Feminist strategies of Syliva Plath

Sylvia plath

Feminist strategies of Syliva Plath.Sylvia Plath's Ariel, it is clear to see a host of women Concentrating mainly on the poems within struggling against the misogynistic ideals of the 1960's.

Sylvia Plath wrote her poems in the 1960’s, a time when women were still dominated by men. Within the patriarchal society women had set roles to play; they were to remain in the kitchen and were never to voice an unwanted opinion.

Plath and the women she portrays in her poems felt suffocated within this domestic prison and were desperate to make a role for themselves outside the dominating misogynist rule.

Deeply depressed and emotional a writer she was committed suicide at the age of 30. Influenced by the insightful arguments of earlier feminist studies, many critics continue to consider Plath within a feminist canon and women’s tradition, often sharply comparing and contrasting Plath with other poets. Paula Bennett’s my life a loaded gun: Dickinson, Plath, Rich and female creativity claims that the gender of these poets ‘central to their poetic development’ and identifies the explosion of a repressed poetic self as the major feature of their texts. Largely informed by letters home and plath’s journals, Bennett offers an intelligent biographical reading of the poetry which examines plath’s struggle to be confidently creative while seeking acceptance withing a patriarchal society, a dialectic Bennett accurately describes as the conflict between needs the needs of her gender and the requirements of her genre.

Sylvia Plath has long been hailed as a feminist writer of great significance. In her 1976 book Literary Women, Ellen Moers writes, "No writer has meant more to the current feminist movement, and still today, at a time when the idea of equality for women isn't so radically revolutionary as it had been earlier in the century, Plath is a literary symbol of the women's rights movement. Roberta Mazzenti quotes Robert A. Piazza as writing that there is "little feminist consciousness" in Plath's work, and goes on to explain that because "Plath's work [is] being read... by readers searching for political sustenance", feminist sentiment that the author never held can easily be attributed to her writing (201). This kind of misguided attribution is illustrated in the opinions of critics like Sheryl Meyering, who states that Sylvia Plath's intense desire to be accepted by men and to eventually marry and have children was purely a product of the constrictive 1950s social mentality during which the author came to womanhood (xi). A

thorough examination of the Plath oeuvre paints a different picture, however. Although Plath's awareness of and distaste for the submissive and insubstantial role a woman in the 1950s was expected to play is apparent from her early journals to the poems completed in the last month of her life, that same body of work also makes plain that she had accepted some of that role for herself on her own terms: a common theme throughout the writing is the author's intense desire to be a beloved and loving wife and, perhaps even more strong, her desire to become a mother--as long as she could still speak from within her "deeper self" through her writing.

Plath gives the subject of her divided female selves and opposing aspirations treatment in her 1956 poem "Two Sisters of Persephone". The piece paints a portrait of two sisters, different as dark and light. The first is a logical, mathematical, intellectual, indoorsy sort whose "rat-shrewd squint eyes" and "root-pale meager frame" serve to make her seem hardly a woman at all, not in the feminine sense of womanhood. The second sister is a vibrant, nature-connected woman whose setting clearly makes her a symbol of fertile womanhood: she lounges luxuriantly in the yard, "bronzed as earth", taking in the vivid "red silk flare of petaled blood" of a nearby "bed of poppies". The first of Plath's sisters goes to her grave a virgin, "with flesh laid waste, / Worm-husbanded, yet no woman", while the second becomes the "sun's bride" and "grows quick with seed". To a reader familiar with a bit of the author's background, the poem is quite obviously a self-portrait, wherein Plath sees in herself the potential for a dry, spinsterish life of intellect and little else, alongside the conflicting looming vision of herself as a vital and sparkling woman made complete in motherhood, nature's most lavish gift.

Other poems embody the notion that a man can have the power to make a woman more than she is in and of herself. "Tinker Jack and the Tidy Wives" introduces a Jack of two trades--he takes pride in his metalwork mastery, confidently inviting his audience of an unnamed lady to bring him for mending any pot or dish marred by age or imperfection, and then goes on to observe that he can make good as new her "face / Fallen from luster" as well as her cracked, scarred heart. In "Widow", the man who makes a woman whole is conspicuous by his absence.

After her split with her husband, Sylvia Plath did not vengefully shake off the trappings of domestic life and reinvent herself as a new and different woman, nor

did she sink into herself and become an overharried mother with no time and no energy for her art. It's been written time again of how she found the balance between the responsibilities of single motherhood and the demands and desires of her art: the poet began to write between four and eight a.m., before her babies had awakened for the day. The poems of this period are the ones universally hailed as the strongest, the deepest, the most profoundly Plath of all her work, and she began to churn them out with astonishing speed. And still, the domestic thread remained. Already mentioned in this paper was the burdened knowing of the hard lives her children would undoubtedly encounter in the harsh and lonely world that Plath expressed in "Nick and the Candlestick" and "Mary's Song". Another poignant piece which shows to the reader the poet's reflection on the future of her children-would they suffer at the hands of the world as she had?-is "For a Fatherless Son" (CP 205-206). There is no hateful bitterness toward the father who betrayed his family and moved away in this poem: only the melancholy knowledge that the innocence of her youthful baby will not last: "You will be aware of an absence, presently, / Growing beside you, like a tree". A poem with such a title might easily be written as a spiteful lashing out of a mother's misdirected, uncontrollable rage at her son for her philandering husband's betrayals, but Plath chose to focus instead on the sad truth of one more sad truth which her son would grow up carrying on his back.

There are other among Plath's poems that do not seem to be so directly personal to her own life, that help to fill in the tile-blanks of the literary mosaic which form a picture of Plath as a willing and even wanting wife and then mother. Plath's being labeled a confessional poet and the idea that "biographical and historical material is absolutely necessary for any real understanding of Plath's work" (Mazzenti 197) is a common one, but her work was not always strictly quasi-autobiographical in nature. In the fictive speakers of her poetic "I"s, we yet and still see images and ideas strongly and positively identified with domesticity. "The Munich Mannequins" (CP 262-263) begins with the almost harsh, certainly critical line "Perfection is terrible, it cannot have children". The poem is a portrait of mannequins in snow-drifted shop windows who represent artificial women whose perfection in beauty is accompanied by sterility and barrenness, "Unloosing their moons, month after month, to no purpose." Pamela Annas writes, "For Sylvia Plath, stasis and perfection are always associated with sterility" (137), and we see this metaphor prominent in "The Munich Mannequins". Also, in "Lesbos" (CP 227), the speaker of the poem who goes to visit a "sad hag" who resents her husband and her child and urges the speaker to wear racy clothes and pick up men. The speaker, a married mother of two herself, cannot understand the cheap, bitter mentality of the woman she visits: "Even in your Zen heaven we shan't meet."

Margaret Dickie writes of this selection, "Despite her own emotional difficulties, the speaker presents herself as a responsible mother, a life nurturer, identified strongly with the domesticity that the woman she visits scorns" (Dickie 179).

For Plath, the most important things were always those she created: her poems, her children. Even in the aftermath of a disintegrated marriage, which must have been for her the terrible crushing of a long-cherished dream, she retained the determination to be not only the great poet she'd so long dreamed of becoming, but also a responsible mother beyond reproach. Perhaps it is in the witness of the struggle to do both and to do both well that feminists, women in search of their sole identities and in search of a liberated independence, see a kindred spirit at work. Writes Lucy Rosenthal, "Miss Plath doesn't claim to 'speak for' any time or anyone-and yet she does, because she speaks so accurately" (Rosenthal 365). This seems to be at the very crux of the claiming of Sylvia Plath by the feminist establishment: that the author was painfully aware that to become all she wanted to become would be to break the binds of stereotype and sexual double standard, and that society would not make it easy for her. But where her writing speaks of her inner dualities, and sometimes even to extreme resentment and jealousy of men for what they had that she did not, it also speaks of a woman who did want to be fully a woman, in many contrasting senses of the word, and to claim as hers some of the very things that so many women who call themselves feminists have rejected in their own searches for completion: love of a man, the raising of children, the creation of what she could create to leave her dual stamps of Woman and of Wit in indelible imprint on her world.

She does have an undeniable appeal to adolescents in her poems which rage against men, those which appear to dwell on suicide and those in which she makes reference to her sessions., extreme experiences. But the poems continue to haunt me now that I’m well past adolescence (and now a wife and a mother). The poems remain relevant because they explore the big themes and our personal hells – all the stuff of which life consists. Generally she deals with life at its extremity, certainly – but it’s the extremes of experience which are so fascinating and stimulating.

What also stuns me about Plath is that her work still sounds completely contemporary and makes many of the younger poets currently writing sound old-fashioned and straight-jacketed. Over-wordy, over-academic.

Take a line such as "A man in black with a Meinkampf look" ("Daddy"); or a poem like "Gigolo". Her poems flow like sparkling rain – slangy, snappy – and are not hidebound by the constraints of academia and what is deemed acceptable poetry by the pundits of the day. It’s for these reasons, I think, as much as her subject matter, that makes her appeal to young people. Back to the rightly famous "Daddy" – with its repeated "oo" sound, this hypnotic poem is like a sinister, twisted nursery rhyme. This is rock n roll, as vital and stunning as anything you’d get in a jewel case from HMV.

It’s pointless to try to mould Plath into a feminist. On the "subject" of women she was often loaded with spite and mockery ("Face Lift", "Eavesdropper"). But, for me, what she did was to give me the courage to be a feminist and still be vindictive, jealous…I don’t believe that even a committed feminist has to love the concept of "wimmin" and womanhood wholesale. Or rather, I can be a feminist, in broad terms, but still dislike individual women. We’re not all of a piece, after all. We can even hate our mothers; even as we love them.

But I don’t think even Sylvia Plath would have wished to be a kind of Doris Day woman, all swirly skirts and cookie production. And that all-important fixed on smile, of course. Many of Plath’s poems are certainly not in the voice of Mrs Mop with a can of Mr Sheen. "The Applicant" has a go at the whole concept of the conventional marriage, in which the little woman is simply "it" – "A living doll…", a servant to her husband. Plath may have rejected feminism, but it’s still possible to say that she wrote feminist poems; either way, her work remains relevant – to both genders.

Gender apart, the tone of many of her poems is one of revenge and aggression, rather than submission and subservience. The poems have a toughness, even (dare I say it?) masculine qualities. Even the poems ostensibly about death (and derided, along with anything that smacks of the deathwish) are often about metaphorical deaths – and a death which leads to a rebirth or a renewal: "I rise with my red hair/And I eat men like air". I think it’s all too easy to get bogged down in the Plath Myth and all the attendant theorising. It’s perhaps impossible to separate the poetry from what we imagine to be the woman, but I think it’s worth at least attempting to read the poems as they stand, stripped of the biography. Read it simply as remarkable poetry written by a poet who went straight for the heart: "And I/Am the arrow".

Feminist critic increasingly become preoccupied with exploring plath’s portrayal of family relationships within a western canon, Bennett continues

the feminist groundwork of the 1970’s yet even in a reading that parallels plath’s biography and poetry giving particular emphasis to the dynamics of the relationship between mother and daughter, Bennett does affectionately employ the rhetoric of psychoanalysis but all finally learnt how to discard the mask and speak directly from the unaccpetable core of their biengs to claim their loaded guns.

To understand the connection between physical vulnerability and ironic self-rejection in women poets, is uselful to consider sylvia plath who appears most thoroughly to have internalized the larger culture’s principal of flesh rejection and aspiration towards transcendence. Plath’s work is filled with body images both internal and external skin, blood , skulls, feet, mouths and tongues, wounds, bone, lungs, heart and veins, legs, arms. She writes of both male and female bodies. She also projects human anatomy into the natural world tulips when the poet is hospitalized have sudden tongues and eat my oxygen. They breathe lightly through their white swaddlings like an awful baby, their redness talks to my wound it corresponds they are opening like the mouth of some great african cat.

Sylvia Plath got many awards for her poetries and many short stories. But her life was a misery and she couldn’t survive for too long as she committed suicide at the age of 30 as she couldn’t bear the abandonment of her husband and kid.

Thus getting into the depression mode she started writing poetries and confided in it as she widely starting depending on writing as a stress and depression buster. But still there was an emptiness in her that not even writing could fulfill, thus she saw suicide as a permanent solution to her problem and then she gassed herself. She has a great impact on women as it attracted loads of women readers who merrily read her poems which were depressing but also projected that women were no less than men.

Her first awarded story, "Sunday at the Mintons," was published in 1952 while she was at college in magazine Mademoiselle. Plath worked in 1953 on the college editorial board at the same magazine and suffered a mental breakdown which led to a suicide attempt. She described this period of her live in THE BELL JAR, her autobiographical novel, which was published under the pseudonym Victoria Lucas in 1963, a month before her death. The novel takes place in New York at the height of the Cold War, during the hot summer in which the Rosenbergs were sent to the electric chair, convicted of spying for the Soviets. Against this background Plath sets the story of the breakdown and near-death of her heroine. The book is considered a powerful exploration of the restricted role of women.

With J.D. Salinger's The Cather in the Rye it is recognized as a classic of adolescent angst.

s Debate has raged ever since over who was to blame for Plath's early death, the feminist movement adopting her as an icon and interpreting Hughes' role as her literary executor, particularly his destruction of her final journal, as continuing a patriarchal oppression she had experienced in life. More recently this interpretation has been challenged, not least by Hughes himself in his collection Birthday Letters, which give his view of their marriage in a series of tender and searing poems. Plath's own work, with its intense sometimes shocking use of metaphor and her exploration of extreme states of mind, refuses to be overshadowed by her tragic biography: in 1982 she became the first poet to be posthumously.

But the Feminist movement did not start with Sylvia Plath at the 20thcentury. It is thought that any resistance of the woman to the society is abeginning of feminism. One example of this is the Celtic women whodefend themselves from the men’s attack.

Mushroom -Sylvia Plath

http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/salinger.htm

Overnight, very Whitely, discreetly, Very quietly

Our toes, our noses Take hold on the loam, Acquire the air.

Nobody sees us, Stops us, betray us; The small grains make room.

Soft fists insist on Heaving the needles, The leafy bedding,

Even the paving. Our hammers, our rams, Earless and eyeless,

Perfectly voiceless, Widen the crannies, Shoulder through holes. We

Diet on water, On crumbs of shadow, Bland-mannered, asking

Little or nothing. So many of us! So many of us!

We are shelves, we are Tables, we are meek, We are edible,

Nudgers and shovers In spite of ourselves.

Our kind multiplies:

We shall by morning

Inherit the earth. Our foot's in the door.

Analysis of the poem Mushroom.

Sylvia Plath was a feminist and the poem is referring to women. It was written in 1959, a period when women were looked down upon. Mushrooms is a metaphor used to describe the emergence of women. Quietly and discreetly, they are rising to power. When they are pushing through leaves and even pavement, it refers to the hard work women are performing to gain more rights.

Mushrooms has various different aspects. For example,

1) It could be about sylvia’s imminent birth, the mushroom is her unborn baby. It is about the growth of a child in her womb, like the growth of mushrooms in a dark and airless room. The whole poem is an extended metaphor. She is terrified about what is going on in her body with the soft fists hammers and rams. The baby is taking over her life just as mushrooms take over everything in their path.

2) This is one of plath’s strangest poems, it has softly sinister edge without being dark or overbearing. It instead forced us to see how the weak and soft who watch from the back row will eventually inherit the earth as it will be the strong ones who destroy themselves.

3) This poem is not specifically about feminist groups, but rather the whole of the underclass in society. The outcasts, the raciality segregated , the disabled. This poem reflects the needs of these people and also that they word will one day open up its eye and that they are not going away. These mushroom represent themselves and strike back against the facist society in which we live.

4) Sylvia Plath was a young woman poet. She felt stuck in an unhappy marriage and wrote hundreds of poems during her life. Her only book the Bell Jar also follows the psyche of women in a world where they now have more opportunities than before. The theme of this poem could be said to be "never underestimate the masses." Looking at South Africa for example,

people were marginalized and treated in an unjust and discriminatory way. The emergence of mass movements and of the ordinary people who came out in thousands to support labour movements are what finally ended the regime known as Apartheid. Sylvia Plath is acknowledging that even the weak can come into power. it may not necessarily be directed to women as such but to any group of individuals that are discriminated against or undermined. Her poem aims to send the message that no matter how weak a person may be alone, the masses can always accomplish what may be considered to be impossible alone. People who were undermined in the past, their time is coming and they will inherit the earth. For it is those ordinary individuals that shaped the world. The economy, diplomacy, relations between countries, businesses etc are all promoted and supported by ordinary labour individuals. The Earth is theirs so why should they not claim what is owed to them. They are finally "inheriting" what is owed to them and what they have accomplished. Sylvia Plath was not a woman to be bound by prejudices and the limiting ideas of the time. She was not going to be put down just by the social inequities of the past. She understood the power of the masses. Everyone's time will come.

Sylvia Plath's strong feministic views can be found in many of her works; "Mushrooms" seems to be overlooked as a manifestation of this, possibly due to the subtlety in her use of metaphors. Persistent struggle is a central theme overall in this poem but Plath's word choices clearly narrow the minority down to women. Written in 1960, "Mushrooms" is a striking social commentary on the struggles of women to overcome the restraints of the housewife image. Plath parallels a mushroom's growth, determination, and population expansion with women's fight for notability, independence, and as she sees it, inevitable control of the majority. By using a metaphor likening mushrooms to women, an idea which is not so far-fetched, she bites back at male dominance and with brutal honesty displays the real position of women in society. Plath herself was torn on this subject however; she had witnessed the impact of gender discrimination yet strived to be the immaculate loving wife and mother.

The link between a mushroom and a woman of the 1950's is not hard to establish. Women were still second class citizens and subject to their husband's opinions and decisions. Plath writes "Our toes, our noses / Take hold of the loam, / acquire the air" (line 5); toes and noses are human-like descriptions and also dainty body parts often thought of as womanly. Loam is a mixture of sand, clay, and straw often used

to make bricks; much like the mushroom, women sprout out of the manure of their social position. The fact that they must acquire air is a sign that it is not a given; such a basic necessity for life has to be sought after, illustrating the diminished status of women. Further feminine descriptions can be found throughout the poem; "Soft fists insist on / Heaving the needles, / The leafy bedding, / Even the paving" (line 10). Soft skin and physical weakness are also characteristics associated with women and perceived as traits that make women inferior to men. Plath is still pointing out the importance of persistence. Women are gaining ground; they are pushing through obstacles slowly and laboriously, but still pushing. Mushrooms grow and thrive because of their natural determination to overcome obstacles; likewise Plath insists women's persistence is their greatest weapon. Plath writes, "Our hammers, our rams, / Earless and eyeless, / Perfectly voiceless, / widen the crannies, Shoulder through the holes" (line 15). Hammers and rams are certainly powerful tools used to breakdown barriers with persistence. While women had limited knowledge and effect on political and social decisions that impacted everyone, their painstaking efforts were expanding their influence and progressing their status. Forcing themselves forward was the only way women could gain acceptance. With jabbing sarcasm Plath writes, "Nudgers and shovers/ In spite of ourselves. /Our kind multiplies" (line 28). Women are strong and can even be violent despite men's conceptions of their shortcomings and weaknesses. There is smugness evident in her diction; if women are so powerless why are they expanding? Women's steadfastness is what will break them through the barriers of male dominance and allow them independence. Issues of domesticity are frequent in "Mushrooms"; "We are shelves, we are/ Tables, we are meek" (line 25). These are utilitarian descriptions representing a woman's place in the home as a silent and timid necessity. Meekness is recurrent throughout the poem; "Diet on water, / On crumbs of shadow, / Bland-mannered, asking / Little or nothing" (line 20). Water is a meager form of sustenance to diet on, such starvation shows a struggle for a pleasing image. Living in the shadow of their husband's opinions and desires, women rarely expressed any ideas of their own that might have disagreed. Thus being bland-mannered and submissive, women conformed as was expected of them without expecting to be treated as an equal human being.Plath documents how the impending assertion of women into the professional world was trivial to the all-powerful man. Countless women began examining their lives from a new perspective; "So many of us! So many of us! (line 23). Despite the increase of women taking part in the movement men still failed to take them seriously. Plath writes, "Nobody sees us, / Stops us, betrays us" (line 10). Men's demeaning perspective of a woman's potential actually works to their advantage; there is no need to stop a fragile woman from doing something she is not capable of.

The theme of meekness climaxes in the last stanza of "Mushrooms" transforming into an empowering prophecy. Plath writes, "We shall by morning / Inherit the earth. / Our foot's in the door" (line 30). Once women emerge from the despair of their darkness, they will have the majority. The first step is already accomplished; women do hold certain legal rights, now it is a matter of gaining independence and breaking away from the housewife stereotype. Sylvia Plath had conflicted feelings on domesticity; she felt compelled to fulfill the expectations of a married woman and mother yet she also passionately believed women were competent and deserved the right to break free of their domestic restrictions and pursue careers. Plath grew up with an independent female role-model, her mother. When she was eight years old her father died, thus she observed the difficulties a single mother must contend with in a male driven society. Devoney Looser writes, "After Otto's death, Aurelia taught secretarial skills and struggled to raise her daughter Sylvia and her younger son Warren" (Looser, "Sylvia Plath: Overview"). Sylvia Plath married the famous poet Ted Hughes and had two children, and so began her attempts at being the perfect housewife while maintaining her career as a writer. Marsha Bryant wrote of her eagerness to please her new husband; "Writing her mother from Cambridge, Plath declares that she will transform her kitchen into "an ad out of House and Gardens with Ted's help" hardly the bohemian image we expect" (Bryant, "Plath, Domesticity, and the Art of Advertising"18), Such a statement in her own words proves Plath's desire to conform to societal norms which directly conflicts with being a successful female writer. Plath's feministic tendencies are evident in many other pieces, especially her most famous works. In "The Poetics of Torture: The Spectacle of Sylvia Plath's Poetry" Lisa Narbeshuber writes, "Most criticism reads "Daddy" and "Lady Lazarus" around the psychology of Plath's life, if not exclusively as a biography, then as the feminist struggles of a victorious woman over man" (Narbeshuber,186). Devoney Looser acknowledges Plath's views in further works; Plath's "loosely autobiographical novel" The Bell Jar "has its moment of feminist impulse and insight" (Looser). Feminism is such an obvious reading in the bulk of Plath's work it is surprising that "Mushrooms" isn't critiqued in the same manner. Sylvia Plath's writing is typically associated with images of death and suicide; however her works reflect much more meaningful and socially relevant ideas. Plath was very opinionated on women's rights as is evident. In the poem of "Mushrooms", the poet Sylvia Plath used the techniques of assonance and enjambment. This help to create a movement feeling through different stanzas. In the first few stanzas, the poet creates a mood of sneaky. They can be represented women, black people or other low status people in the society. Later, it shows that the mushrooms want to get in from and it seems that they

want to be show in somewhere as well. They are facing a challenge. Once they get over it, they will be nearly almost there from their goal.

In the poem of "The Wild Swans at Coole", we can feel that the poet W.B.Yeats creates a mood of sadness because he lost his love. He tries to describe the surroundings where he was. By telling the scenery, he expresses his sadness as well. He uses nine-and-fifty to describe there are fifty nine swans as he wants this poem to be more romantic. Since he also describes some beautiful creatures and what he has seen. Meanwhile, he tells the readers that he was very sad. By showing the bright and pretty side of the world, his sadness will be more realistic and people might feel for him as well. After that he writes something about those swans. This show that the swans are the opposite side of him and it also shows that how sad he was. He was exhausted and tired of the romance already. Besides, the swans enjoyed their life and their heart will not grown old. In the last stanza, the poet shows that he is frightened about his future. It is because he does not have a goal like swans fly to the south every year. He thought that nothing can last long and everything has to go away and die. The poet describes the freedom and beauty is to contrast himself.

Lady Lazarus-Sylvia Plath

I have done it again.One year in every tenI manage it----

A sort of walking miracle, my skinBright as a Nazi lampshade,

My right foot

A paperweight,My face a featureless, fineJew linen.

Peel off the napkin0 my enemy.Do I terrify?----

The nose, the eye pits, the full set of teeth?The sour breathWill vanish in a day.

Soon, soon the fleshThe grave cave ate will beAt home on me

And I a smiling woman.I am only thirty.And like the cat I have nine times to die.

This is Number Three.What a trashTo annihilate each decade.

What a million filaments.The peanut-crunching crowdShoves in to see

Them unwrap me hand and footThe big strip tease.Gentlemen, ladies

These are my handsMy knees.I may be skin and bone,

Nevertheless, I am the same, identical woman.The first time it happened I was ten.It was an accident.

The second time I meantTo last it out and not come back at all.I rocked shut

As a seashell.They had to call and callAnd pick the worms off me like sticky pearls.

DyingIs an art, like everything else,I do it exceptionally well.

I do it so it feels like hell.I do it so it feels real.I guess you could say I've a call.

It's easy enough to do it in a cell.It's easy enough to do it and stay put.It's the theatrical

Comeback in broad dayTo the same place, the same face, the same bruteAmused shout:

'A miracle!'That knocks me out.There is a charge

For the eyeing of my scars, there is a chargeFor the hearing of my heart----It really goes.

And there is a charge, a very large chargeFor a word or a touchOr a bit of blood

Or a piece of my hair or my clothes.So, so, Herr Doktor.So, Herr Enemy.

I am your opus,I am your valuable,The pure gold baby

That melts to a shriek.I turn and burn.Do not think I underestimate your great concern.

Ash, ash ---You poke and stir.Flesh, bone, there is nothing there----

A cake of soap,A wedding ring,A gold filling.

Herr God, Herr LuciferBeware

Beware.

Out of the ashI rise with my red hairAnd I eat men like air.

Analysis of lady lazarus.

In American culture, suicide is considered to be one of the darkest taboos. It has the particular quality of being equally gripping and repulsive. Although suicide is seen as overtly morbid, gruesome and disturbing, it has made many people famous.

Sylvia Plath, the illustrious 20th century poetess, is one of them.

Sylvia Plath was born on October 27th, 1932 of two parents in a middleclass household in Boston. At a very young age, she demonstrated great literary talent and a hardworking attitude, publishing her first poem at the age of eight and maintaining a straight A record throughout all of her studies. A few days after she turned eight, her father deceased of diabetes. This event in her life is what most specialists believe to have triggered her depressive tendencies. It has also been known to have caused the poet to hate her father for the pain his death inflicted on her. Twenty-year-old Plath committed her first near-successful suicide attempt after a whole month of not being able to sleep, write or eat properly. She recovered from her nervous breakdown and met her to-be husband, renowned poet Ted Hughes, three years later. However, after having their first child, their relationship started to go stale, and finally adultery on both their parts caused their painful separation. Soon enough, Sylvia returned to her old suicidal habits.

During this feverish period of her life, "Lady Lazarus" and other poems of that genre were written. "Lady Lazarus" conveys a message about her own life, obsessions, weaknesses, and feelings. In recording her previous suicide attempts, she makes comparisons that are not always obvious to decipher or to understand without the right background information. The poem serves as a metaphor that retains a morbid sensation through its description of the author’s psychological journey. This poem has always fascinated me in terms of the figurative language and the ever-precise vocabulary that is used. In light of her suicidal tendencies, while gathering the information necessary and using a decorticating method, I believe to have been able to make an estimated guess of the message Sylvia Plath intended to render when writing this poem. Take note that the entire "Lady Lazarus" poem can be found at the end of this essay.

Upon reading the title, a first impression is made. Plath creatively uses biblical allusion to connect the title of her poem, "Lady Lazarus," to the book of John's Lazarus of Bethany. As Lazarus was resurrected from the dead, so is Plath, or Lady Lazarus, 'reincarnated' after each suicide attempt. There is also a hint of her feministic side present in "lady," a word that projects an image of a powerful woman.

"I have done it again. One year in every ten I manage it—"

This first stanza acts as an introduction to the poem. It introduces the idea of suicide and death. The first verse demonstrates this. "I have done it again" could be translated as "I have tried to kill myself again." When Plath declares "One year in every ten / I manage it," she refers to the equal repartition of her near-death experiences, one per decade and one being premeditated at this stage. She

specifies these later on in the poem.

"A sort of walking miracle, my skin Bright as a Nazi lampshade, My right foot

A paperweight, My face a featureless, fine Jew linen."

For the times when Plath was 'resurrected' from the dead, she refers to herself as "A sort of walking miracle," which reflects the meaning of the title; Lady Lazarus is miraculously raised from the dead. She then uses the gritty and powerful comparison "Bright as a Nazi lampshade" to describe her skin, which designates the suicidal tyrant that lives within her, and ends up contrasting this image with the softer more subdued metaphor, "a featureless, fine / Jew linen," to depict her face, which is the victim in a state of deterioration and weakness. These references to the holocaust are her way to demonstrate how she imposes, like the Nazis, her will to commit suicide on her body, which withers beneath her willpower, like the Jews. She is two different personas in this poem: the Nazis and the Jews, the strong and the weak. Between these comparisons, there are the subtle verses, "My right foot / A paperweight," which are rather ambiguous. They might mean that she cannot escape these archetypes that live in her given that she feels as if she were nailed to the ground, too heavy to move or act against these. Moreover, I noticed that these objects to which she compares herself may as well be things that were on her desk or within her eyesight when she wrote this: a lampshade, a paperweight, linen clothing.

"Peel off the napkin O my enemy. Do I terrify? —

The nose, the eye pits, the full set of teeth? The sour breath Will vanish in a day."

These stanzas mark the beginning of the crude sarcasm the author uses throughout Lady Lazarus. Plath dares her enemy to "Peel off the napkin." Although she is speaking to one distinct person in the poem, this is an invitation to everyone who wants to observe her with all the awe and disgust this performance inspires. She does, though, mention later that there is a charge to watch her, as if she were a freak show. To the enemy and to those who are willing to watch, she asks the rhetorical question, "Do I terrify?" We know as the reader, the audience, that the answer is yes. Most of us are terrified by such a sight, by suicide. She also wants us

to look at her face especially, which she had characterized as the victim earlier: "The nose, the eye pits, the full set of teeth?" The speaker’s appearance is infallible evidence to her condition; death emanates from her face and bears a certain walking dead quality. Although her face is now wan and drained, she is not beaten yet. In the last two verses, she reassures us derisively that she can get over that within a day, restoring her original beauty, strength and healthy state of mind.

"Soon, soon the flesh The grave cave ate will be At home on me

And I a smiling woman. I am only thirty. And like the cat I have nine times to die.

This is Number Three. What a trash To annihilate each decade."

In this section, the first stanza is a continuation of the idea of the restoration of her original self, "a smiling woman." "The grave cave" signifies death, or Plath may also be referring to the earth-bottomed crevice in the cellar of her house where she attempted suicide at twenty with sleeping pills. Next, she states her age with the pride of someone who has a lifetime ahead of them and makes a witty comparison with the cat and herself, who both have "nine times to die." Then, in a boastful tone, she declares that "This is Number Three." The capitalization of "Number Three" is effective in blowing out the proportions of this event, as if the act of committing suicide were a big and exciting occasion, which in fact translates Plath’s position on the matter. Then, as quickly as she swelled with pride, her self-disgust manifests itself in "What a trash / To annihilate each decade." These verses also confirm the fact that she nearly died at ten in a drowning accident, that she tried to kill herself at twenty with the sleeping pill incident, and that she will be trying again at thirty, all these being at equal intervals, the markers of each decade.

"What a million filaments. The peanut-crunching crowd Shoves in to see

Them unwrap me hand and foot The big strip tease."

These "million filaments" could be a physical representation of her guilt, its invading quality. The verse acts as a continuation of the self-disgust expressed in the

previous stanza. "The peanut-crunching crowd" designates everyone really, including the doctors, Plath’s family, and the reader. Her self-aggrandizing gestures invite attention, and yet we, as the readers, are to be ashamed of ourselves if we accept the invitation. The crowd is aggressive as it "shoves in to see," and its interest is lascivious as they undress her, "unwrap" her; it is "The big strip tease." This crowd also seeks an illicit source of arousal, if not from her naked body, then from her naked psyche. She offers herself to the crowd like a vulgar piece of meat.

"Gentlemen, ladies

These are my hands My knees. I may be skin and bone,

Nevertheless, I am the same, identical woman. The first time it happened I was ten. It was an accident."

The usage of "Gentlemen, ladies" here is purely satirical and is meant to mock the audience. We are still, in fact, the same shameful "peanut-crunching crowd" as before. Plath acts as a guide at this particular point as she demonstrates her features: "These are my hands / My knees." She emphasizes the fact that she has been reduced to "skin and bone[s]," yet she reassures us that she is "the same, identical woman" in spite of her altered physical appearance; she has not changed. Then, as any good guide would do, she supplies a historical record of past events. She mentions the swimming incident that nearly cost her her life when she was ten. This was the first time she skimmed death. It was purely accidental.

"The second time I meant To last it out and not come back at all. I rocked shut

As a seashell. They had to call and call And pick the worms off me like sticky pearls."

Naturally, Plath doesn’t forget to speak of the second time she nearly died, at twenty, when she tried to kill herself with sleeping pills. She had "rock shut // As a seashell" in the earth-bottomed crevice in the cellar of her house. She was terribly well hidden like the second verse of the second stanza suggests. Her mother and brother found her only three days later, practically dead, with earthworms crawling over her, as mentioned in the last verse.

"Dying Is an art, like everything else, I do it exceptionally well.

I do it so it feels like hell. I do it so it feels real. I guess you could say I've a call."

In the first stanza of this excerpt, Plath considers dying like an exploit of sorts, and brags about the fact that she is talented in doing so as in anything else: "Dying / Is an art, like everything else, / I do it exceptionally well." This is where we are shown her perfectionist and masochistic selves surfacing and intertwining as she makes sure that she is real about it: "I do it so it feels like hell. / I do it so it feels real." It has become an obsession for her at this point, like "a call" or something related to fate.

"It's easy enough to do it in a cell. It's easy enough to do it and stay put. It's the theatrical

Comeback in broad day To the same place, the same face, the same bruteAmused shout:"

In these following stanzas, Plath provides an insight on how easy she finds it is to commit suicide: "It’s easy enough to do it in a cell. / It’s easy enough to do it and stay put." In her case, you could nearly say it accomplishes itself on its own as Plath summons death upon herself so fervently. Next, she describes the disappointment she feels when she realizes she is still in this world, as it is only "the theatrical // Comeback in broad day / To the same place, the same face, the same brute / Amused shout." It is another act for the same harassing audience to attend and observe.

"'A miracle!' That knocks me out. There is a charge

For the eyeing of my scars, there is a charge For the hearing of my heart— It really goes."

As she is resurrected, the crowd is in awe and entertained but completely indifferent to the fact that she is alive still. They're watching a magic trick being performed: 'A miracle!' They are amused by the fact that death nearly took her from them. She is a martyr, unattainable and expensive as she needs to charge them "For the hearing of [her] heart" or her naked psyche. This kind of business "really goes," says the author. Plath, here, makes a connection to the fact that the holocaust business has become a highly profitable entertainment industry over the years.

"And there is a charge, a very large charge For a word or a touch Or a bit of blood

Or a piece of my hair or my clothes. So, so, Herr Doktor. So, Herr Enemy."

In these stanzas, Plath portrays herself as a parody while the people treat her as if she were a martyr, like Jesus or such personages. This unserious depiction is found in the following sardonic verses: "And there is a charge, a very large charge / For a word or a touch / Or a bit of blood // Or a piece of my hair or my clothes." They very crudely ridicule the commercialization of Jesus, religious entities and even the holocaust, as I mentioned. Subsequently, there are other holocaust-related elements, such as the usage of German terms, "Herr" and "Doktor," which mean 'mister' and 'doctor' respectively. She turns away from the audience to address a single person, the 'Nazi Doktor,' which turns out to be the enemy from the beginning of the poem. She taunts and pokes fun at him using mock movie talk. The enemy, thus far unspecified, is either a German male figure of authority, a scholar like Otto Plath, her father, who thinks of the speaker as his "pure gold baby" or she may simply be referring to doctors in general who keep reviving her after each fruitless attempt.

"I am your opus, I am your valuable, The pure gold baby

That melts to a shriek. I turn and burn. Do not think I underestimate your great concern."

Still addressing herself to the 'Doktor,' she is defining what she represents for him. Otto Plath may be whom she’s talking to, as she says she is his "valuable, / The pure gold baby." Or yet still, the typical doctor may see her as an opportunity to receive gratitude, to become locally famous, or to do a good deed in bringing her

back to life. In her ironically pretentious way, the image Plath creates of herself is overblown as usual. Whether she is the daughter or the patient, she is either one’s masterpiece, an "opus," a "pure gold baby," and this exhausts her to a point where she "melts to a shriek," "turn[s] and burn[s]." Finally, with more diplomacy, she reassures him that she knows he’s trying to do what he thinks is best for her: "Do not think I underestimate your great concern." However, this polite impression fails when we take into consideration the sarcastic tone behind it. In reality, she does not want anyone to save her or to have pity on her.

"Ash, ash— You poke and stir. Flesh, bone, there is nothing there—

A cake of soap, A wedding ring, A gold filling."

In this passage, she is growing vengeful as her tone becomes grittier. Plath is revolted by her own dehumanization and she would love to triumph over the enemy after she dies. She has burnt and reduced herself to ashes and nothingness in the first stanza shown here. This may allude to the use of an oven perhaps, as this would hint to the method by which she would try to kill herself in the future. Although nothing much remains of her at this point, she knows the enemy will be profiting from her death. She expresses this as if she were going to be made into merchandise, which once again refers to the Nazis, who manufactured their victims’ hair, skin, bones, rings and fillings. Historians are not certain that Nazis made cakes of soap with them, but they did, however, make wedding rings and gold fillings.

"Herr God, Herr Lucifer Beware Beware.

Out of the ash I rise with my red hair And I eat men like air."

In an access of anger and grandiosity, she warns the great powers from above and below: "Herr God, Herr Lucifer / Beware / Beware." Additionally, she acknowledges no power greater than herself, as Plath accomplishes her own resurrection, unlike the biblical miracle of Lazarus of Bethany. We can clearly see how she grows stronger by the end of the poem as she rises "Out of the ash" like a phoenix with "red hair." Finally, with her concluding and blatantly feministic verse, "I eat men like air," she declares that she has defeated all her enemies, all the men in her life: the doctors who kept reviving her, the businessmen who sold her body to the crowd,

and perhaps her father. In concluding this poem, Sylvia Plath finally has triumphed as her own puppet and puppet master.

On February 11th, 1963, a few months after having written "Lady Lazarus", Sylvia Plath committed suicide successfully by inhaling the gas from her stove. In the process, she immortalized herself and became extremely popular after her death with her collection of poetry Ariel, which was written within the last few months of her life and published two years after her death. The famous poem "Lady Lazarus", that had made a valid prediction of her destiny, can be found in this collection. Although she was never truly acclaimed as a writer during her lifetime, her much-anticipated compilation of poetry, Collected Poems, was finally released in 1981 and in 1982 won a rarely posthumously-awarded Pulitzer Prize. In spite of her self-depreciating tendencies, there is no doubt that Sylvia Plath would have been extremely proud.

Ariel -Sylvia Plath

Stasis in darkness.Then the substanceless bluePour of tor and distances.

God's lioness,How one we grow,Pivot of heels and knees! -- The furrow

Splits and passes, sister toThe brown arcOf the neck I cannot catch,

Nigger-eyeBerries cast darkHooks ----

Black sweet blood mouthfuls,Shadows.Something else

Hauls me through air ----Thighs, hair;Flakes from my heels.

WhiteGodiva, I unpeel ----Dead hands, dead stringencies.

And now IFoam to wheat, a glitter of seas.The child's cry

Melts in the wall.And IAm the arrow,

The dew that flies,Suicidal, at one with the driveInto the red

Eye, the cauldron of morning.

Analysis of Ariel.

Sylvia Plath's Ariel is one of the most important books of poetry

of the 20th century, and among the most controversial. In February of 1963, when

Plath committed suicide, she left behind a manuscript titled Ariel and Other Poems.

But that manuscript was never published. Instead, a very different book called Ariel

arrived in bookshops in the U.K. in 1965 and sold a phenomenal 15,000 copies in 10

months. In the U.S. edition (which varies slightly from the U.K. edition), 12 of the

poems Plath had included had been cut, and 15 new ones added in their place;

several poems had been bumped out of their original order. Ted Hughes, Plath's

estranged husband—of whom she had lately written "I hate and despise him so I

can hardly speak"—had made the changes, inviting some charged questions about

his apparent conflict of interest as both Plath's executor and the impugned subject

of her poetry. Plath's followers, especially feminist literary critics, were all too happy

to skip the questioning and issue an indictment. They tore Hughes to shreds for

what they presumed was a self-protective rearrangement—outraged at the male

arrogance of his intrusion. It wasn't until last month that Plath's version of Ariel was

published, as The Restored Edition: Ariel, with a foreword by the poets' daughter,

Frieda Hughes. An overflowing "worldwide premiere" reading by poets and critics

took place in Manhattan last week—a halcyon moment for Plath's supporters.

But is it a halcyon moment for Plath's poetry? The new edition is undoubtedly useful

(though it is marred by several factual mistakes). But there's a good case to be

made that Hughes' version of Ariel is actually superior to Plath's—and that Plath

herself might have agreed.

Plath began to put together the manuscript that became the framework for Ariel in

late 1961 or early 1962, fussing with it and changing the title from The Rival to A

Birthday Present to Daddy to The Rabbit Catcher and finally to Ariel and Other

Poems. She stopped working on it in mid-November of 1962, we think. And at 4 a.m.

in the last few weeks of her life, she wrote some of the best poems of her career,

the poems that, as she herself predicted in the febrile flush of composition, would

"make my name." What Hughes did was to take these poems, some of which had a

bleak, astonishingly pitched quietude—like Emily Dickinson's "formal feeling" that

follows grief—and add about a dozen of them, including "Totem," "The Munich

Mannequins," and the exquisite "Edge," to the end of her manuscript.

Hughes also acted like a good film editor, cutting a labored opening sequence back,

removing poems like "Barren Woman," which were more conventional (and

repetitive), and dismantling some of the narrative scaffolding Plath thought she

needed. The effect was to plunge the reader swiftly into the sarcastic, funny,

grotesque voice that dominates Ariel. Plath was still, as Hughes himself later said, a

little afraid of her own poems, still learning how to wean herself from exposition in

favor of dramatic immersion. (For evidence, read the drafts of the "Ariel" poem

itself, included in the restored edition.) Hughes then moved up "Poppies in October"

and "Berck-Plage" and used them as a springboard into "Ariel," the book's title

poem, a luminous vision of self-transformation. The resulting sequence is more

psychologically charged (and dramatic) than Plath's ordering had been. Hughes also

added a few older poems, including "Hanging Man," inspired by Plath's electroshock

therapy, to help clarify what he took to be her story line—the story of a woman

triumphing over great peril only to later succumb to a version of her own "self-

conquering self."

Hughes' changes did profoundly alter Plath's vision of the book, as enterprising

readers could piece together when the excised Ariel poems were later published,

chronologically arranged, in Plath's Collected Poems. Plath's Ariel was more

pointedly optimistic, carefully plotting a path from "love" to "spring" (the first and

last words of the book). In her mind, it was the redemptive story of a self

overcoming the elemental forces that threaten her—a coherent allegory of rebirth,

which ended with her famous sequence of bee poems. Hers is a powerful narrative

on its own—but the final bee poems simply aren't as convincing as the late work

that Hughes discovered on her desk. Their hopefulness ("The bees are flying. They

taste the spring.") seems forced and self-conscious, as does the feminist thrust of

passages like "The bees are all women,/ Maids and the long royal lady./ They have

got rid of the men,/ The blunt, clumsy stumblers, the boors." Most of Plath's best

tropes have the benefit of being factually plausible as well as emotionally powerful;

this one doesn't.

Understandably, some critics are troubled by the newly morbid arc that results from

Hughes' re-engineering. But what we don't know is whether Plath herself would

have held Ariel and Other Poems to her original vision of it, as these critics believe.

Plath was sharp-eyed and averse to platitudes, and it's not clear why she would

have suppressed the work that was emerging in her final two weeks of life, or even

have saved it for a new book, given that she was an inveterate reviser of her own

manuscripts. We do know that Hughes and Plath had a history of reading one

another's work; their shared preoccupation with mythology, their Nietzschean

fascination with the interplay between creativity and destructiveness, were a

wellspring for claustrophobic intimacy neither of them ever fully escaped. Despite

the pair's embittered separation, Plath had apparently shown some of her recent

work to Hughes, and the two had agreed that the freshly written "Totem" and "The

Munich Mannequins" were among her strongest poems.

What's more, the poems Plath generated in the weeks before her death were

thematically, syntactically, and lexically similar to poems she'd already added to the

Ariel manuscript. They spoke to one another in a kind of harmonic design, full of

images of stasis and violence; of bleak, fixed stars and dangerous little hooks; of

crackling, dangerous moons standing hooded over a mythic landscape, and images

of the self perfected and transformed by its flirtations with death. Plath was too

sensitive a writer and critic not to have been conscious of the resonant layering of

imagery she was playing with—all of which is reason to suspect that Ariel and Other

Poems was not completely "finished." Hughes simply curated the poems as they

invited him to curate them, with a poet's feel for the building implications of the

interwoven imagery.

There is no question that Hughes laid himself open to the accusation that he had

self-servingly suppressed lacerating (or, as he put it, "personally aggressive")

poems about him, like "The Rabbit Catcher" or "The Jailor," in which Plath writes,

baldly, "I have been drugged and raped" and describes herself as a "Lever of his

wet dreams." But Ariel is by no means a bowdlerized version of Plath's original—

Hughes comes in for plenty of scouring as it is. And far from reducing Plath to a

pathologized victim—a sick woman—Hughes' version arguably dared to present

Plath's raw power as even she did not, in its full-fledged, authoritative self-

knowledge.

The real problem with Hughes' interference is that we can't separate the emotional

relationship from the intellectual, artistic relationship—and we don't trust Hughes

to, either. But from this distance Plath seems fortunate to have had his input. It's

easy to forget now how radical Plath's poetry—with its elemental female anger, its

sexual voracity, its self-loathing knowingness—was in 1963. A number of the poems

Plath wrote in 1961 and 1962 had been turned down by editors who didn't

understand them. Plath's publishers in the U.K. didn't want to publish Ariel, nor

could Hughes convince Knopf, in the United States, to publish the new poems.

"People didn't understand what they were getting at, or didn't like what they saw,"

the critic A. Alvarez later told Janet Malcolm. Hughes did get Plath's poems. And in a

strange way, there is something moving about what he did. It is surely an

emotionally complicated task to spend two years carefully reorganizing the work of

your dead wife so as to persuade someone to publish a book that will implicate you

in her tragic fate. And the irony is that, in reorganizing Ariel to emphasize the

ultimate price of Plath's emotional injuries, Hughes, like Samson, brought down the

walls of the temple around him, even as he helped his wife take flight.

"Ariel," the title poem of Sylvia Plath’s posthumous volume of the same name is one of her most highly regarded, most often criticised, and most complicated poems. The ambiguities in the poem begin with its title, which has a three fold meaning. To a reader uninformed by Plath’s biography "Ariel" would probably most immediately call to mind the "airy spirit" who in Shakespeare’s The Tempest is a servant to Prospero and symbolizes Prospero’s control of the upper elements of the universe, fire and air. On another biographical or autobiographical level, "Ariel," as we know from reports about the poet’s life, was the name of her favorite horse, on whom she weekly went riding. Robert Lowell, in his forward to Ariel, says, "The title Ariel summons up Shakespeare’s lovely, though slightly chilling and androgynous spirit, but the truth is that this Ariel is the author’s horse." Ted Hughes, Plath’s husband, adds these comments,

ARIEL was the name of the horse on which she went riding weekly. Long before, while she was a student atCambridge (England), she went riding with an American friend out towards Grantchester. Her horse

bolted, the stirrups fell off, and she came all the way home to the stables, about two miles, at full gallop, hanging around the horse’s neck.

These two allusions, to The Tempest and to her horse "Ariel," have often been noticed and pointed out, with the emphasis, from a critical perspective, being placed on the biographical referent. But there is another possible referent in the title of the poem which no one has yet noted, although the poet, apparently, went out of her way to make reference, even obvious reference, to it. I refer to "Ariel" as the symbolic name for Jerusalem. "Ariel" in Hebrew means "lion of God." She begins the second stanza of the poem with the line "God’s lioness," which seems to be a direct reference to the Hebrew or Jewish "Ariel."

Plath’s obsession with Judaism and the Jewish people is clearly indicated in many of her poems.

Indeed, some of the imagery which informs the passage concerning "Ariel" in the Book of Isaiah appears to have been drawn on directly by Plath for her imagery in her poem "Ariel." In Isaiah 29-5-6 we read,

And in an instant, suddenly,You will be visited by the Lord of hostsWith thunder and with earthquake and great noise,With whirlwind and tempest,And the flame of a devouring fire

In short, then, the poet seems to be combining these three references to "Ariel" in her poem, and creating a context where each of the possible meanings enriches the others. She even seems to imply this when she says, in the second stanza, "How one we grow." Each of the three "Ariel’s" contributes its part to the totality of the poem, and each of them merges into the others so that, by the end of the poem, they are all "one."

Now, of these three references to "Ariel," the two that seem most fruitful in terms of an analysis of the poem appear to be the autobiographical and the Biblical In terms of the autobiographical overtones, the poem can be seen as what apparently it is in fact—an account of the poet’s going for a ride on her favorite horse. Each of the details she mentions with respect to the ride (at least through the first six stanzas) can be seen as exact reporting of what it is like to ride a horse. The last five stanzas of the poem obviously move beyond the literal telling of taking a horseback ride and move into something which partakes of the mystery whereby the rider experiences something of the unity which is created between horse and rider, if not literally, at least metaphorically. This change in the theme of the poem is signaled both by a change in tone and by a change in technique, and specifically by the break in the rhyme scheme.

A poem like "Ariel" possesses power and importance to the degree to which the horseback ride Plath once took becomes something more—a ride into the eye of the sun, a journey to death, a stripping of personality and selfhood. To treat "Ariel" as a confessional poem is to suggest that its actual importance lies in the horse- ride taken by its author, in the author's psychological problems, or in its position within the biographical development of the author. None of these issues is as significant as the imagistic and thematic developments rendered by the poem itself. . . .

. . . "Ariel" is probably Plath's finest single construction because of the precision and depth of its images. In its account of the ritual journey toward the center of life and death, Plath perfects her method of leaping from image to image in order to represent mental process. The sensuousness

and concreteness of the poem—the "Black sweet blood mouthfuls" of the berries; the "glitter of seas"—is unmatched in contemporary American poetry. We see, hear, touch, and taste the process of disintegration: the horse emerging from the darkness of the morning, the sun beginning to rise as Ariel rushes uncontrollably across the countryside, the rider trying to catch the brown neck but instead "tasting" the blackberries on the side of the road. Then all the rider's perceptions are thrown together: the horse's body and the rider's merge. She hears her own cry as if it were that of a child and flies toward the burning sun that has now risen.

Bibliographywww.google.com

Poetry of Sylvia Plath(Book).

www.yahoo.com

www.bing.com

tal and stunning as anything yoAnu’d get in a jewel case from HM’s pointless to try to mould Plath into a feminist. On the "subject" of women she was often loaded with spite

and mockery ("Face Lift", "Eavesdropper"). But, for me, what she did was to give me the

http://www.bing.com/

http://www.yahoo.com/

http://www.google.com/

courage to sskfjrgjgkjtgjktgjkjgtkjtgjkgkjkjgtbe a feminist and still be vindictive, jealous…I don’t believe that even a committed feminist has to love the concept of "wimmin" and womanhood wholesale. Or rather, I can be a feminist, in broad terms, but still dislike individual women. We’re not all of a piece, after all. We can even hate our mothers;

even as we love them.

But I don’t thFRRGRGGk even Sylvia Plath would have wished to be a kind of Doris Day woman, all swirly skirts and cookie production. And that all-important fixed on smile, of course. Many of Plath’s poems are certainly not in the voice of Mrs Mop with a can of Mr Sheen. "The ApplicLLLLLRFRFRFLGLGLGLGLant" has a go at the wLLGTHHhole concept of the conventional marriage, in which the little woman is simply "it" – "A living doll…", a servant to her husband. Plath may have rejected feminism, but it’s still possible to say that she wrote feminist poems; either way, her work remains relevant – to both genders.

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Gender apart, the tone of many of her poems is one of revenge and aggression, rather than submission and subservience. The poems have a toughness, even qualities. Even mMMushroom the poems ostensibly about death (and derided, along with anything that smacks of the deathwish) are often about metaphorical deaths – and a death which leads to a rebirth or a renewal: "I rise with my red hair/And I eat men like air". I think it’s all too easy to get bogged down in the Plath Myth and all the attendant theorising. It’s perhaps impossible to separate the poetry from what we imagine to be the woman, but I think it’s worth at least attempting to read the poems as they stand, stripped of the biography. Read it simply as remarkable poetry written by a poet who went straight for the heart: "And I/Am the arrow".

e younger poets currently writing sound old-fashioned and straight-jacketed. Over-wordy, over-academic. Take a line such as "A man in black with a Meinkampf look" ("Daddy"); or a poem like "Gigolo". Her poems flow like sparkling rain – slangy, snappy – and are not hidebound by the constraints of academia and what is deemed acceptable poetry by the pundits of the day. It’s for these reasons, I think, as much as her subject matter, that makes her appeal to young people. Back to the rightly famous "Daddy" – with its repeated "oo" sound, this hypnotic poem is like a sinister, twisted nursery rhyme. This is rock n roll, as vital and stunning as anything you’d get in a jewel case from HMV.

It’s pointless to try to mould Plath into a feminist. On the "subject" of women she was often loaded with spite and mockery ("Face Lift", "Eavesdropper"). But, for me, what she

did was to give me the courage to be a feminist and still be vindictive, jealous…I don’t believe that even a committed feminist has to love the concept of "wimmin" and womanhood wholesale. Or rather, I can be a feminist, in broad terms, but still dislike individual women. We’re not all of a piece, after all. We can even hate our mothers; even as we love them.



kes many of the younger poets currently writing sound old-fashioned and straight-jacketed. Over-wordy, over-academic. Take a line such as "A man in black with a Meinkampf look" ("Daddy"); or a poem like "Gigolo". Her poems flow like sparkling rain – slangy, snappy – and are not hidebound by the constraints of academia and what is deemed acceptable poetry by the pundits of the day. It’s for these reasons, I think, as much as her subject matter, that makes her appeal to young people. Back to the rightly famous "Daddy" – with its repeated "oo" sound, this hypnotic poem is like a sinister, twisted nursery rhyme. This is rock n roll, as vital and stunning as anything you’d get in a jewel case from HMV.


But I don’t think even Sylvia Plath would have wished to be a kind of Doris Day woman, all swirly skirts and cookie production. And that all-important fixed on smile, of course. Many of Plath’s poems are certainly not in the voice of Mrs Mop with a can of Mr Sheen.

"The Applicant" has a go at the whole concept of the conventional marriage, in which the little woman is simply "it" – "A living doll…", a servant to her husband. Plath may have rejected feminism, but it’s still possible to say that she wrote feminist poems; either way, her work remains relevant – to both genders.


What also stuns me about Plath is that her work still sounds completely contemporary and makes many of the younger poets currently writing sound old-fashioned and straight-jacketed. Over-wordy, over-academic. Take a line such as "A man in black with a Meinkampf look" ("Daddy"); or a poem like "Gigolo". Her poems flow like sparkling rain – slangy, snappy – and are not hidebound by the constraints of academia and what is deemed acceptable poetry by the pundits of the day. It’s for these reasons, I think, as much as her subject matter, that makes her appeal to young people. Back to the rightly famous "Daddy" – with its repeated "oo" sound, this hypnotic poem is like a sinister, twisted nursery rhyme. This is rock n roll, as vital and stunning as anything you’d get in a jewel case from HMV.


But I don’t think even Sylvia Plath would have wished to be a kind of Doris Day woman, all swirly skirts and cookie production. And that all-important fixed on smile, of course. Many of Plath’s poems are certainly not in the voice of Mrs Mop with a can of Mr Sheen. "The Applicant" has a go at the whole concept of the conventional marriage, in which the little woman is simply "it" – "A living doll…", a servant to her husband. Plath may

have rejected feminism, but it’s still possible to say that she wrote feminist poems; either way, her work remains relevant – to both genders.





Gender apart, the tone of many of her poems is one of revenge and aggression, rather than submission and subservience. The poems have a toughness, even (dare I say it?)

masculine qualities. Even the poems ostensibly about death (and derided, along with anything that smacks of the deathwish) are often about metaphorical deaths – and a death which leads to a rebirth or a renewal: "I rise with my red hair/And I eat men like air". I think it’s all too easy to get bogged down in the Plath Myth and all the attendant theorising. It’s perhaps impossible to separate tWhat also stuns me about Plath is that her work still sounds completely contemporary and makes many of the younger poets currently writing sound old-fashioned and straight-jacketed. Over-wordy, over-academic. Take a line such as "A man in black with a Meinkampf look" ("Daddy"); or a poem like "Gigolo". Her poems flow like sparkling rain – slangy, snappy – and are not hidebound by the constraints of academia and what is deemed acceptable poetry by the pundits of the day. It’s for these reasons, I think, as much as her subject matter, that makes her appeal to young people. Back to the rightly famous "Daddy" – with its repeated "oo" sound, this hypnotic poem is like a sinister, twisted nursery rhyme. This is rock n roll, as vital and stunning as anything you’d get in a jewel case from HMV.




he poetry from what we imagine to be the woman, but I think it’s worth at least attempting to read the poems as they stand, stripped of the biography. Read it simply as remarkable poetry written by a poet who went straight for the heart: "And I/Am the arrow".





Documents

Feminist strategies of Syliva Plath