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Ariel by Sylvia Plath

7/9/2008 8:59:05 AM
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Sylvia Plath Sylvia Plath
(1932 - 1963 / America)
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124 poems of Sylvia Plath

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Ariel
 
  Stasis in darkness.
Then the substanceless blue
Pour of tor and distances.

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

Splits and passes, sister to
The brown arc
Of the neck I cannot catch,

Nigger-eye
Berries cast dark
Hooks ---

Black sweet blood mouthfuls,
Shadows.
Something else

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

White
Godiva, I unpeel ---
Dead hands, dead stringencies.

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

Melts in the wall.
And I
Am the arrow,

The dew that flies,
Suicidal, at one with the drive
Into the red

Eye, the cauldron of morning.

Sylvia Plath


Read poems about / on: sister, child, hair, red, dark, god, children

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Comments about this poem (Ariel by Sylvia Plath)  more comments >>
Click here to write your comments about this poem (Ariel by Sylvia Plath)
 
Mary Ferachi (3/13/2008 9:48:00 PM)
It seems as if she's almost having a nightmare of sorts. I think it's very foreboding...
Deborah Conner (1/29/2008 1:38:00 PM)
The key to plath's poem is The Tempest.... her personal setting is the loss of her father.

William Shakespeare (1564-1616)

from The Tempest

Ariel's Song

Come unto these yellow sands,
And then take hands:
Curtsied when you have, and kiss'd
The wild waves whist,
Foot it featly here and there;
And, sweet sprites, the burthen bear.
Hark, hark!
Bow-wow.
The watch-dogs bark.
Bow-wow.
Hark, hark! I hear
The strain of strutting chanticleer
Cry, Cock-a-diddle-dow.

Full fathom five thy father lies;
Of his bones are coral made;
Those are pearls that were his eyes:
Nothing of him that doth fade,
But doth suffer a sea-change
Into something rich and strange.
Sea-nymphs hourly ring his knell:
Ding-dong.
Hark! now I hear them—Ding-dong, bell.

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7/9/2008 8:59:05 AM. You Are Here: Ariel by Sylvia Plath

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