Comparing Suffering in Plaths Ariel, Stings, Lady...

Portrayal of Suffering in Plaths Ariel, Stings, Lady Lazarus, Wintering, and Fever 103 ° Sylvia Plaths poems evoke the worst of subjective fallacies. Probably some of our charged reactions are symptomatic of the times and the culture; but more of them seem to stem from the always-too-easy identification between troubled poet and what might be the tone of imagery and rhythm of the poem considered. Because Plath worked so intensively in archetypal imagery (water, air, fire as bases for image patterns, for example), many of her poems could be read as either dark wasteland kinds of expressions, or as the reverse, as death-by-water, salvation poems--destruction implied, but also survived, phoenix-like. Ariel, the title†¦show more content†¦The stasis is momentary, for immediately after the pause that the word shadows creates comes the fragmentary picture of the woman being forcibly taken through air--thighs hair / flakes from my heels. And the statement-like close of that vivid image is the apostrophe to the naked Godiva (physically, and emotionally, white, a link to the many images of purity and chastity in these Ariel poems), who finds her freedom in the physical act of unpeeling--not clothes, in this case, but Dead hands, dead stringencies. There is no motion in either of these things; either the sexual links with the image of hands, or the compulsive duty-oriented links with the image of stringency. Once free of these deadnesses, the rider/persona can then take off to the ecstasy that awaits her. That the progression has been a fairly tortuous one is suggested, effectively, by the back-and-forth emphasis on stasis and then speed; but that the poem ends with the sheer joy of movement can be read only as affirmation. Metamorphosis, transcendence blots out even those all-important cries from the children that other poems of Plaths show to be so beloved, as the poem closes (and the line arrangement here is, of course, mine): And now I foam to wheat, a glitter of seas, (The childs cry melts in the wall) and I am the arrow the dew that flies suicidal, at one with