"Ariel" by Sylvia Plath
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
I looked up the word Ariel- a gazelle found in the Middle East and North Africa.
ReplyDeleteThe N-bomb was an odd surprise. I looked up to see if there was a meaning I didn't know. But ti looks like a weird choice in 2020 to describe black berries. I also found this in a 2013 New Yorker article by Dan Chiasson. Sylvia Plath's Joy
"There is nothing else like this in English; it is, I think, a perfect poem, perfect in its excesses and stray blasphemies (that “nigger-eye”), which make Plath Plath—that is to say, dangerous, heedless, a menace, and irresistible. The greatest thing in it, though, is a detail whose uncanniness will strike any new parent: “The child’s cry / Melts in the wall.”"
These poems are starting to all feel the same. Maybe I need to space them out, or read the whole poetry book in one sitting.
They feel the same to me too, and yet I keep reading on and on.... I think it takes so little for the energy of her sound to be understood. So very little for us to know her, and yet she has a way of saying the exact same thing a lifetime of different ways...brilliance!! The imperfection of a Poet.
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