Ariel (1962). Content and Description

Written on Plath’s 30th birthday, “Ariel” depicts a frenzied horse ride through the English countryside, the speaker’s movement into the unknown out of the stable (the “Stasis in darkness”) and toward “the red / Eye, the cauldron of morning.” Plath ordered her collection Ariel so that this poem would appear as the 15th work. Ariel was the name of the horse Plath rode near the Devon village where she and Ted Hughes had purchased an old church rectory the year before. Yet, rather than merely record a true experience on her horse (Ted Hughes confirmed after Sylvia’s death that she had had such an experience, when her horse ran uncontrollably and she held on for her life as the horse raced back to the stable), Plath creates a mythic morning ride filled with literary allusions.

For example, Plath wrote “God’s lioness” on a draft of the poem: the literal translation of the Hebrew word Ariel, which in Isaiah 29:1-3 and 5-7 stands for Jerusalem, the holy city chosen by God and the city whose fiery end Isaiah prophesies. The destruction of Jerusalem is an apocalyptic event as Isaiah describes it, one that leaves the temple, the connection with divinity and source of religious life, in ruins. “Ariel” focuses on a similarly destructive experience—one in which the self as it is known is transformed at the end of a harrowing ride.

The speaker clings to the horse’s neck while berry bushes with hooks threaten and then appear as “Black sweet blood mouthfuls.” One with the horse, who hauls her through the air, the speaker is a “White Godiva”: Lady Godiva riding naked (“I unpeel——”) and a pale, ghostlike goddess who appears corpselike (“Dead hands, dead stringencies”). Capturing the madness of the ride and all of its rushing images, the poem assaults the reader, leaving us with few concrete ideas to hold on to and a string of unprocessed images and sensory details, creating a jarring effect, at once the experience of the loss of self and the violent ride on a horse out of control.

As the horse speeds along, the speaker joins the landscape: “And now I / Foam to wheat, a glitter of seas.” As a child’s cry rings in the air, the speaker becomes both arrow and morning dew, both of which fly toward redness, the arrow toward the target’s center and the dew evaporating in “the cauldron of morning.”

Plath associates the speaker’s movement and transformation in the poem with a radical transformation of the self arrived at through suffering, a kind of purgatorial religious experience. While the poem’s title refers to Plath’s horse and the city of Jerusalem, “Ariel” also refers to the magical, androgynous sprite in Shakespeare’s Tempest (1611), who, freed from a witch’s spell by Prospero, conjures the tempest that causes both the play’s shipwreck and mischief.

From a Shakespearean perspective, Ariel symbolizes emancipation, the liberation that Prospero grants the elfin sprite. In the Plath poem, this sense of freedom is arrived at after the speaker travels into the sun. As many scholars have, it is tempting to read the poem as an allegory of the end of Plath’s marriage and the beginning of her new journey alone. Regardless of the autobiographical elements, the poem describes the disintegration of an old self and the possibility of renewal. The poem portrays a powerful woman, sexualized, one with a wild animal, heading into the morning light, a place where the self, as the morning dew, dissolves in the air.

For Discussion or Writing:
1. In one of his Birthday Letters addressed to Plath, Ted Hughes writes, “Red was your color. / . . . [Red] Was what you wrapped around you.” How does Plath use the color red in “Ariel”? What does the color red signify, and why is it important to the poem’s possible meanings?

2. Consider the structure of the poem: 10 three-line stanzas with a single closing line. That structure appears to be straightforward; with such a structure one might expect some sort of continuity between the stanzas, yet the stanzas are often difficult to decipher; one often has to reread to tell where one image or subject ends and another begins. With this in mind, what effect does the structure have? How does Plath wed content and form in the poem?

3. “Ariel” is a violent poem containing sexual images. What does the poem’s violence signify? Why is it necessary to sexualize the speaker? What significance do the poem’s violent, sexual images have?

4. After consulting a reliable Internet source such as http://www.historic-uk.com/CultureUK/Lady Godiva.htm, analyze how Plath works with the traditional myth of Lady Godiva in “Ariel.” What similarities can you find? What differences? Why is it significant that Plath chose this literary allusion? After considering these questions, write a well-developed essay that explores Plath’s poem and the Lady Godiva myth.

5. In her novel The Bell Jar Plath uses an arrow metaphor to describe the relationship between genders: “What a man is an arrow into the future and what a woman is is the place the arrow shoots off from.” With this metaphorical description in mind, write a well-developed essay on the arrow imagery/metaphor in “Ariel.”