Poem Sylvia Plath Dress
The poem “Words” portrays the hegemony and abandonment of poetry art which is described purely in a metaphorical way. Sylvia Plath manipulated the poem with devices such as repetition, metaphors and enjambment which made the poem truly remarkable and majestic.
Death
Death is an ever-present reality in Plath's poetry, and manifests in several different ways.
One common theme is the void left by her father's death. In 'Full Fathom Five,' she speaks of his death and burial, mourning that she is forever exiled. In 'The Colossus,' she tries in vain to put him back together again and make him speak. In 'Daddy,' she goes further in claiming that she wants to kill him herself, finally exorcising his vicious hold over her mind and her work.
- Sylvia Plath. An Appearance. By Sylvia Plath. It will make little dresses and coats, It will cover a dynasty. How her body opens and shuts - A Swiss watch, jeweled in the hinges! O heart, such disorganization! The stars are flashing like terrible numerals. ABC, her eyelids say. Share this Poem: poem. Next poem Sylvia Plath.
- Most people know the story of Sylvia Plath — the famed poet who took her own life at thirty years of age, distraught by the abandonment of her husband, poet laureate Ted Hughes. But few are as well-acquainted with Assia Wevill, the scorned “other woman” in this tragic love triangle — who.
Death is also dealt with in terms of suicide, which eerily corresponds to her own suicide attempts and eventual death by suicide. In 'Lady Lazarus,' she claims that she has mastered the art of dying after trying to kill herself multiple times. She sneers that everyone is used to crowding in and watching her self-destruct. Suicide, though, is presented as a desirable alternative in many of these works. The poems suggest it would release her from the difficulties of life, and bring her transcendence wherein her mind could free itself from its corporeal cage. This desire is exhilaratingly expressed in 'Ariel,' and bleakly and resignedly expressed in 'Edge.' Death is an immensely vivid aspect of Plath's work, both in metaphorical and literal representations.
Victimization
Plath felt like a victim to the men in her life, including her father, her husband, and the great male-dominated literary world. Her poetry can often be understood as response to these feelings of victimization, and many of the poems with a male figure can be interpreted as referring to any or all of these male forces in her life.
In regards to her father, she realized she could never escape his terrible hold over her; she expressed her sense of victimhood in 'The Colossus' and 'Daddy,' using powerful metaphors and comparisons to limn a man who figured heavily in her psyche.
Her husband also victimized her through the power he exerted as a man, both by assuming he should have the literary career and through his infidelity. Plath felt relegated to a subordinate, 'feminine' position which stripped from her any autonomy or power. Her poems from the 'Colossus' era express her frustration over the strictures under which she operated. For instance, 'A Life' evokes a menacing and bleak future for Plath. However, in her later poems, she seems finally able to transcend her status as victim by fully embracing her creative gifts ('Ariel'), metaphorically killing her father ('Daddy'), and committing suicide ('Lady Lazarus', 'Edge').
Patriarchy
Plath lived and worked in 1950s/1960s England and America, societies characterized by very strict gender norms. Women were expected to remain safely ensconced in the house, with motherhood as their ultimate joy and goal. Women who ventured into the arts found it difficult to attain much attention for their work, and were often subject to marginalization and disdain. Plath explored and challenged this reductionist tendency through her work, offering poems of intense vitality and stunning language. She depicted the bleakness of the domestic scene, the disappointment of pregnancy, the despair over her husband's infidelity, her tortured relationship with her father, and her attempts to find her own creative voice amidst the crushing weight of patriarchy. She shied away from using genteel language and avoided writing only of traditionally 'female' topics. Most impressively, the work remains poetic and artistic - rather than political - because of her willing to admit ambivalence over all these expectations, admitting that both perspectives can prove a trap.
Nature
Images and allusions to nature permeate Plath's poetry. She often evokes the sea and the fields to great effect. The sea is usually associated with her father; it is powerful, unpredictable, mesmerizing, and dangerous. In 'Full Fathom Five,' her father is depicted as a sea god. An image of the sea is also used in 'Contusion,' there suggesting a terrible sense of loss and loneliness.
She also pulled from her personal life, writing of horse-riding on the English fields, in 'Sheep in Fog' and 'Ariel.' In these cases, she uses the activity to suggest an otherworldly, mystical arena in which creative thought or unfettered emotion can be expressed.
Nature is also manifested in the bright red tulips which jolt the listless Plath from her post-operation stupor, insisting that she return to the world of the living. Here, nature is a provoker, an instigator - it does not want her to give up. Nature is a ubiquitous theme in Plath's work; it is a potent force that is sometimes unpredictable, but usually works to encourage her creative output.
The self
Plath has often been grouped into the confessional movement of poetry. One of the reasons for this classification is that she wrote extensively of her own life, her own thoughts, her own worries. Any great artist both creates his or her art and is created by it, and Plath was always endeavoring to know herself better through her writing. She tried to come to terms with her personal demons, and tried to work through her problematic relationships. For instance, she tried to understand her ambivalence about motherhood, and tried to vent her rage at her failed marriage.
However, her exploration of herself can also be understood as an exploration of the idea of the self, as it stands opposed to society as a whole and to other people, whom she did not particularly like. Joyce Carol Oates wrote that even Plath's children seemed to be merely the objects of her perception, rather than subjective extensions of herself. The specifics of Plath's work were drawn from her life, but endeavored to transcend those to ask more universal questions. Most infamously, Plath imagined her self as a Jew, another wounded and persecuted victim. She also tried to engage with the idea of self in terms of the mind and body dialectic. 'Edge' and 'Sheep in Fog' explore her desire to leave the earthly life, but express some ambivalence about what is to come after. 'Ariel' suggests it is glory and oneness with nature, but the other two poems do not seem to know what will happen to the mind/soul once the body is eradicated. This conflict - between the self and the world outside - can be used to understand almost all of Plath's poems.
The Body
Many of Plath's poems deal with the body, in terms of motherhood, wounds, operations, and death.
In 'Metaphors,' she describes how her body does not feel like it is her own; she is simply a 'means' towards delivering a child. In 'Tulips' and 'A Life,' the body has undergone an operation. With the surgery comes an excising of emotion, attachment, connection, and responsibility. The physical cut has resulted in an emotional severing, which is a relief to the depressed woman. 'Cut' depicts the thrill Plath feels on almost cutting her own thumb off. It is suggested that she feels more alive as she contemplates her nearly-decapitated thumb, and watches the blood pool on the floor. 'Contusion' takes things further - she has received a bruise for some reason, but unlike in 'Cut,' where she eventually seems to grow uneasy with the wound, she seems to welcome the physical pain, since the bruise suggests an imminent end to her suffering. Suicide, the most profound and dramatic thing one can do to one's own body, is also central to many of her poems.
Overall, it is clear that Plath was constantly discerning the relationship between mind and body, and was fascinated with the implications of bodily pain.
Motherhood
Motherhood is a major theme in Plath's work. She was profoundly ambivalent about this prescribed role for women, writing in 'Metaphors' about how she felt insignificant as a pregnant woman, a mere 'means' to an end. She lamented how grotesque she looked, and expressed her resignation over a perceived lack of options. However, in 'Child,' she delights in her child's perception of and engagement with the world. Of course, 'Child' ends with the suggestions that she knows her child will someday see the harsh reality of life. Plath did not want her children to be contaminated by her own despair. This fear may also have manifested itself in her last poem, 'Edge,' in which some critics have discerned a desire to kill her children and take them with her far from the terrors of life. Other poems in her oeuvre express the same tension. Overall, Plath clearly loved her children, but was not completely content in either pregnancy or motherhood.
Summary
'Ariel' depicts a woman riding her horse in the countryside, at the very break of dawn. It details the ecstasy and personal transformation that occurs through the experience.
The poem begins with complete immobility in the darkness, while the rider waits on the horse. There is then a change – the intangible blue of hills and distances come into being. The rider is 'God's lioness;' she experiences the sensation of becoming one with her horse in a powerful entangling of knees and heels. The plowed field on which she rides soon splits and vanishes behind her, remaining elusive like the brown neck of her steed that she 'cannot catch.'
As she rides, the narrator observes black berries 'cast[ing] dark hooks,' and a profusion of shadows. There is 'something else' that forcefully pulls her through the air as she rides, its strength described as thighs, hair, and her heels, which flake from the force of the ride.
Poem Sylvia Plath Dress Code
She compares herself to Lady Godiva, who rode naked upon her horse. In the midst of the ride, she can slough off things of no consequence –'dead hands, dead stringencies.' She views herself as the foam on wheat, as a sparkling of light on the ocean. She discerns a child's cry through a wall, but ignores it.
The rider is now a potent arrow, as well as dew that 'flies suicidal.' She has been subsumed into both the horse and the ride as she propels herself forward into the rising sun, which is depicted as a powerful red Eye.
Analysis
'Ariel's short length and seeming simplicity – a woman rides her horse through the countryside at dawn – is belied by the incredible amount of critical attention and praise that the poem has received since its publication in 1965. It is considered one of Plath's most accomplished and enigmatic poems, for it explores far more than a simple daybreak ride. It must be noted that this poem provides the title for her collection Ariel, selected after she rejected the title 'Daddy.' The poem justifies its centrality through a use of dazzling imagery, vivid emotional resonance, historical and biblical allusions, and a breathtaking sense of movement. Critics tend to discuss the poem as explorations of several different subjects, including: poetic creativity; sexuality; Judaism; animism; suicide and death; self-realization and self-transformation; and mysticism.
To begin with, the name Ariel refers to three different things: Sylvia Plath's own horse, which she loved to ride; the androgynous sprite from Shakespeare's play The Tempest; and Jerusalem, which was also called Ariel in the Old Testament. Critics who discuss Shakespeare's Ariel tend to read Plath's poem as an exploration of poetic creativity and process. Shakespeare's Ariel embodies this power, and Plath may be attempting to fashion a metaphor for the process of writing a poem. The poet begins in darkness, but is then hauled along by the inspiration of poetic language. The poem begins in passivity, but moves into one of control and power. The critic Susan van Dyne notes how the poet's self-transformation is manifest in her use of complete sentences, which begins midway through the poem. She becomes both male and female, horse and rider, poet and creative force, arrow and target. She is not merely a captive of the creative drive, but its agent.
In regards to the biblical allusion of Jerusalem, it is no doubt a product of Plath's fascination – nay, obsession – with Judaism and the Jews. 'Ariel' translates to 'lion of God' from Hebrew, and Plath refers to herself as 'God's lioness' in line 4. Critics have observed a recurrent motif in Plath's poetry wherein she associates horses with religious ecstasy. Riding seemed to be a way to achieve this transcendence. William V. Davis sees Plath as wanting to communicate this private, ecstatic, and nearly-unknowable experience to the reader. He considers the rhyming scheme of the last line –'Eye, the cauldron of morning' – and sees it as tying together the personal activity of riding a horse, the communal connotations of the Hebrew race and its suffering, and the cauldron, which is a way to '[mix] all of the foregoing elements together into a kind of melting pot of emotion, history, and personal involvement.' She does not mean to declare herself an inhabitant of Jerusalem, but as one connected to it through greater, transcendental forces.
The allusion to Lady Godiva is an important one, as it suggests issues of the feminine and the masculine. In the 11th century Anglo-Saxon legend, Lady Godiva was the wife of an English lord who rode naked through the streets in order to gain a remission from the heavy tax he had placed upon his tenants. She had been frustrated with his stubbornness and greed in the taxation matter, and continued to demand that her husband ease the burden. He finally agreed to do so if she would strip naked and ride her horse through the town. The townspeople agreed to refrain from looking at her; only one man, 'Peeping Tom,' did not keep his promise. Quite obviously, Plath wishes to connect her ride through darkness to that of Lady Godiva. The connection can be understood in terms of the privacy she enjoys on her ride, or as suggestion that she rides for a greater cause than simply her own pleasure. The allusion also resonates because of the prevailing fascination western culture has with the forbidden figure of the female nude and the problems of spectacle; Plath uses this image to take control of her self-display, and does not mention any male gaze at all. She embraces her ride and all of its evocations of power, including sexual power, and is able to ignore even a child's cry that 'melts in the wall.' On this ride, she can firmly declare her feminine independence away from stifling patriarchal forces.
The poem is indeed full of sexual imagery. Some examples include: lines 5 and 6 ('How one we grow,/Pivot of heels and knees!'); line 17 ('thighs, hair'); and the imagery of the phallic arrow. All of these lend credence to the claim that 'Ariel' is an erotic poem. Plath is clearly the female rider, but she identifies with the horse's masculinity. Further, when she ignores the child's cry, she is refusing to accept the traditionally female role of mother and care-giver. Shakespeare's Ariel is an androgynous figure, and Plath's 'Ariel' might also be statement about how a female poet, when possessed by the poetic creative fury, is not a female anymore – the genius transcends gender. The transcendence is not a violent one, and is not aimed at destroying men, however. Instead, it lies entirely outside of gender.
Finally, in critic Marjorie Perloff's discussion of animism and angst, she claims Plath's poetry as representative of the ecstatic, oracular poetic type, which centered upon self, thereby eschewing any sort of narrative objectivity. Plath identifies with the animal kingdom to express herself, depicting humans as lifeless and cold, and animals as vibrant and alive. She wishes to lose her human identity and commit to the instinct of animal, which rids her of any objectivity or judgment. In 'Ariel,' she is 'God's lioness' as she becomes one with her force in a vivid trance. Perloff comments that 'at its most intense, life becomes death but it is a death that is desired: the 'Suicidal' leap into the 'red / Eye' of the morning sun is not only violent but ecstatic.' Animism is a way to demonstrate how one is taken out of one's quotidian life and one's self to achieve a state of transcendence and communion.
Poem Sylvia Plath Dress For Men
If one is so inclined, one can even connect this interpretation to the feminist and creative interpretations to suggest that Plath's ultimate goal was to relate ecstatic frenzy - how we identify and understand the frenzy ultimately reveals our own personality and interest.