog, but their brazenness of
language and style and their mesmerizing and unflinching hold on the reader. The rebirth
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of herself granted in the lines of “The Stones” is meticulous and calculated, as she
“became a still pebble” as “they hunted the stones, taciturn and separate, / The mouthhole crying their locations” (6, 15-16). It is only when Plath breaks apart from herself
that her “mouth-hole” can cry for what she should be: only Plath can piece herself back
together as whole, only Plath can reclaim her true self. “The Stones” ends with a hinting
certainty of this change within the poet: the voice is triumphant, expectant, and defiant.
It is in 1960’s “Love Letter” that Plath reveals her newly transformed self.
Detailing the change within herself, the poem begins by acknowledging, “Not easy to
state the change you made./ If I’m alive now, then I was dead,/ Though, like a stone,
unbothered by it” (1-3).
Addressing the poem to an ambiguous “you,” Plath is indeed
writing a love letter: writing to her Ariel voice and the poetic freedom finally “alive”
within her. Detailing the process of discovery, “Love Letter” follows the moments of
recognition throughout her journey as she emerges from the haze of her sleep-filled
“white hiatus of winter” and finds herself awake and vividly alive (11). Plath’s mastery
is fully present in the tone of “Love Letter”: the poem is easeful, quiet, and subtle,
capturing, simply through the structure and language, the blissful discovery of the true
self. The culmination of Plath’s voice “slept, say: a snake/ Masked among black rocks,”
gathering strength and detailing form, to emerge distinct, separate, as a voice wholly
unique to Plath (9-10). As in “The Stones,” the stones of “Love Letter” are “peaceable”
and “quiet, jostled by nothing,” indecipherable until the “jewelmaster” of “The Stones”
“drives his chisel to pry/ Open one stone eye” (9, 10, 20-21). The voice of Plath,
“staying put according to habit,” is now awakened to itself, aware of its individuality as it
is no longer “masked among” other stones. As the poem continues, the snake weaves
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itself through the stanzas, subtly revealing the trademarks of the Ariel voice of imagery—
“taking no pleasure/ In the million perfectly-chiseled/ Cheeks alighting each moment to
melt/ My cheek of basalt”—and control of the reader’s attention through language—
“Each dead head had a visor of ice” and “the locked drops rising in a dew” (12-15, 18,
21). Plath is wielding her control over the poem, slowing, and thus emphasizing,
according to language and form, while garnering strength and authority through the
images created.
“Love Letter” is the culmination of the development of Plath’s voice throughout
her poetic career, germinating throughout her earlier writings, and staking its final
command in the poems composing the Ariel voice. The Ariel voice, as echoed in her
journal entries, and here, in “Love Letter,” is a gift Plath “didn’t know what to make of”
(24). Yet, with a power all its own, “I shone, mica-scaled, and unfolded/ To pour myself
out like a fluid/ Among bird feet and the stems of plants” (25-27). The speaker within
“Love Letter” reveals this outpouring of self as though it was simply a natural event,
occurring without any forced intention, and taking place on its own accord. The voice
being honored is thus the natural progression, the fulfillment of Plath’s earlier poetic
endeavors, with Plath’s speaker making clear, “I wasn’t fooled. I knew you at once”
(28). This voice was always within, waiting, maturing as Plath’s pen surged forward on
the page. Plath’s genius is finally fully at home here and, indeed, she did know her voice
“at once.”
The Ariel voice within “Love Letter” is going through the process of its
reclamation, starting anew as it spreads itself among the “stems of plants,” germinating in
the flashes of brilliance clearly evident in the language, style, and form of her earlier
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written works. As the “I” of Plath’s poem matures from a “bent finger” to a “fingerlength [growing] lucent as glass,” Plath’s speaker “start[s] to bud like a March twig:/ An
arm and a leg, an arm, a leg” (19, 30, 31-21). The germination of Plath’s genius
throughout her earlier works is physically present in the reformation of Plath’s figure.
Instead of being simply reborn as something totally new, she is instead spread amongst
the soil’s roots and stems and reconfigured as something fresh—still herself, but casting
aside the many “dense and expressionless” stones that lay about her (23). This
reclamation is a transcendent journey as Plath’s figure is recreated “from stone to cloud,
so I ascended” (33). Plath’s figure is ascending above the page, molding itself out of the
written word and defining itself in mythic qualities: “Now I resemble a sort of god/
Floating through the air in my soul-shift/ Pure as a pane of ice. It’s a gift” (34-36). The
dream outlined in Plath’s journal is triumphantly fulfilled as she achieves her poetic
mastery, having received her “gift of the gods.”
The sacrifice of her former self is
complete. The voice resounding through the final lines of “Love Letter” is not a voice of
anger or hysteria; it is a voice that is weaving itself into the poetic consciousness,
marking its territory, staking its claim, with its serpent quietly whispering its dare.
The poetic recognition outlined in “Love Letter” is the awakening of Plath’s
creative voice. Heralding this new imaginative energy, Plath’s voice finally broke free
on the page, spilling itself out with ferocity as each poem reveals a new facet of the Ariel
voice. Each poem comprising the Ariel genius is thus a journey towards self-recognition.
While Plath has finally shed the latent agents hindering her poetic process, she is still a
poet in search of herself. The reclamation of Plath’s true voice reveals her complexity:
the Ariel poems build on one another, exploring the poet’s changing roles within her life
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and poetry as she thematically moves through the range of emotions discovered in the
various experiences of motherhood, miscarriage, marriage, separation, all of which are
weaving through the maze of Plath’s search for identity. The poetry is vividly alive,
reaching out to the reader through the lines on the page as Plath deciphers her way
through the web of experience. Plath’s daughter, Frieda Hughes, further contends of the
Ariel poems, “They had an urgency, freedom, and force that was quite new in her work”
(xii). The overlapping of reality and imagination abounds through these poems,
reconciling the haze of understanding as Plath continues to seek herself out in the poetic
journey.
As Plath’s poetic mastery tightens its grip on the creative experience, her journal
vanishes as another source of understanding Plath’s motives. Despite that loss, however,
the bulk of entries found in late 1959 echo the obvious creative resurrection at work
within Plath: “I will write mad stories. But honest. I know the horror of primal feelings,
obsessions. (. . .) All experience becomes usable to me. . . Start with self and extend
outwards: then my life will be fascinating, not a glassed-in cage” (Journals 512, 509).
The infamous poems of the Ariel voice—“Daddy,” “Lady Lazarus,” “Fever 103˚”—
reveal the “horror” of the “primal feelings” felt at Plath’s core and use that keen
emotional awareness to manipulate the reader and orchestrate reaction. This use of
Plath’s own experience within her work is exactly what makes so many readers and
critics uncomfortable; Plath is threatening and challenging the reader with the striptease
of her own soul. She is freeing herself from the “glassed-in cage” and breaking her way
into the poetic consciousness, finally resurrecting herself as the Queen Bee, Medusa,
Lady Lazarus, and the phoenix. As critic Jon Rosenblatt affirms, Plath, “by using
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intensely personal material,” is giving “concrete form to an action involving violent selftransformation and initiatory change” (21). Plath is deciphering herself and exploring her
other selves throughout the Ariel poems, evolving from the figure budding into life in
“Love Letter,” sprouting “an arm, a leg,” until she not just “resemble[s] a sort of god,”
but has truly become one (32, 34).
Before the declaration of “Lady Lazarus” can be made, however, Plath must first
pronounce ownership over the expanding roles in her life. “Parliament Hill Fields,”
written in early 1961, addresses the complicated collision of selves in Plath’s poetry.
Detailing her miscarriage, Plath herself states, “The speaker here is caught between the
old and the new year, between the grief caused by the loss of a child and the joy aroused
by the knowledge of an older child safe at home” (qtd. in Wagner-Martin 93). Plath’s
speaker is grief-stricken, meandering through her journey home as “the city melts like
sugar” around her and “the wind stops my breath like a bandage” (12, 20). The
surroundings are the physical manifestation of the speaker’s internal struggle,
experiencing this “inconspicuous” loss as the reality of life “opens to swallow me” (4,
15). Plath relates the grayness of her vision reflected in the landscape: “These faithful
dark-boughed cypresses / Brood, rooted in their heaped losses. / Your cry fades like the
cry of a gnat. (. . .) The moon’s crook whitens, / Thin as the skin seaming a scar” (3032, 38-39). Further tracing Plath’s mastery through the course of the Ariel poems, the
moon is a reoccurring symbol Plath assigns meaning to: the moon in “Parliament Hill
Fields” is the physical representation of the living pain Plath’s speaker is experiencing,
whitening and seaming, revealing the scar hidden on Plath’s own body.
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The pain is secret, internal, again declaring, “I’m a stone,” as “nobody can tell
what I lack”: “Parliament Hill Fields” follows the speaker through the literal journey to
the living life waiting for her, her daughter and husband (15, 5). There is a struggle,
though, between the emotions: the overwhelming sense of pain and powerlessness is
threatening to suffocate her, thus she reasons, “I suppose it’s pointless to think of you at
all. Already your doll grip lets go” (24-25). However, as quickly as the speaker begins
to loosen her grip, she realizes it is all too fleeting, countering, “I am too happy” as she
loses “sight of you on your blind journey” (29, 33). Plath’s speaker is trying to heal as
she settles the conflict of life and depression within her, eventually choosing the self of
surviving motherhood, remembering “the little pale blue hill/ In your sister’s birthday
picture” as it “start[s] to glow”: Plath’s “I” “enter[s] the lit house” (50). Entering the “lit
house,” Plath thus chooses life, with all of its ghosts and shadows, abandoning the
grayness of her mind and forcing herself into the light of reality. This internal struggle of
juxtaposing emotions is fluent throughout the Ariel poems, particularly the poems
detailing the physical self and motherhood. Susan Van Dyne reiterates, “In negotiating
these roles, Plath was repeatedly caught up in the contradictory meanings of rage, the
female body, and motherhood” (5). Yet during this “negotiation” of roles, the opposing
emotions are succinctly given life in Plath’s poems. The emotions are pulsating through
the images of the poems as Plath’s masterful hand leads the reader through the deliberate
experience haunting the lines of the poem.
“Face Lift” negotiates the reconciliation of self in Plath’s physical body. Not a
rebirth as in “The Stones,” “Face Lift,” as Rosenblatt concurs, is the process of the
body’s “own annihilation” and “effacement” (26). Plath’s speaker is hospitalized, “fizzy
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with sedatives and unusually humorous” as she waits for “the count of two” to bring the
“darkness [that] wipes me out like chalk on a blackboard” (11, 14, 15). This selfannihilation leaves Plath’s speaker lost: “I don’t know a thing” (14). The figure here is
not sprouting new life as in “The Stones” or “Love Letter;” instead, Plath’s speaker is
literally shedding its layers: “Skin doesn’t have roots, it peels away easy as paper” (20).
The figure is “grow[ing] backward” as her former self is “trapped somewhere in some
laboratory jar” (21, 28). Recounting her former face with disgust, Plath’s “I” is so
removed from the self she is shedding that it now becomes a separate person: “Now she’s
done for, the dewlapped lady/ I watched settle, line by line, in my mirror” (25-26). Her
former self will continue to live, “nodding and rocking and fingering her thin hair,” while
Plath’s “I” can victoriously declare: “Mother to myself, I wake swaddled in gauze, / Pink
and smooth as a baby” (30, 31-32). “Facelift” is thus a different form of Plath’s
reclamation of self. Rosenblatt offers, “After the ritual ordeal of dismemberment and
dissolution, the self emerges as if reborn in a new world. Death is converted into new
birth through an imitation of gestation and delivery” (26). “Facelift” is the furthering of
the rebirthing process as Plath’s figure is literally peeling off her layers and shedding her
former self until she is again reborn as something new and fresh.
“In Plaster,” written just one month after “Facelift,” counters the latter’s process
of peeling away the ugliness until again “pink and smooth as a baby.” “In Plaster”
deciphers the relationship of a woman encased in a body cast, a figure that becomes
another person, trapping the two in “a kind of marriage” (51). Plath’s speaker is the “old
yellow one” and, instead of being “swaddled in gauze” as in “Facelift,” the mode to selftransformation here is through the other “new absolutely white person” who is “certainly
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the superior one” (2, 3). Diana Curtis writes, “The color suggests both sickness and her
fear of the strange new persona that encases her” (185). Unlike the “darkness” that
“wipes me out” until “I don’t know a thing” in “Facelift,” Plath’s speaker is very aware
of the transformation that is occurring, the first line of the poem beginning with a
desperate cry: “I shall never get out of this!” (1).
“In Plaster” reveals the transformation at work, not just in the physical body as
the poems before, but in the mental transformation and the struggle of the warring selves
for dominance. Plath deftly weaves emotion—fear, confusion, anger, annoyance—in the
subtle tone of the poem. The speaker is recounting her relationship with the new person:
“At the beginning I hated her, she had no personality— / She lay in bed with me like a
dead body / And I was scared, because she was shaped just the way I was” (5-7). As the
relationship grows, however, the two develop, as Jeannine Dobbs writes in “’Viciousness
in the Kitchen’: Sylvia Plath’s Domestic Poetry,” “an interdependency, the cast playing a
supporting role” as “she humored my weakness like the best of nurses” (18; Plath 26).
The change in their relationship is particularly noteworthy in comparison to the shedding
of selves present in “The Stones,” “Love Letter,” and “Facelift”: “In Plaster” is being told
from the perspective of the old self, the self Plath’s speaker in “Facelift” “trapped in
some laboratory jar” that she dreamed of “nodding and rocking and fingering her thin
hair” as she “wither[ed] incessantly for the next fifty years” (28, 30, 29). The “white”
and “unbreakable” cast of “In Plaster,” while still piecing Plath’s speaker back together,
“holding my bones in place so they would mend properly,” is entirely dependent on the
old “yellow” self: “Without me, she wouldn’t exist, so of course she was grateful / I gave
her a soul, I bloomed out of her as a rose” (8, 27, 15-16). The self germinating
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throughout the course of the developing Ariel poems is now sprouting life through the
soul of the former self, not just “bud[ding] like a March twig” as in “Love Letter,” but
blooming “as a rose” with the declaration of “it was I who attracted everybody’s
attention, / Not her whiteness and beauty, as I had at first supposed” (18-19). “In Plaster”
is thus a crucial step in the journey of self-discovery for Plath as she acknowledges the
beauty and potential of her former self, her real self, and that living with the figure of her
transformation “was like living with my own coffin” (48).
The decisive acknowledgement of her true self in “In Plaster” is accompanied by
the collision of roles in “Tulips,” both written the same day in early 1961. The speaker is
“learning peacefulness, lying by myself quietly” as she has surrendered her “name” and
“day-clothes up to the nurses,” yielding herself into the anonymity afforded by the whitewalled sterility of the hospital. Rosenblatt reiterates, “The self wishes to throw off her
life, with its attachments to others and the weight of its sorrow and guilt” (25). The
hospital scene surrounding Plath’s speaker is engulfed in whiteness; even as her “stupid
pupil. . . has to take everything in,” she is calmed by the routine of the nurses as “they are
no trouble” (10, 11). Her body is once again a stone, yet she is whole here, not in pieces
with her “mouth-hole” crying out for its self; instead, “My body is a pebble to them, they
tend it as water / Tends to the pebbles it must run over, smoothing them gently” (15-16).
The condition here is gentle, with a subtle sense of numbed peace as the doctors “bring. .
. sleep” with “their bright needles” (17).
Plath’s speaker’s journey is echoing that of “Parliament Hill Fields,” with both
figures lost in the solace of their minds, quiet and subdued, until the reality of their
surviving lives is brought back to them. Interrupting her peacefulness, the appearance of
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“my husband and child smiling out of the family photo” immediately changes the tone of
“Tulips” as “their smiles catch onto my skin, little smiling hooks” (20, 21). Plath’s word
choice masterfully changes the mood of the poem: the sterility of the whiteness
surrounding her speaker is shattered with the abrasiveness of the contradicting “little
smiling hooks.” Curtis concurs, “The word ‘hooks’ convey[s] a sense of entrapment” as
Plath confesses in the next stanzas: “I only wanted / To lie with my hands turned up and
be utterly empty. / How free it is, you have no idea how free— / The peacefulness is so
big it dazes you” (184; Plath 29-32). The reconciliation of herself to the life awaiting her
is not as easy as in “Parliament Hill Fields”; the speaker of “Tulips” will not simply
“enter the lit house” of its predecessor. “Tulips,” like “In Plaster,” brings the reader into
the mind of the warring selves within Plath’s “I”, likening her newly found peaceful state
with that of what the “dead close on” before they leave the world.
This peacefulness that consumes Plath’s numbed speaker is invaded by the “too
excitable” tulips that are “too red in the first place” (1, 36). The pulsating life within
these tulips bleed redness into the white sterility of her tranquil surroundings. They are
too alive as Plath’s speaker confides, “they hurt me. / Even through the gift paper I could
hear them breathe / Lightly, through their white swaddlings, like an awful baby” (36-38).
The tulips “weigh me down” and “eat my oxygen” as the “dozen red lead sinkers round
my neck” (40, 49, 42). The equation of these tulips with that of “an awful baby”
strangling the life from the speaker reveal the complication of the demanding roles of
woman, mother, and independent self within Plath as she confesses, “Nobody watched
me before, now I am watched” (43). The acknowledgement that her life is no longer
simply her own is one that Plath continually struggles with, as Curtis echoes, “Perceiving
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the child to be a threat to her existence, the speaker wishes it to stay away, preferring the
serenity of the hospital room prior to the arrival of the tulips” (185). The room and “the
air was calm enough” before the tulips arrived, “fill[ing] it up like a loud noise / Now the
air snags and eddies round them,” threatening as they “concentrate my attention, that was
happy / Playing and resting without committing itself” (50, 52-53, 55-56).
There is, however, a reconciliation of self within “Tulips.” The tulips are
threatening the very existence of Plath’s speaker as she sees herself drained in the
presence of the tulips: “I see myself, flat, ridiculous, a cut-paper shadow / Between the
eye of the sun and the eyes of the tulips, / And I have no face, I have wanted to efface
myself” (46-48). The effacement accomplished in “Facelift,” as well as the separation of
the duality of her roles into the two figures in “In Plaster,” is no longer a possibility as
Plath’s speaker is “aware of my heart: it opens and closes / Its bowl of red blooms out of
sheer love of me” (60-61). She reclaims her strength within herself, not seeking
effacement or rebirth; Plath ends “Tulips” abandoning the notion that she must recreate
for herself. The speaker simply tastes water, “warm and salt, like the sea,” shedding tears
for the loss of the self that cannot be replaced.
The recognition within Plath’s poetry that she has created roles for herself which
she must fulfill is played out in “The Surgeon at 2 a.m.” Plath’s speaker is completely in
control. Instead of pouring herself out into the soil to sprout new life as in “Love Letter,”
the speaker in “The Surgeon at 2 a.m.” is the gardener cultivating the new life: “It is the
garden I have to do with—tubers, fruits / Oozing their jammy substances, / A mat of
roots. My assistants hook them back” (11-13). Plath’s speaker is the creator here, as her
creations “spot and coil like snakes” (16). The challenge awakened in the serpent of
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“Love Letter” is thus weaving itself through Plath’s poetry. She is in full control of her
art; indeed, a review published in 1971 detailing “The Surgeon at 2 a.m.” quotes, “The
persona of the surgeon is never twisted by simile or bald statement into a gratuitous
system of emotional equivalents; if anything, he is committed to a world of exclusive
artifact, a singular vision” (“A World in Disintegration” 167).
Plath’s speaker is once again dealing with stones as the surgeon of the poem is
organizing the flow of life through the “intricate, blue piping under this pale marble”
(26). The surgeon in the poem wields the same control as the “jewelmaster” in “The
Stones,” who “drives his chisel to pry / open one stone eye” (20-21). The speaker of
“The Surgeon at 2 a.m.” proudly announces, “I have perfected it. / I am left with an arm
or a leg, / A set of teeth, or stones / To rattle in a bottle and take home” (32-35). The
spare parts that pieced together the “I” of “The Stones” and sprouted life in “Love Letter”
are now the trophies, the “saints’ relics” that Plath’s surgeon can carry away from the
confining hospital (39). Plath’s speaker now triumphantly declares: “I am the sun, in my
white coat, / Gray faces, shuttered by drugs, follow me like flowers” (49-50). The
grayness, the numbness, and the disjointed conditions that plagued Plath’s speakers are
now gone: Plath is in control, orchestrating her power through the reclamation of the self
in her poetry.
“The Mirror” is another reconciliation of the new self present in Plath’s poetry.
Once again, Plath has changed the power structure initially present in the poems
searching for her identity: here, Plath is the mirror, the source of self-understanding,
“silver and exact,” with “no preconceptions” (1). The recognition of the true self is
tormented with the “faces and darkness” that “separate us over and over” as “a woman
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bends over me, / Searching my reaches for what she really is” (9, 10-11). The reflection
is met with disgust as “she rewards me with tears and an agitation of hands” (14). “The
Mirror” is the statement of the final reconciliation of Plath’s true self: there is a resolution
in the shift in speaker, the relinquishing of control to the honest reflection of herself as
the mirror makes clear, “I am important to her” (15). The woman peering into the mirror
each morning is not in search of a rebirth of her younger self; instead, the mirror reveals,
“In me she has drowned a young girl, and in me an old woman / Rises toward her day
after day, like a terrible fish” (17-18). The tone is crucial here: while Plath is
surrendering control over the inevitable, she is still injecting her dissatisfaction and
disgust over the aging process, drowning her former self as the new reflection ascends
“as what she really is.” By shifting the first person speaker to that of the mirror, Plath is
displaying control over the process; yet there is a vulnerability that peeks through the
lines of “Mirror,” revealing the continuing journey for self-acceptance within Plath.
The duality of roles and emotions within Plath’s poetry is what makes the Ariel
voice so compelling: she is controlled and maddened, calm and violent, loving and
murderous. Bringing the reader right along with her to the brink of self-understanding
and self-annihilation, Plath is brazenly honest throughout the journey toward her
reclamation and resolution of self. Turning again to her journal entries as a source of
understanding, Plath writes in October 1959, “I am my own master. I am a fool to be
jealous of phantoms” (Journals 519). These phantoms, however, are at the core of
Plath’s poetry: her writing is haunted by the demons of her past and terrorized by the
realities of her present. Susan Van Dyne continues, “The journals are characterized, as
the Ariel poems would be, by fears of insufficiency and an often enraged rivalry” (5).
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The contradicting roles within Plath’s life play out their “rivalry” within the Ariel poems
with juxtaposing conditions of warring control, hysterical resolution, and decisive
defiance.
“Elm,” written in April 1962 during the height of Plath’s surge of creative energy,
finds the Ariel voice in full-force. The tone is urgent, declarative, never halting in its
honesty and questioning as Plath manipulates her control over the poem. Embracing the
understanding of self achieved in her journal entries, Plath begins “Elm” echoing her
myriad of emotional registers—“love, delusion, madness, hatred, murderous passions”—
and declaratively makes clear her stance: “I know the bottom, she says. I know it with my
great tap root: / It is what you fear. / I do not fear it: I have been there” (1-3). Plath’s
speaker knows the depth of true experience, having “suffered and been to hell,” living
with the phantoms that threaten to overwhelm her creative self (Journals 286). Thus
“Elm” is pivotal in that it gives voice to those phantoms, articulating the “threat of
madness” at the root of the Plath’s creativity (Wagner-Martin 125). The serpent
whispering in Plath’s poetry is here, challenging through the onslaught of images as
Plath’s speaker threatens to strangle its reader with “the sound of poisons” (13). “Elm”
succeeds in the tension it creates: there is a fear and a danger reaching out through the
lines of the poem, desperately clutching at some kind of reconciliation of self. The rival
selves are at war from the opening of the poem, with Plath exploring the implications of
the “otherness” within her: “I am inhabited by a cry. / Nightly it flaps out / Looking, with
its hooks, for something to love” (28-30). Sandra M. Gilbert writes in “’My Name is
Darkness’: The Poetry of Self-Definition,” “For, inhabiting her, the second self is a cry
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that keeps her awake . . .she can define it no more precisely, can define instead only her
own pain, her fear of its otherness” (453).
Plath’s honesty breathes life into the lines of “Elm,” transcending the poem
beyond the page and making it a visceral experience of Plath’s speaker’s fear: “I am
terrified by this dark thing / That sleeps in me; / All day I feel its soft, feathery turnings,
its malignity” (31-33). The “second self,” the madness, the other force at the root of
Plath is always within her, threatening and “terrifying” until her exhaustion takes hold
and she relinquishes: “I am incapable of more knowledge” (37). There is no defiant
reconciliation of the self here: there is only the surrender to the madness, the ongoing
battle with the “otherness” within her. The moon, once the external representation of her
internal pain, is now the madness within Plath, “cruelly” dragging her, its “face so
murderous in its strangle of branches” (23, 38-39). She has experienced hell, “suffer[ing]
the atrocity of sunsets”: it has “scorched to the root / My red filaments” as “I break up in
pieces that fly about like clubs” (16, 17-18, 19). It is when “a wind of such violence” that
“will tolerate no bystanding” rips through her that she allows her fear to take hold,
declaring “I must shriek” (20, 21). Plath is once again “in pieces,” at the mercy of the
phantoms haunting “Elm.” The poem ends ominously: the “snaky acids” of the “strangle
of branches” go beyond simply terrifying—“it petrifies the will” (40, 39, 41). This war
of selves, this madness, this struggle for power are the “isolate, slow faults / That kill,
that kill, that kill” (41-42).
The genius of Plath’s poetry lies in her power to orchestrate reaction and
manipulate words and images to create a visceral experience within the reading of her
work. The Ariel voice is fearless, tempting the reader into the brink of her madness
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through the revelation of her vulnerability, yet still always maintaining control. The
journey presented in the previous poems reveals an emergence of a dominant self; thus
the surrender in “Elm” to the continued existence of Plath’s opposing forces creates a
tension within the Ariel poems. Plath gives voice to the beautiful and the ugly, the
controlled and the hysterical, fleshing out the experience of true emotion within her
poetry. The unbridling of self revealed in “Elm” therefore perfectly sets the stage for the
control and power that is in full force in “Lady Lazarus.”
Plath’s speaker begins simply, “I have done it again / One year in every ten / I
manage it” (1-3). Extending the metaphor of herself as Lady Lazarus, Plath’s figure is
detailing the process of her literal rebirth as different versions of the same person,
declaring, each time she comes back, “Nevertheless, I am the same, identical woman”
(34). No matter the circumstances of her transformation and the audiences awaiting her,
Plath’s “I” returns as her own creation, in control of her affect and her power. Plath is at
last victorious over her “awareness of the eye of the reader upon her” as she humors “the
peanut-crunching crowd” that “shoves in to see / Them unwrap me hand and foot,”
awarding them a ceremonious “strip tease” as she addresses her crowd: “Gentleman,
ladies / These are my hands / My knees” (26, 27-28, 29, 30-32). Regarding the
“jewelmaster” piecing her back together in “The Stones” and the doctor’s role she fulfills
in “The Surgeon at 2 a.m.,” Plath’s speaker is a medical miracle delighting them with
“the eyeing of my scars” and “the hearing of my heart” (58, 59). She is aware of her
worth, declaring “there is a charge, a very large charge / For a word or a touch / Or a bit
of blood” (61-63). She is, to “Herr Docktor” and “Herr Enemy,” “your opus,” “your
valuable,” “the pure gold baby,” who is placed in the fire and “melts to a shriek” (67, 68,
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69, 70). This emergence of selves is different, however, from the opposing selves in
Plath’s earlier poems. The personas in “Lady Lazarus” are not roles assigned to Plath,
but ideals of her own creation, formed to wield power over her audiences. Van Dyne
reiterates, “The persistent double consciousness of ‘Lady Lazarus’ is not the split self of
alienation that marks Plath’s other poems of rage but a strategy for control” (qtd. in
Wagner-Martin 113). Plath is at the height of her manipulation; the “eye of the world”
she so feared in her earlier years is still a focus, but here she challenges, defies, and
ridicules the outside world, whispering in the poem’s opening stanzas a mocking, “Do I
terrify?” (12).
This poem answers the question of who is in charge of Plath’s poetic journey:
Plath, in all the forms presented here, owns the reclamation of herself. Plath herself
wrote of the poem, “The speaker is a woman who has the great and terrible gift of being
reborn. The only trouble is, she has to die first. She is the phoenix, the libertarian spirit,
what you will. She is also just a good, plain, very resourceful woman” (Plath 196). The
meticulously detailed rebirthing process outlined in “The Stones” and “Love Letter” is, in
“Lady Lazarus,” “more violent and more various” with “the degree of self-dramatization
on the part of the speaker . . .much greater” (Rosenblatt 31). Indeed, “Lady Lazarus”
chronicles the various transformations of the speaker, ending, not with “mendings” that
“itch” as in “The Stones,” but a complete annihilation of the physical body as “I turn and
burn” (71). The transformative self of “The Stones” has to await her outcome, noting,
“There is nothing to do. / I shall be good as new”; the self that rises “out of the ash” in
“Lady Lazarus,” however, is of her own making. There is nothing for the “others” to
piece back together because she is not simply transforming her former self, she is literally
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giving herself new life. The Lady of the poem is then the true self emerging from the
haze of Plath’s life, ascending to a god-like status as she rises above the spare parts of her
previous rebirthing attempts. She is, as Susan Bassnett relates, “a survivor, a woman who
understands the nature of her enemy and returns to fight back” (113).
Plath’s speaker that was “scorched to the root” in “Elm” finds herself again in
ashes in “Lady Lazarus,” burned without recognition. The fiery self of “Elm” survives as
only “a hand of wires” whose “red filaments burn and stand,” but in “Lady Lazarus,” the
self meets complete annihilation, symbolically destroying her earthly remains. Plath has
at last achieved her mythical status: “Out of the ash / I rise with my red hair / And I eat
men like air” (82-84). This is the culmination of Plath’s poetic reclamation of self: she
has left the warring selves of reality behind and shed the other voices vying for control
within her. The rebirth of “Lady Lazarus” is much different than her other attempts
because here she completely destroys herself, playing on the “theatrical” and calling on
her witnesses to “poke and stir. / Flesh, bone, there is nothing there” (51, 74-75). She is
not piecing herself back together as in “The Stones” or spreading herself to sprout new
life as in “Love Letter.” Plath’s speaker instead transcends as the phoenix, ascending
beyond any earthly status of mother, wife, and daughter, seeking revenge on all those
who attempted to stifle her.
Plath’s poetic journey is the search for her true self. The processes of
transformation and rebirth in the Ariel poems articulate the mastery of Plath’s genius.
She impressively orchestrates the evolution of self while still maintaining the consistency
of her authentic voice, never wavering and never slackening. The Ariel poems exist as an
onslaught of emotional recognitions, as Frieda Hughes continues, “[Plath] wasted nothing
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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” (xix-xx). It is through that process
of discerning her true emotions, with all of their complexities and contradictions, that
Plath harnesses the poetic energy running through the undercurrent of all of her earlier
work. Lowell’s assertion of the Ariel poems as “appalling and triumphant” thus stems
from Plath’s unflinching honesty and truthful examination of herself. She destroys
herself again and again in her poetry so that she can, at last, emerge as wholly herself. As
outlined in her journal writing, Plath has already experienced the range of emotions that
are at the core of human experience, already annihilated herself, already searched the
“bottom” with her “great tap root” and does “not fear” what hell she may find because, as
she confesses in “Elm,” “I have been there.” Rosenblatt relates, “The symbolic settings
that Plath chooses for her dramas and the images that structure her ritual journeys
compose a poetry of initiation in which the self and body are transformed through a
succession of profound changes” (22). There is a ritualistic process at the core of Plath’s
self-discovery as she sheds her former selves, reconciles her roles, and transcends her
earthly status to become not just a woman or a poet, but a force within herself. Plath ends
her journey declaring the final reclamation of herself as the phoenix, the myth, the
triumphant Lady Lazarus that rises from the ashes of her former self, defiant, proud, and
in search of a final resolution.
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CHAPTER III
THE RESOLUTION OF PLATH’S “STASIS IN DARKNESS”
The life of a true artist is often overwhelmed by the assertion that there is a deeper
side to life, a more complex and tumultuous side to reality, and that it is the artist’s
inherent responsibility to probe the underbelly of experience and reveal the truths that lie
there. Sylvia Plath repeatedly sought for and rooted out the truths she could derive from
her own experiences, suffering through ritualistic phases of rebirths and resurrections so
that she finally achieved her triumphant reclamation of self. The true voice Plath so
exhaustively searched for throughout her poetic journey is at last fully present in the Ariel
poems as she brazenly takes hold of her craft. The graphic self-effacing process of the
artist’s rebirth first requires a descent into, as “Facelift” describes, the “darkness [that]
wipes me out like chalk on a blackboard” until “I don’t know a thing” (15, 16). Through
this descent into the darkness of her own soul, Plath orchestrates the ritualistic process of
returning to life, shedding her former selves and reclaiming her true self. The
reclamation heralds the emergence of the true poet who was, as Anne Stevenson writes in
Bitter Fame, “closing in on her mind’s light as she had not before, and her grasp of this
unearthly illumination was by now masterly, her armory of poetic techniques impressive,
the voice completely her own—her mature voice” (229). Probing into the dark recesses
of her own experiences, Plath sought for and achieved the “mind’s light” at the end of her
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journey, transcending the shackles binding her earthly status as she, at last, emerges as
the mythologized “illumination” of her own creation.
The genius of Plath’s Ariel voice is its mesmerizing declaration of the poet’s true
self, unflinchingly taking hold of the reader as it startles, threatens, and haunts the poetic
consciousness. In the foreword to Plath’s Journals, Ted Hughes writes, “When a real self
finds language, and manages to speak, it is surely a dazzling event” (qtd. in Malcolm 4).
Whispers can be heard in the poems pre-dating Ariel, but it is when Plath emerges as
wholly herself—the phoenix, the queen bee, the demigod—that her “dazzling” voice
becomes louder and louder. Plath remains in complete control throughout the Ariel
poems, orchestrating emotion depending on her desired effect. What makes so many
uncomfortable in reading Plath’s poetry is their helpless surrender to her gift: Plath
seamlessly maneuvers between intensifying the hysteria of unhinged madness and then
alternately placating her aggressiveness to achieve a numbing stillness. Whatever the
emotional register, Plath is at the helm of the experience, pushing her reader to the edge
right along with her. Robert Lowell confesses, “There is a peculiar, haunting challenge
to these poems” that “most of us will turn back [from] (. . .) These poems are playing
Russian roulette with six cartridges in the cylinder, a game of ‘chicken,’ the wheels of
both cars locked and unable to swerve” (Lowell xv). Some of the key poems at the core
of the Ariel legacy—“Stings,” “Daddy,” “Medusa,” “Fever 103˚,” “Lady Lazarus”—were
written with great “frequency” and “ferocity”: a rush of twenty-five major poems
produced in just one month, October 1962 (Hughes xiii). Plath’s voice, once unleashed,
could not be quieted as the poems continued to build and build on one another, each of
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them another admission, another revelation, all steering their way to Plath’s final
resolution.
There is a notion maintained by some critics and readers that all of Plath’s poetry
leads to her suicide, thus forever fixing the poet in the assumed legacy of a tragic figure
consumed by her own blaze. Yet within this construct, Plath’s poetry would have been
consumed with her, functioning solely as Plath’s means to her end, the propellant
sparking her final flame. Plath’s poetry, her true legacy, is not simply the catalyst leading
to its creator’s demise; instead, the words, the images, the voice survives its creator,
breathing life with each new reading. While Plath does make intentional use of the
private in her poetry, simply reading the voice of Plath’s poetry as the voice of her
autobiography stifles the true artistic mastery within her poems. Thus reading Plath’s
final poems, as Janet Malcolm does in The Silent Woman: Sylvia Plath & Ted Hughes,
paralyzes the true resolution that Plath achieves poetically: “A person who dies at thirty
in the middle of a messy separation remains forever fixed in the mess. To the readers of
her poetry and her biography, Sylvia Plath will always be young and in a rage” (7). It
cannot be forgotten that Plath did commit suicide but, as Stevenson, another biographer,
makes clear, “It is as a writer that she matters and would have wished to be remembered”
(xii). Indeed, the critical study of Plath’s biography serves no purpose except to relate
that Plath’s life was consumed with writing; even as Plath matured and took on more
roles of student, wife, and mother, she remained a storyteller, a poet, an artist obsessed
with words. Plath confides in a 1957 journal entry, “I cannot live for life itself: but for
the words which stay the flux. My life, I feel, will not be lived until there are books and
stories which relive it perpetually in time” (Journals 286). Plath instinctively understood
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the power of her craft, continuing in the same entry, “Writing breaks open the vaults of
the dead and the skies behind which the prophesying angels hide. The mind makes and
makes, spinning its web” (286). The Ariel voice is Plath’s legacy: the voice that resounds
through history, breathing life “perpetually in time” as her poetic mind continues to spin
its web through the lines of her surviving poems.
The truth of Plath’s resolution is clearly laid out in her final collection. After
reconciling the warring selves within her poetry and reclaiming her true self, Plath sets
out on the deliberate quest for resolution. The Ariel poems reveal a poet seeking out her
demons, bringing them to trial, and enacting her judgment on them. Casting off the
haunts that plague her liberates Plath: she finds freedom to experiment within her poetry,
exploring the different effects of the devices of image, language, sound, and symbol. The
voice of Plath’s speaker spins its web around its audience, shifting its narrative voice
from third person to first person to third person. Plath is fully aware of her power,
outlining the journey towards her final, resolute declaration. The “I” of “Lady Lazarus”
warns, “there is a charge, a very large charge,” not just “for a word or a touch” but for the
hearing of Plath’s soul. Plath’s final resolution may not be pretty, may not be romantic,
but it is a resolution all the same.
Plath’s journey toward resolution first begins with the annihilation of the forces
hindering her poetic process. “Burning the Letters” returns Plath’s speaker to the more
autobiographical realm of her earlier writing. Periodically consumed with writer’s block,
Plath often sought her husband’s guidance in writing exercises to force her out of her
creative paralysis. This interdependent relationship created great tension in an already
volatile relationship. Thus as the latent agents hindering Plath’s craft were cast off and
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she emerged out of the haze of the studied, logical writing of her youth, Plath’s true poet
came into play, not just as Hughes’ equal, but as Hughes’ rival. “Burning the Letters,” as
Lynda K. Bundtzen writes in “Poetic Arson and Sylvia Plath’s ‘Burning the Letters,’” is
the recording of the “acts of textual violence of abuse” that were “habitual in the PlathHughes marriage” (435). The exhausting battle between creation and destruction is
evident in the tone of “Burning the Letters,” with Plath’s speaker beginning, as if with a
sigh, “I made a fire; being tired / Of the white fists of old / Letters and their death rattle /
When I came too close to the wastebasket” (1-4). The poetic structure is long and
winding (“They would flutter off, black and glittering, they would be coal angels”), cut
with short staccato phrases (“Dumb fish / With one tin eye”) and repeated reminders of
“well, I was tired” (33, 24-25, 10). Bundtzen makes clear Plath’s aim: “‘Burning the
Letters’ is, I believe, important precisely because of its crudities, its poetic awkwardness,
and, further, because these deficiencies constitute an attack on her poet-husband Ted
Hughes’s aesthetic principles” (438). The poem lacks the “incendiary rage” fueling
poems like “Lady Lazarus” and “Daddy,” but “Burning the Letters” is not intended to be
a direct attack (438). She is instead “[poking] at the carbon birds in my housedress,”
fanning the fire and extinguishing the ashes “with the butt of a rake” so that “they have
nothing to say to anybody. / I have seen to that” (29, 36, 34-35). “Burning the Letters” is
“a ‘slash and burn’ poem, clearing the poetic playing field to make room for the type of
poems she would compose for Ariel,” the poems that have Plath’s flames actually
dancing through the lines (Bundtzen 438).
“Burning the Letters” is thus a step towards Plath’s final resolution of self
because she is throwing off the agents hindering her own unique craft. This is an
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assertion of the validity of her Ariel voice, declaring “I am not subtle”: her reclaimed self
will not take on the faces of other voices and will not shy away from the truth (9). For
Plath, poetry, like her resolution, does not have to be pretty; she will not hold her reader’s
hand as she searches for her own truth. Plath ends “Burning the Letters” with a mocking
reference to Hughes’ decided poetic legacy: “This is what it is like— / A red burst and a
cry / That splits from its ripped bag and does not stop (. . .) but goes on / Dyeing the air, /
Telling the particles of the clouds, the leaves, the water / What immortality is. That it is
immortal” (49-51, 53-56). Plath’s speaker is thus asserting that the surviving particles of
her extinguished blaze have to claim their immortality: Hughes has to first tell the world
of his “immortality” to secure his status, instead of simply letting it survive him.
Whereas Plath, as Bundtzen states, “stakes the immortality of her verse on the sincerity,
the authenticity of its feeling” (443). Plath is thus making a statement of her aesthetic
worth here: her poetry will speak for itself. She will not apologize or make excuses,
already making clear, “I am not subtle.”
Plath’s demand for creative ownership takes shape in various ways in her poems.
“A Birthday Present” is an examination of herself and the stifling world she inhabits.
The “I” of the poem views herself disgustedly: “the one with black eye-pits and a scar”
always “adhering to rules, to rules, to rules” (6, 8). Plath’s characteristic repetition is
here, echoing its loathsome tone; however, what makes “A Birthday Present” unique is
its relationship to Plath’s other poems, such as “Facelift” and “In Plaster,” that outline a
denouncement of self and then go through the process of rebirth. A rebirth is not what
Plath’s speaker is seeking here; instead, the “I” of the poem is pleading for the unveiling
of her “gift,” promising, “If it were death / I would admire the deep gravity of it, its
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timeless eyes” (56-57). There is a terror within “A Birthday Present” as she desperately
relates her present condition: “If you only knew how the veils were killing my days. / To
you they are only transparencies, clear air. / But my god, the clouds are like cotton. /
Armies of them. They are carbon monoxide” (37-40). These sentences come as an
onslaught with Plath structurally breaking up the flow of the poem and forcing the reader
into the stifling world of Plath’s speaker. The “I” of the poem is separate from the “you”
of the poem—understanding the ugliness of the world, seeing the truth of the murderous
“armies” of clouds that are filling her skies—and makes clear that this gift, this ironically
titled “birthday present,” would save her from the oppressive forces attacking her. She is
seeking ownership over the experience of the poem: looking not for a rebirth, but a
resolute end to the battle she has lost control of as she is forced to “sweetly, sweetly (. . .)
breathe in, / Filling [her] veins with invisibles, with the million / Probable motes that tick
the years off [her] life” (41-43).
The final lines of “A Birthday Present” recall the rebirth granted to the speaker in
“Facelift” as “I wake swaddled in gauze, / Pink and smooth as a baby” (31-32). The
contrasting image of the baby in “A Birthday Present” reveals the speaker dreaming that
the surgeon wielding the “knife not carve” her into a new self, “but enter / Pure and clean
as the cry of a baby” as the “universe [then] slide[s] from my side” (60-62). There is an
understanding here that the rebirthing process can no longer achieve the necessary
cathartic resolution that the “I” of the poem requires. “A Birthday Present” thus presents
a new journey into the understanding of death, not as a terrifying experience, but as an act
of gentle “nobility” where “the universe” simply “slides” away. Life, and its present
condition, is the real source of terror for Plath’s speaker. Plath is journeying towards an
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understanding and final resolution with death, building tension as she acknowledges its
temptation and her desire to have it come in the present.
Plath is categorically bringing her past demons to the stage as she maneuvers
through these poems. Plath’s father, Otto Plath, is a phantom haunting Plath’s poetry,
forcing the poet into a conversation reconciling her identification as the daughter to a
man she never truly knew. As evidenced in her journal and early poems such as “Full
Fathom Five,” “Electra on Azalea Path,” and “The Colossus,” the role of her father has
evolved as Plath’s creative talents have evolved. “Little Fugue,” written in April 1962, is
a crucial addition to the body of poems directly addressing Plath’s relationship to her
father. This poem, however, is uniquely significant because it is, as Hughes declares, a
“point-blank, demythologized assessment” of Plath’s father: Plath is observing her father
as a man then, not just as her father-figure. His features come into focus with the
reflection, “I remember a blue eye, / A briefcase of tangerines,” and then the startled,
“This was a man, then!” (45-46, 47). The mythic ghost-like figure conjured in the poems
of Colossus has been reduced to a simple man, as Stevenson continues, “No longer the
mythic Neptune of ‘Full Fathom Five’ or a crumbling stone Colossus, Otto Plath comes
back to life, is seen and heard. And the draining effect—the bell jar effect—of this
mighty presence within her is recognized” (237). Her father is “a dark funnel,” pulling
her into the “vacuous” clouds as “death opened, like a black tree, blackly” (22, 42, 48).
Yet Plath’s speaker distinguishes herself from the “I” voices of her previous poems: she
“see[s]” her father’s voice, “gothic and barbarous, pure German” and knows “dead men
cry from it” (23, 26, 27). No longer are her “hours married” to the “shadow” she has
created of her father as in “The Colossus”; instead Plath’s speaker of “Little Fugue” is at
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last beginning the disassociation from her father that culminates so explosively in
“Daddy” as she declares, “I am guilty of nothing” (28). There is still an underlying fear
creeping through the lines of “Little Fugue,” though: Plath’s speaker will “survive the
while,” busying herself “arranging my morning,” but there is still an apprehension of the
“dark funnel” of her father’s memory (49, 50).
The terror of Plath’s conjured image of her father is finally denounced as the
ownership necessary for her resolution of self forces her to examine the truth of her
emotional attachments to this man. Hailed as “the ‘Guernica’ of modern poetry” by critic
George Steiner, “Daddy” seared Plath’s name into the poetic consciousness and
catapulted her to legendary status. Toying with sounds and riddles of language, “Daddy”
is the hallmark of Plath’s genius with the poet as puppet-master—coiling words and
sounds around the web of her making as she tightens her hold on the reader’s mind.
“Daddy” never calls a cease-fire, never gives room to breathe: it is an annihilation of the
phantoms that have been haunting her and stifling her existence. Linda Wagner-Martin
furthers in Sylvia Plath: A Literary Life, “What ‘Daddy’ explains is the way living with a
man of formidable, and cruel, ego can wear another person’s identity away, like water
dripping slowly on rock. Anger less at her husband’s affair than at the waste of her own
self” (128). Plath’s father and husband are intrinsically bound in this poem, with the
poet, according to Susan Bassnett, “fusing the two men in her life into a single,
monstrous figure” (156). The figure Plath’s “I” “used to pray to recover” is, in fact, the
man she “has always been scared of,” yet she “made a model” and said, “I do, I do” (14,
41, 64, 67). Her identity has become so warped in her relationship with each that Plath
has to murder both the original and the model—“If I’ve killed one man, I’ve killed two,”
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thereby publicly denouncing their control over her self so that she can achieve the
resolution that belongs to her alone.
“Daddy” is a masterful execution of language and style: Plath is producing a very
elaborate play here with her audience in mind. In “Daddy,” what is being said matters
just as much as how it is being said. Every emotion experienced is of Plath’s
orchestration: the effect is the “I” of the poem’s deliberate unbridling of the senses.
“Daddy” is a study of momentum with Plath employing rhyme, repetition, and alliteration
to propel the poem forward—“I have always been scared of you, / With your Luftwaffe,
your gobbledygoo. / And you neat mustache / And you Aryan eye, bright blue. / Panzerman, panzer-man, O you” (41-45). There is an astounding emotional range within the
speaker’s voice, with Stevenson continuing, “The wizardry of this amazing poem is that
its jubilant fury has a sobbing and impassioned undersong. The voice is finally that of a
revengeful, bitterly hurt child storming against a beloved parent” (Stevenson 264). The
collision of selves plaguing Plath’s earlier work is at last fully reconciled in the voice
presented here: “Daddy” displays, within its one voice, a myriad of emotions ranging
from indignant to mocking, resentful to reflective, murderous to child-like.
The infamy surrounding “Daddy” has much to do with its unapologetic use of
public tragedies to frame its conflict. Lisa Narbeshuber writes in “The Poetics of
Torture: The Spectacle of Sylvia Plath’s Poetry,” “‘Daddy’ makes the invisible visible,
the private public (. . .) Plath stages a public trial, turning the commonplace into
spectacle, revealing form as deformity, the natural as commodity, domestic life as
torture” (188). It is this public execution that makes Plath’s resolution so absolute, with a
communal denouncement of the figure: “And the villagers never liked you. / They are
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dancing and stamping on you. / They always knew it was you” (77-79). Yet Plath ends
the poem returning to the “I” voice, making clear that this resolution is her victory:
“Daddy, daddy, you bastard, I’m through” (80). Plath is throwing off the paralyzing hold
of her father’s ghost in the final declaration of the poem, “not only cursing him,” as
Roger Platizky writes in “Plath’s ‘Daddy,’” “but trying to make his hold on her history,
personality, identity, and destiny illegitimate” (106). The resolute expulsion of Plath’s
father as an identity-crushing figure sets the poet free.
Written just four days apart, “Medusa” offers a mythologized female version of
the demonized male in “Daddy.” The language and imagery are different, though,
recalling the mythologized language rooted in the earlier poems of “Full Fathom Five”
and “Electra on Azalea Path.” The figure of Medusa is “both sea-creature and gorgon
(. . .) able to inflict stinging pain and turn to stone” (Bassnett 92). Plath’s speaker is
working towards another resolute ending to this relationship; however, there is a
reflective confusion about the status of their relationship, “Did I escape, I wonder? (. . .)
In any case, you are always there / Tremulous breath at the end of my line” (12-13, 1617). The Medusa-figure is an unwelcome visitor forcing herself into Plath’s world with
Plath repeating, “I didn’t call you. / I didn’t call you at all. / Nevertheless, nevertheless /
You steamed to me over the sea” (21-24). There is an inherent connection between
Medusa and Plath’s speaker, with her admitting, “My mind winds to you / Old barnacled
umbilicus, Atlantic cable” (13-14). Bassnett offers, “The umbilical relationship between
daughter and mother-medusa binds them both together”; this relationship with the stifling
mother leaves the speaker violated and “overexposed, like an X-ray” (31). Both
oppressing forces of “Daddy” and “Medusa” manifest themselves in the life of Plath’s
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speaker: the figure haunting Plath’s speaker in “Daddy” is a phantom, a ghost invading
her mind and destroying her sense of identity; the figure within “Medusa,” on the other
hand, is an actual physical presence, stifling her, “always there” as she desperately tries
to shake it off, “Off, off, eely tentacle! / There is nothing between us” (40-41). The tone
and the style of “Medusa” are less enraged than “Daddy,” but “Medusa” is still a crucial
step in Plath’s individual journey towards resolution.
It is through the process of removing the opposing influences around her that
Plath not only fully declares herself in her poetry, but makes clear the specific journey
her poetry is embarking on. “Fever 103˚” details, citing Plath herself, “two kind of fire—
the fires of hell, which merely agonize, and the fires of heaven, which purify. During the
poem, the first sort of fire suffers into itself into the second” (Plath 197). The fire
addressed in “Burning the Letters” and “Lady Lazarus” is then, here, first a force that
Plath must harness. The “fires of hell” subtly dole out their destruction: “they will not
rise, / But trundle round the globe / Choking the aged and the meek, / The weak /
Hothouse baby in its crib” (15-19). Then the fire’s power expands to “radiation (. . .)
greasing the bodies of adulterers / Like Hiroshima ash and eating in. / The sin. The sin”
(23, 25-28). Raging through hell and doling out their punishments, Plath’s “fires of hell”
are the controlling force through the beginning of the poem; not answering to a higher
power, the fire chooses the victim’s fate.
Plath’s first person voice does not appear until more than half-way through the
poem, entering into “Fever 103˚” with a declarative, “I am too pure for you or anyone”
(34). The “I” voice, echoing the mythical resurrection of “Lady Lazarus,” is now the
empowered force of the poem, questioning, “Does not my heat astound you?” (40).
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Stevenson’s assertion of Plath’s “unearthly illumination” is given the source of its power
in the lines of “Fever 103˚”: “And my light. / All by myself I am a huge camellia /
Glowing and coming and going, flush on flush” (40-42). It is as Plath’s light spreads
outward that she decides, “I think I am going up, / I think I may rise,” thus ascending,
engulfed in the flame of her illumination, with “my selves dissolving,” the “old whore
petticoats” (43-44, 53). Plath’s final poetic shedding of selves is complete as the “pure
acetylene Virgin” emerges from hell as fire herself, “too pure for you or anyone,” an
“unearthly illumination” of the force contained in her “mind’s light” (46).
It is through Plath’s immersion in the illuminating flame of “Fever 103˚” that she
achieves the long awaited “stasis in darkness” of “Ariel” (1). Although once again
depicting a self-transformation, “Ariel” is different from its predecessors in that there are
no longer any other “selves” to cast away, no “old whore petticoats” clinging to the
speaker; instead, “Ariel” is the simple journey of the speaker riding her horse. Pamela A.
Smith in “The Unitive Urge in the Poetry of Sylvia Plath” expands, “She attained at last a
still point (. . .) within herself as her life and work merged, became interchangeable and
indistinguishable. A ride on her horse, Ariel, comes to embody the unity she searched
for, the active, ecstatic oblivion” (336). Plath’s speaker can simply “unpeel” the “dead
hands” and “dead stringencies” containing her spirit (20, 21). The earthly body is thus a
cage that must be cast off for Plath’s “I” to transform into “the arrow,” “the dew,” the
force that resonates within the pulse of being completely free (27, 28). The “child’s cry,”
the reminder of the real world that recalls the “little smiling hooks” of the family photo in
“Tulips,” no longer has the power to bring Plath back to reality as the cry “melts in the
wall” (24, 25). “Ariel” is thus a clear resolution of her warring selves and the
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interferences hindering Plath’s creative process. The ritual process of rebirth and
shedding of selves is completely gone: “Ariel” reveals Plath’s triumph over the demons
plaguing her craft. Plath’s speaker becomes the “arrow, / The dew that flies / Suicidal, at
one with the drive / Into the red / Eye, the cauldron of morning” (27-31). The poem ends
with Plath as not even a “self” anymore, but as a force and energy within the poem, the
“still point” of life merging into art.
The “I” of Plath’s poetry is no longer “adhering to rules” as in “The Birthday
Present,” but journeying toward her own definition of resolution. She took control and
“let down the veil” herself, thus looking unflinchingly into the “pure acetylene Virgin” at
her core, stripped down and bare, “an arrow in flight” (Rosenblatt 27). With “Fever
103˚” and “Ariel,” Plath has begun the removal of the “I” voice of her poetry, only
bringing the remainder of her “self” into the poem as it reaches its ecstatic
transformation. Death is no longer a theatrical production or a birthday gift wrapped in a
shiny bow, but a feeling resonating throughout the poems, peeking through the lines and
tightening its grip on the reader. These poems are indeed playing a game of Russian
roulette with a loaded weapon: it is not the fire roaring out of control that is the concern
in Plath’s poems, but the slow creep of inevitable death.
“Sheep in Fog,” written in January 1963, conjures immediate setting with Plath’s
speaker observing, “The hills step off into whiteness” while “the train leaves a line of
breath” (1, 4). The feeling of the poem is cold and overwhelmed, as though the day,
which “has been blackening (. . .) all morning” is being overtaken by the menacing
landscape’s enveloping fog (9). Nothing remains as what it was: the hills are
indistinguishable in the horizon and both “people and stars,” the earthly and the heavenly,
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look at the speaker and “regard” her “sadly” (2, 3). There is no hope here, only surrender
as she simply states, “I disappoint them” (3). Plath’s speaker is no longer an active part
of the poem, not even as the “arrow” or “the dew that flies / suicidal, at one with the drive
/ into the red / eye, the cauldron of morning.” Death is not alive in “Sheep in Fog” as a
“red eye” burning in the “cauldron of morning”; it is a slow “blackening,” a creeping
inevitability that Plath’s speaker is not an active part of as she awaits, her “bones
hold[ing] a stillness” (11). Death is waiting for her: “the far / Fields melt my heart. /
They threaten / To let me through to a heaven / Starless and fatherless, a dark water” (1115). Plath’s speaker’s is being depersonalized as the presence of death takes over the
more assertive position in the poem. The death depicted in “Sheep in Fog” is a death
without resolution as “they threaten / To let me through to a heaven / Starless and
fatherless.” There is not a reconciliation of life and death here. Death is too much in
control, with Plath terrified and too involved. There is a disassociation that must take
place, mirroring the mythological uprising of “Lady Lazarus,” “Fever 103˚,” and “Ariel”
as each figure ascends above the earthly status and finds resurrection in her new form.
The journey into the blackness outlined in “Sheep in Fog” and the recognition of
the feelings once there are crucial steps for Plath’s resolution as an artist. It is by
understanding the fear of a “starless and fatherless” heaven that Plath can then observe
the death from the other side of experience. “Edge” is the final, haunting declaration
made by Plath, literally outlining the suicide that would take place just six days after the
poem’s completion. Yet, intrinsically linked to the poem’s impact and importance, there
is a thematic and symbolic resolution beyond the literal end of the poet’s life: Plath, as an
artist, is aware this is her last statement. Thus she removes the “I” voice from her final
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poem: the self Plath sought again and again to reclaim through rebirth and resurrection
has already had her final reconciliations. The return to the third person narrative brings
Plath’s poetic voice to the end of its journey: she has already thrown off her “old whore
petticoats” and reached the height of her transformative rebirths. All that is left now is
“the woman” of “Edge,” with Plath beginning her poem with her final resolution of self:
“The woman is perfected. / Her dead body wears the smile of accomplishment” (1-2).
The pared down structure of “Edge” perfectly relates its control and emphasis:
Plath is not maddened here, but writing with deliberate ease and language. “Edge” does
not rely on the theatrics of “Daddy” and “Lady Lazarus”; instead the tension is created
through the final shedding of Plath’s soul as she makes peace with the phantoms
surviving the cathartic journey of Ariel. Plath, the poet, is observing the mythologized
creation of her poetry, “The illusion of a Greek necessity” whose “bare feet seem to be
saying: / We have come so far, it is over” (4, 6-8). Death is not an invasive force here,
taking over the poem and leaving the poet in its wake; death is the poet’s decision, the
resolution for the sake of perfection, the offering for the gift of resurrection. Jon
Rosenblatt affirms, “In a cosmos that is alternately persecutory and inert, the poet
summons the courage to face the death-forces by undergoing, through the ritual journey,
a descent into blackness. When the descent stops in the midst of the blackness, the poetry
seems to mirror the inertness and passivity of nonbeing” (35). “Edge” is written within
that descent into blackness; there is “no resistance to the death world”: she is, at last, in
full control (35).
The role of mother and its complex relationship with her artistic self is at peace in
“Edge” with the mother folding her children “back into her body as petals / Of a rose
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close” (12-14). She is protectively drawing her children back into her womb as if in an
attempt to protect them from the horrors she has ritualistically endured throughout her
poetic processes. Observing this death scene is Plath’s constant symbolization of the
moon; however, the moon is now separate from Plath: no longer a physical reflection of
her inner pain as in “Parliament Hill Fields,” a liar as in “Mirror,” or the cruel
externalization of her madness as in “Elm.” “The persona” in “Edge,” as Eileen M. Aird
writes, “enters the world of the moon and her hostility is reduced to acceptance” (108).
The moon “throughout the poetry represents a world of unrelieved suffering” and is thus
“not saddened by the death she beholds” because, as Plath states in “Edge,” “she is used
to this sort of thing” (Aird 86; Plath 19). The symbol now simply stares “from her hood
of bone” as the final bell toll of “her blacks crackle and drag” (18, 20).
The resolution achieved in the final culminating poems of Plath’s Ariel genius is
not simply the surrender to death. The biography is there for those who wish to
understand Plath’s life and her final motivations towards death; the Ariel poems,
however, the poems of Plath’s legacy, offer a journey of their own. Plath explicitly and
graphically sought out the truth of her artistic talent: destroying herself again and again
through self-effacement and self-annihilation so that she would continue to emerge as a
truer version of her poetic self. Through Plath’s journey towards resolution, the voice
emerging out of the final poems of Plath’s creativity is no longer simply the voice of a
woman, of a poet, of Sylvia Plath, but a free-flying spirit, a force that has at last broken
free above the page and ascended into her blissful “stasis in darkness.”
Sylvia Plath did not end her artistic journey with a mess of emotions still
unexplored or a web of identities still at war. Plath’s ability to externalize the internal
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battles within herself, or, as Aird states, “to write about death with control, almost with
objectivity, or rather the ability to make in the process of artistic creation the most
subjective feelings acquire a certain appearance of reasoned and reasonable, is one of the
most remarkable qualities which Sylvia Plath’s last poetry exhibits” (86). Plath’s ability
to give voice to the terrors of life—not only death, but the desire for death—has
catapulted Plath’s iconic status into that of often inflicted terms. However, simply
reading the poems makes clear that Plath was never a poet who focused on one
abstraction; instead she explored each emotion and theme intensely, often annihilating
her poetic speaker in the process, hence the continued need for rebirth within Plath’s
poetry. Simply observing and considering an emotion is not the revelation of truth, and
Plath relentlessly sought out the truths of her poetic self. She was reborn, reclaimed,
resurrected, and, at last, reconciled in the final perfected woman of “Edge.” Sylvia Plath
had immersed herself so completely in her poetry that there was nothing left to do but
remove herself from it: “Edge” is the moment with Plath on the precipice, the edge,
teetering between falling further into the blackness to be swallowed completely, or rising
above the blackness of her creation as the eternal Lady Lazarus and wearing the proud
“smile of accomplishment.”
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CONCLUSION
Sylvia Plath’s poetry is the poet’s journey into the understanding of her art. The
search for Plath’s true voice, the reclamation of her true self, and the discovery of her
art’s resolution at the end of her journey is played out in the Ariel poems. Elaborately
detailing her journey into herself, Plath makes particular use of the “I” voice in her
poetry. The speaker of her poems repeatedly endures the processes of shedding the other
voices and influences hindering Plath’s craft. This process of rebirth and selfannihilation leads to the poet’s resolute true self. It is through Plath’s ritualistic process
of shedding her other selves and emerging as wholly herself that she can then bring
forward the outside influences deterring her authentic poetic experience. Through this
denouncement of the forces stifling her—her father, Ted Hughes, her mother—Plath is
categorically shedding the other voices around her until she is stripped down and her own
self. This shift brings about the crucial change in Plath’s poetry leading to her resolution;
Plath poetically removed herself from the other influences until she alone stood in her
poetry. The “I” voice so crucial in Plath’s poetry becomes an energy, an “arrow,” a
flame leaping through the poetry until the “I” of her works could no longer exist within
the confines of her creations. The “I” voice thus becomes the perfected woman of
“Edge”: Plath has journeyed so far into herself that her only option is to rise above the
poetry and observe her masterpiece, wearing the “smile of accomplishment” (2).
There is a need among her critics and readers to assign Plath a specific role of
discussion—feminism, depression, suicide, motherhood—simply because her poetry is so
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brazenly honest. Plath makes great use of the power she wields over a poem,
orchestrating emotion with shock, horror, and anguish; the poems are studies of visceral
reaction with Plath’s pen at the helm of her chosen emotion. She refuses to hold her
reader’s hand through the process, opting instead to use image, symbol, and language to
manipulate her poem’s control. This precise use of image and language is so meticulous
and so masterful that it is, indeed, obvious that this talent is a gift that had been
germinating throughout the course of Plath’s creative career. To declare that she just
simply exploded onto the page one day and began to write, cheapens and devalues the
actual staggeringly impressive poetic talent of Sylvia Plath as a poet. Peter Davison
continues in “‘Inhabited by a Cry’: The Last Poetry of Sylvia Plath,” “We can only
perform with true spontaneity what we have first learned to do by habit” (81). Thus the
genius exhibited in the poems comprising the Ariel voice are, in fact, the result of Plath’s
studied youth.
It is through her previous studied attention to detail and form that the controlled
unbridling of emotions that resonates in poems like “Lady Lazarus,” “Elm,” and “Daddy”
can exist. Through the freedom granted by the full discovery of the Ariel voice, Plath
could search the contradictions within her own nature, discerning and discovering the
true self at the core of her talent. Plath journeyed through the voices and roles of her life,
never pulling away her unflinching eye, no matter how ugly the reality she found. The
later poems of Ariel are thus the poems that lead up to Plath’s suicide: death does take on
a dominant role, yet the role of death within her poetry is not completely entrenched in
the fact of her suicide. She writes about death with objectivity, allowing her speaker, at
times, as in “Sheep in Fog,” to feel terror, but her treatment of death is more as another
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force she must reconcile with. Plath does achieve a resolution of her relationship with
death in “Edge.” The “I” voice, so vivid in the bulk of Plath’s poetry, is absent; the death
scene is instead coolly observed from a third person narration. The poem achieves a
visceral sense of coldness, as though the reader is in the mausoleum with the dead body.
“Edge” is the clear source of Plath’s resolution within her poetry: the “I” of Plath’s
poetry has become a force unto itself—a mythic figure, a phoenix, an “arrow” tearing
through the sky. All that is left now is the statement of Plath’s peace with death,
represented in the presence of the moon. Previously representing Plath’s pain and
madness, the moon is now “staring from her hood of bone” with “nothing to be sad
about” (18, 19). Plath has entered the world of the moon, surrendering herself to death
and the serenity it will bring.
The poems of Plath’s catalogue represent a poet in search of herself: her Ariel
voice, her true self, and her final artistic resolution. Plath’s inflicted iconic status has
plagued the reading of her poetry since her death. There is a need to assume that art and
life occur simultaneously, with one directly mirroring the other. This is simply not the
case with Sylvia Plath. While her poetry does draw on her life, the gestures of life are
reimagined in the poetry of the artist. Plath’s daughter, Frieda Hughes, declares, “It
comes down to this: Her 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” (xx). Plath’s words are what remain as her true legacy; her words, as she
writes in “Burning the Letters,” they are “immortal.”
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