2015: The Year of Reading Women discussion
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Ariel by Sylvia Plath
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Bloodorange wrote: "Connie wrote: We have around 27-28 more poems left in "Ariel". I'm going to be having extra reading for a course I am taking, starting the third week of February, so I also might be a lurker some w..."I'd also like to read all the poems, even if activity is low. From my perspective, if the poems are posted and people don't have time or interest to comment, that's all right, but it's great to have the chance to read and consider. My time is limited as well but I'm relishing the opportunity to immerse myself in Plath's work, and I don't mind if we move along more slowly. If choosing poems is what the majority prefers, that's fine too.
There are some that seem to be interested in reading all the poems so I would hate to disappoint them. I think we all have an interest in Plath, but some of us may be short on time because we have other reading. Let's see how it goes for another month. If we find it gets to be too much to read them all in the future, we can always change and wrap it up with some favorite poems.
Connie wrote: "There are some that seem to be interested in reading all the poems so I would hate to disappoint them. I think we all have an interest in Plath, but some of us may be short on time because we have..."That sounds like a good compromise to me, Connie. It gives us a plan in the shorter term, with the option of re-evaluating later if necessary.
I have come up with a short list of poems, if need be. I must admit that what is between the point we're at and the end of the collection feels like a lot, but we have February to decide.The next poem is 'Cut'.
Cut
For Susan O'Neill Roe
What a thrill --
My thumb instead of an onion.
The top quite gone
Except for a sort of a hinge
Of skin,
A flap like a hat,
Dead white.
Then that red plush.
Little pilgrim,
The Indian's axed your scalp.
Your turkey wattle
Carpet rolls
Straight from the heart.
I step on it,
Clutching my bottle
Of pink fizz.
A celebration, this is.
Out of a gap
A million soldiers run,
Redcoats, every one.
Whose side are they on?
O my
Homunculus, I am ill.
I have taken a pill to kill
The thin
Papery feeling.
Saboteur,
Kamikaze man --
The stain on your
Gauze Ku Klux Klan
Babushka
Darkens and tarnishes and when
The balled
Pulp of your heart
Confronts its small
Mill of silence
How you jump--
Trepanned veteran,
Dirty girl,
Thumb stump.
24.10.62
Thank you for posting "Cut", Bloodorange.The poem is dedicated to Susan O'Neill Roe, her friend and the nanny for Plath's children. It seemed to be a strange poem to dedicate to someone, unless Susan had bandaged Plath's finger.
Plath starts off with "What a thrill--". Is she being sarcastic, or is she excited at the sight of blood? She uses red color images for the blood such as "red plush", "turkey wattle", "the heart", and "Redcoats".
She injects a little lightness describing the anticeptic (maybe something containing peroxide that fizzes) as a sparkling wine:
"Clutching my bottle
Of pink fizz. A celebration, this
is."
Plath has personified her thumb in the imagery, even calling her thumb "Homunculus" (a small human being, a little man).
A cut with blood pouring out brings violence to mind. Many of the images in the poem are of violent men taken from history, such as:
"Little pilgrim,
The Indian axed your scalp."
"A million soldiers run,
Redcoats, every one."
"Kamikaze man"
"Trepanned veteran"
"The stain on your
Gauze Ku Klux Klan
Babushka".
(For non-Americans, the Klan are violent racists who dress up in white sheets with white hoods so they can not be identified.)
I wanted to add something intelligent;) and looked into my materials, and to my surprise saw that 'Cut' is referred to as a very aggressive poem. Strange. It seems festive to me - unless it's written in the same sarcastic-grotesque vein as 'A Secret'.
Well, she did cut off the top of her finger, so I'm guessing she's not too happy with that, and yes, I assumed the thrill was meant as sarcasm. I thought "Redcoats" might refer to red blood corpuscles?Re the Klu Klux Klan, this is obviously what the bandaged digit looks like to her - a sinister hooded person.
Traveller wrote: " I thought "Redcoats" might refer to red blood corpuscles?"And the traditional name for British soldiers, right?
Bloodorange wrote: "Traveller wrote: " I thought "Redcoats" might refer to red blood corpuscles?"And the traditional name for British soldiers, right?"
Yes. :) But it kind of fit in for me, because people often see blood corpuscles as soldiers, though admittedly the white ones. (White corpuscles, i meant, because they are the ones fighting infection.)
Maybe the red blood cells are the soldiers in charge of supplies--carrying the oxygen :)
Connie wrote: "Maybe the red blood cells are the soldiers in charge of supplies--carrying the oxygen :)"I *really* dislike this poem for some reason. Maybe it's the tone. Interesting/odd that it's dedicated to her friend/children's nanny.
Connie wrote: "Thank you for posting "Cut", Bloodorange.Plath starts off with "What a thrill--". Is she being sarcastic, or is she excited at the sight of blood? She uses red color images for the blood such as "red plush", "turkey wattle", "the heart", and "Redcoats". ..."
Thanks for that reading, Connie. That's helpful. Looking again at the poem, I wonder if she's expressing/feeling both sarcasm and excitement?
To me one of the most interesting lines is about the red blood cells/redcoats: "Whose side are they on?"
That whole British-American juxtaposition and reference to American Revolution. It reminds me of the word "turncoats," too - how that might bring in a theme of betrayal.
Obscureason, interesting observations about the Redcoats, especially since Plath is an American who is "at war" with an Englishman. On one level she seems to be writing about her cut, but there is an undercurrent about her personal situation of feeling brokenhearted in the lines:"The balled
Pulp of your heart"
Connie wrote: "Obscureason, interesting observations about the Redcoats, especially since Plath is an American who is "at war" with an Englishman. On one level she seems to be writing about her cut, but there is..."The ongoing "war" with the husband, definitely. And so much feeling there, I agree. Those last three stanzas are especially unsettling, again bordering on disgust. They make me feel quite ill. All of the awful, powerful imagery, some of which you've already pointed to - the pump of the blood through the bandage, comparing her bandaged thumb to a Klu Klux Klan "babushka" (what a juxtaposition), to a "trepanned veteran," "dirty girl" ...
The stain on your
Gauze Ku Klux Klan
Babushka
Darkens and tarnishes and when
The balled
Pulp of your heart
Confronts its small
Mill of silence
How you jump--
Trepanned veteran,
Dirty girl,
Thumb stump.
Is it time to post the next one?Elm
For Ruth Fainlight
I know the bottom, she says. I know it with my great tap root:
It is what you fear.
I do not fear it: I have been there.
Is it the sea you hear in me,
Its dissatisfactions?
Or the voice of nothing, that was your madness?
Love is a shadow.
How you lie and cry after it
Listen: these are its hooves: it has gone off, like a horse.
All night I shall gallop thus, impetuously,
Till your head is a stone, your pillow a little turf,
Echoing, echoing.
Or shall I bring you the sound of poisons?
This is rain now, this big hush.
And this is the fruit of it: tin-white, like arsenic.
I have suffered the atrocity of sunsets.
Scorched to the root
My red filaments burn and stand, a hand of wires.
Now I break up in pieces that fly about like clubs.
A wind of such violence
Will tolerate no bystanding: I must shriek.
The moon, also, is merciless: she would drag me
Cruelly, being barren.
Her radiance scathes me. Or perhaps I have caught her.
I let her go. I let her go
Diminished and flat, as after radical surgery.
How your bad dreams possess and endow me.
I am inhabited by a cry.
Nightly it flaps out
Looking, with its hooks, for something to love.
I am terrified by this dark thing
That sleeps in me;
All day I feel its soft, feathery turnings, its malignity.
Clouds pass and disperse.
Are those the faces of love, those pale irretrievables?
Is it for such I agitate my heart?
I am incapable of more knowledge.
What is this, this face
So murderous in its strangle of branches?——
Its snaky acids hiss.
It petrifies the will. These are the isolate, slow faults
That kill, that kill, that kill.
I find this poem very interesting - partly because I have recently came across a beautiful fragment on the biological peculiarities of the elm in A. S. Byatt's Still Life:An English elm grove is one individual, reproducing itself by suckers. It is true that the tree has flowers, what are called "perfect" flowers, male and female in one, the male stamens protruding above the female anther, so that when the flowers open, very early, February perhaps, the pollen cells can be blown in the wind to cross-fertilize other trees. But the English elm propagates itself underground, and was probably imported by Stone Age tribed who valued its suckering habit for fences. It might be thought a peculiarly happy tree, a self-sufficient tree, a kind of single eternity. The lack of variation among the clones, however, makes them peculiarly susceptible to the same disease. But in the 1955 was a sempiternal, essential part of our English landscape.Another Celtic reference? But elms grew near their home - in one of his poems, 'The Afterbirth' Hughes
recounts how during the birth of their son at home, he caught the placenta in a bowl he used for preparing jugged hare and then buried it under an elm tree watched by his wife.(Bassnett, Susan. Sylvia Plath. An Introduction to the Poetry. 2e, p. 152)Form-wise, I am struck by the irregular form of stanzas.
According to Bassnett, this poem "returns to Plath’s favourite images of trees at night, the sea and the cold whiteness of the moon." (p. 42)
Hughes notes on the 'Elm': "On 19 April she wrote 'Elm', and Hughes notes that the manuscript version of this poem shows the poet struggling with her material, battling for control
when suddenly it burst all her restraints and she let it go. And at once the Ariel voice emerged in full." (Bassnett p. 41)
Very interesting information about elm trees, Bloodorange. We don't see these majestic trees much anymore since the blight. Thanks for taking the time to post the poem since you've been so busy leading the "Wide Sargasso Sea" thread. (I've been lurking, but it's been years since I read WSS.)The elm tree is speaking as a woman who has lost love, and uses upsetting images from nature to express her feelings. More later.
"Elm" starts out with a phrase expressing unhappiness, speaking through an elm tree:"I know the bottom, she says. I know it with my great tap root"
In the next stanza, Plath shows disturbances by using the upheaval of the sea:
"Is it the sea you hear in me,
Its dissatisfactions?"
Love has gone away, like a horse galloping away:
"Listen: these are its hooves: it has gone off, like a horse."
Love only brings unhappiness:
"And this is the fruit of it: tin-white, like arsenic."
Love is ending so the poem compares it to sunsets, the end of the day.
Like a tree in a violent storm, she is breaking up and shrieking in the wind:
"Now I break up in pieces that fly about like clubs.
A wind of such violence
Will tolerate no bystanding: I must shriek."
Using another nature image, she feels like a predatory bird looking for love:
"I am inhabited by a cry.
Nightly it flaps out
Looking, with its hooks, for something to love."
She compares her dark, depressed feelings growing inside her to a fetus in her womb:
"I am terrified by this dark thing
That sleeps in me;
All day I feel its soft, feathery turnings, its malignity."
Love just floats away like clouds.
She goes back to the image of a tree--a crooked scary tree that may strangle her in its branches:
"What is this, this face
So murderous in its strangle of branches?"
There is a sexual connotation, and the words themselves hiss in the line:
"Its snaky acids hiss"
Like the wood of a tree, she is dead and petrified. She makes her point by repeating the words "that kill" three times:
"It petrifies the will. These are the isolate, slow faults
That kill, that kill, that kill."
thanks everyone for the readings of this poem and for the additional information. Connie, I like your comparison of Plath/speaker of poem to a predatory bird in stanzas 10 + 11.That first stanza must be one of the most powerful and iconic in all of Western literature. It rivals Eliot in The Wasteland.
I know the bottom, she says. I know it with my great tap root:
It is what you fear.
I do not fear it: I have been there.
The poem is very powerful; not only is Plath adept in making her speakers suffer inhuman pain, but the story features love, madness, and death, and has an archaic and haunting 'feel', an appeal similar to Goethe's 'Der Erlkönig'. Love is a shadow.It took me a while before I noticed the tomb reference above.
How you lie and cry after it
Listen: these are its hooves: it has gone off, like a horse.
All night I shall gallop thus, impetuously,
Till your head is a stone, your pillow a little turf,
Echoing, echoing.
Bloodorange wrote: "The poem is very powerful; not only is Plath adept in making her speakers suffer inhuman pain, but the story features love, madness, and death, and has an archaic and haunting 'feel', an appeal sim..."Interesting!
I was also able to find some info about the Elm: In some traditions, elms symbolize death and/or birth. And to your point, Bloodorange, coffins were often made from elmwood. The Elm symbolizes wisdom, strength of will and intuition. Elms are also said to be a bridge between worlds, this one and spirit worlds.
This website , which looks to be chapters from a book by Ann Skea called Sylvia Plath, Ariel and the Tarot has some fascinating notes on this poem, including the suggestion that the speaker is the elm tree, and this (some of which was mentioned by Bloodorange and also relevant to your other points, such as irregularity of form):
It is impossible to write about the next poem, ‘Elm’ (dated 12-19 April 1962), without referring to what Ted Hughes wrote about it. After tracing in Plath’s journals her ‘Jungian’ drama of “alchemical individuation of self”, which “began with a ‘death’, which was followed by a long ‘gestation’ or ‘regeneration’, which in turn would ultimately require a ‘birth’ or ‘rebirth’”, Hughes describes how she “started a poem about a giant wych elm that overshadowed the yard of her home”.
For him, the drafts of the poem show Plath’s struggle to control the poem, to force it into order when “the lines try to take the law into their own hands”. Ultimately, “it burst all her restraints and she let it go”, and this was the instant when, according to Hughes, “the Ariel voice emerged, in full, out of the tree”, and “from that day on it never faltered again“.
Hughes saw ‘Elm’ as a poem of ‘birth’, and also as the poem which marked Plath’s confrontation through the dramatic speech of Ariel, with all that threatened “the nucleus of self” which she had for so long been “nursing and repairing”.
Elms, in British and North-European folk–lore, have many magical associations with birth and death and Plath almost certainly knew about these, if not through her own reading, then through her husband’s extensive knowledge of those subjects. Elms are believed to be a bridge between the world of the dead and that of the living and, partly for this reason, elm–wood is traditionally used for coffins. Elm trees are also associated with elves, and the elf–mounds on which they grow are a source of inspiration and communication with the spirits of the dead.
The elm trees at Court Green grew on just such an elf-mound, and in Hughes’ poem, ‘The Afterbirth’, he writes that after burying the afterbirth of their newborn son in “a motherly hump of ancient Briton/ under the elms”, a hare – “a witchy familiar” (and a form of the Goddess) – “came hobbling down from under the elms/ into our yard”.
Elm , too, was the wood from which Hughes made Plath’s writing desk. On 15 September 1961, she wrote to her mother that Warren, her brother, was helping Hughes to sand “an immense elm plank which will make me my first real capacious writing table”. In Hughes’ poem ‘The Table’, he describes this plank as “Rough-cut for coffin timber”, and he depicts Plath “Bent over it, euphoric”, and able to “divine in the elm” the words which would open “a door / downwards into [her] Daddy’s grave”.
So, the elm in Plath’s poem has associations with the Goddess, with magic, with the spirit world and with death and rebirth, regardless of any link which the poem might have with the Tarot.
It's interesting to read the poem again, with the suggestion that the speaker IS the elm, that the perspective of the poem is that of the elm. Then the elm would be speaking about the inconstancy of the human and of love... compared to Nature's own ageless, timeless strength and mystery.
Clouds pass and disperse.
Are those the faces of love, those pale irretrievables?
Is it for such I agitate my heart?
And speaking to humans about what they hear in the wind, how they hear themselves, echoes of their own dissatisfactions and madness:
Is it the sea you hear in me,
Its dissatisfactions?
Or the voice of nothing, that was your madness?
Or shall I bring you the sound of poisons?
This is rain now, this big hush.
For some reason, I have immediately accepted the speaker-as-elm narrative situation:)Thanks for sharing the article, Obscureason - an interesting read, though in my book, the existence (in all degrees up to prevalence) of Tarot-based analyses of any literary text is a fast proof that all other keys/ ways of reading failed (and the number of such analyses of Ariel only shows how cryptic some of the poems are...)
Bloodorange wrote: "For some reason, I have immediately accepted the speaker-as-elm narrative situation:)Thanks for sharing the article, Obscureason - an interesting read, though in my book, the existence (in all de..."
LOL! Normally I would agree with you, but in this case, it's known that Plath relied on the Tarot to guide her writing in her final years (written about by critic Mary Kurtzman in often-cited work), and this is why I thought it was interesting (though the excerpt I posted didn't include any of the Tarot interpretations).
Not to start a flurry of Tarot research but below is an excerpt from Sylvia Plath: A Literary Life (book available online here):
Critic Mary Kurtzman notes that Plath relied on her knowledge of the Tarot cards (a Western Tarot based on the Hebrew Cabala, replicating the 22 paths on the Cabalistic Tree of Life, each standing for a ‘‘state of consciousness and spiritual unfolding’’) throughout her last years of writing, using the pack as an organizing principle as early as the chapter arrangement of The Bell Jar. She attributes the positive effect of ‘‘Edge’’ to the fact that its details and form suggest that Plath was drawing on the High Priestess card as model, and the role of the High Priestess was to experience the ‘‘highest possible union with the Goddess or God (Tarot divinities are both female and male).’’ Such union is labeled ‘‘Isis perfected’’ and Kurtzman notes that someone wrote ISIS on the final typescript of the poem ‘‘Edge.’’
...
Kurtzman’s reading of ‘‘Ariel’’ depends, line by line, on those beliefs as generated from Tarot card 14, Art or Temperance, on which a black-white woman is doing alchemical work over a cauldron, with a lion and an eagle at her feet. Associated with this iconography is the number 60, the Hebrew letter S, the sign Sagittarius, the God Jupiter, the Goddess Diana, the color blue, the horse, the Arrow, the hips and thighs, the Centaur, and the Path of union with one’s Higher Self or Holy Guardian Angel, symbolized by the Sun. Considering how brief the poem ‘‘Ariel’’ is, the fact that so many of these symbols occur in it lends weight to this critic’s detailed reading (see Centennial Review, 32, 1988). As she concludes, ‘‘Knowing the spiritual meaning of ‘Ariel’ – [the word as translated from the Hebrew means ‘God’s lioness’] – helps one avoid some critical pitfalls.’’
Thank you! I was not sure if Plath relied on Tarot (started to have some suspicions she did - based on the criticism, not my recognition of the imagery/ symbolism), so this is really helpful.(I also noticed the fragment you posted did not contain Tarot references, and actually intended to mention that, but it slipped my mind:(
Bloodorange wrote: "Thank you! I was not sure if Plath relied on Tarot (started to have some suspicions she did - based on the criticism, not my recognition of the imagery/ symbolism), so this is really helpful.(I a..."
No worries. I'm still smiling (broadly) at the thought of using Tarot to randomly interpret poetry ... which might just be silly enough to work!!
:D
This actually sounds like an entertaining idea for a story;) (You posted so soon after me I've only now noticed your last post, so sorry for not having answered more promptly!) And it's time to post another one, I think:
The Night Dances
A smile fell in the grass.
Irretrievable!
And how will your night dances
Lose themselves. In mathematics?
Such pure leaps and spirals -
Surely they travel
The world forever, I shall not entirely
Sit emptied of beauties, the gift
Of your small breath, the drenched grass
Smell of your sleeps, lilies, lilies.
Their flesh bears no relation.
Cold folds of ego, the calla,
And the tiger, embellishing itself -
Spots, and a spread of hot petals.
The comets
Have such a space to cross,
Such coldness, forgetfulness.
So your gestures flake off -
Warm and human, then their pink light
Bleeding and peeling
Through the black amnesias of heaven.
Why am I given
These lamps, these planets
Falling like blessings, like flakes
Six sided, white
On my eyes, my lips, my hair
Touching and melting.
Nowhere.
Very interesting research on "Elm", Obscureason.Thanks for posting the new poem, Bloodorange.
In "The Night Dances" the mother is marveling at her baby, a wonderful gift in her life. This is a beautiful poem, first showing the wonder of a baby making dance-like moves in the night. There is a oneness of the child with nature--the innocence and purity of the calla lily and the exotic danger of the tiger lily.
The poem then moves on to colder, more distant images of nature in the cosmos. From the heavens, the mother is given responsibilities and blessings which fall to her like snowflakes. The ending of this poem is gorgeous:
"Why am I given
These lamps, these planets
Falling like blessings, like flakes
Six sided, white
On my eyes, my lips, my hair
Touching and melting
Nowhere."
I'm sorry, Connie. I have the feeling I left you on your own, but each day I hoped I will be able to add something to your commentary, and each day I failed. I'll try to add something on the next poem tomorrow. The first think that popped up when I was doing my 'homework' was
that: http://ann.skea.com/Ariel4.html, and I feel a little defeated at the moment;)
The Detective
What was she doing when it blew in
Over the seven hills, the red furrow, the blue mountain?
Was she arranging cups? It is important.
Was she at the window, listening?
In that valley the train shrieks echo like souls on hooks.
That is the valley of death, though the cows thrive.
In her garden the lies were shaking out their moist silks
And the eyes of the killer moving sluglike and sidelong,
Unable to face the fingers, those egotists.
The fingers were tamping a woman into a wall,
A body into a pipe, and the smoke rising.
This is the smell of years burning, here in the kitchen,
These are the deceits, tacked up like family photographs,
And this is a man, look at his smile,
The death weapon? No-one is dead.
There is no body in the house at all.
There is the smell of polish, there are plush carpets.
There is the sunlight, playing its blades,
Bored hoodlum in a red room
Where the wireless talks to itself like an elderly relative.
Did it come like an arrow, did it come like a knife?
Which of the poisons is it?
Which of the nerve-curlers, the convulsors? Did it electrify?
This is a case without a body.
The body does not come into it at all.
It is a case of vaporization.
The mouth first, its absence reported
In the second year. It had been insatiable
And in punishment was hung out like brown fruit
To wrinkle and dry.
The breasts next.
These were harder, two white stones.
The milk came yellow, then blue and sweet as water.
There was no absence of lips, there were two children,
But their bones showed, and the moon smiles.
Then the dry wood, the gates,
The brown motherly furrows, the whole estate.
We walk on air, Watson.
There is only the moon, embalmed in phosphorus.
There is only a crow in a tree. Make notes.
(dated 1 October 1962, a month before ‘The Night Dances’)
The first line seems to surprise us in the middle of a situation - 'What was she doing when it blew in' cointains two puzzles - we will not, until the end of the poem, learn who 'she' or 'it' was, but we have our suspicions.The speaker further establishes the atmosphere of suspense by using yes/ no questions in the first and fourth stanzas (out of eight, which suggests a division of the poem into two parts, each starting with a 'questioning' stanza.
In the second stanza, I like the first line, for its paradoc and its simplicity ('That is the valley of death, though the cows thrive.'), and the use of sibilants (silks, sluglike, sidelong), whcih create unpleasant effect of mistrusts.
The next stanza contains key words connected with the family life - years, kitchen, burning, family photographs - and we learn that the death was in fact symbolic.
Later, an enjambment ('No-one is dead./There is no body in the house at all." stresses the imagery of emptiness: on the top of the smell of polish and plush carpets (silence comes to mind), the personified wireless 'talking to itself' and sunlight are the only ocupants of the house.
In stanza five, the speaker rejects the thesis that the death was symbolic. After a series of increasingly specific questions concerning the method, he/ she states: "This is a case without a body./The body does not come into it at all.'
In the next stanza, the detective strives to describe the process, s/he seems, in fact, to be very familiar with. The woman disappears by degrees; the process of effacement starts from the lips - 'insatiable' and thus punished, taken away from her and rendered ineffective.
In the last stanza, we're leaving the place of crime and moving away from the house, taking in the wood, the gates, the whole estate; it's the night, the moon is dead, a crow, the bird of wisdom and death, is ominously present. (and despite of the last sentence I hae a strong feeling that the inquest won't be a success).
Lovely analysis, Bloodorange, with an interesting look at the imagery of emptiness and the process of effacement.I like the last line of the first stanza, "In that valley the train shrieks echo like souls on hooks." It seems to suggest a tortured soul in hell, or foreshadows a hell-like existence.
The woman is experiencing a death of spirit in a domestic environment with a deceitful man, losing her own voice. Nurturing her children took away even more of the woman's existence as her own person.
In the last stanza, the narrator addresses Watson. This seems to suggest that Sherlock Holmes is narrating the poem as the detective asking questions and noting the evidence. I'm wondering if the moon is phosphorescent (treated or embalmed in the chemical phosphorus), but Plath chose the word "embalmed" since it also is associated with death. The crow (death), blown in on the wind, ties together the beginning and the end of the poem as you mentioned. I have a visual picture of a big black crow silhouetted against a phosphorescent moon.
"The Detective" was not published in the original "Ariel" edited by Ted Hughes. It was first published as part of the "Winter Trees" collection of poems.
Thank you, Connie, for kindly adding whatever was missing from my rather rough analysis! I almost thought, for a moment, that the world 'woman' never appears in the poem, but it does, once, in the second stanza; interestingly, the woman in the poem disappears - her ambitions, then her sexuality, represented by breasts-turned-asexual - yet the moon typically represents the feminine element, the furrows are 'motherly', and overall the poems seems almost pleasantly domestic (conveying the concept of death through becoming a housewife?).
I think I can post another poem? I'm not sure I will be able to post anything *on* it tomorrow- I conclude one group discussion and start another - but I'll do it at the earliest opportunity.Poppies In October
Even the sun-clouds this morning cannot manage such skirts.
Nor the woman in the ambulance
Whose red heart blooms through her coat so astoundingly ----
A gift, a love gift
Utterly unasked for
By a sky
Palely and flamily
Igniting its carbon monoxides, by eyes
Dulled to a halt under bowlers.
O my God, what am I
That these late mouths should cry open
In a forest of frost, in a dawn of cornflowers.
I had a few minutes to look at "Poppies" which seems to be a reaction to being saved from a suicide attempt.The poppies are brilliant this morning, in spite of the clouds, in the beautiful opening line of the poem. The color red is referred to in the red heart of the woman in the ambulance. (She is alive--oxygenated blood is a poppy red color.)
Life is a gift after a suicide attempt, which is suggested by carbon monoxide. "A gift, a love gift/Utterly unasked for"
She's asking what she is, now that she's been saved. It's a momentous event, just like poppies on a frosty morning under a cornflower blue sky would be. She shouldn't be alive, just like poppies should not normally bloom in October.
Connie - I think this poem exemplifies problem with Ariel really well. It's beautiful. I have marked it on the list of poems I would love to read and discuss if we were to choose some poems instead of discussing the whole of Ariel. But it just won't talk to me:/ Many of the Ariel poems are, to me, little, and majorly autobiographical, puzzles. I am not completely utrained in reading poetry, but they are inscrutable. (Also, perhaps, unlike in fiction, there's no sense of progression, we're trapped in the same situation again and again and again... perhaps I'm not cut to discuss poetry colections; or I should only read sonnet cycles.)I wanted to wait until the weekend (the end of February), but I'm ready to throw in the towel. Let me take this opportunity to say I very much appreciate your presence in this thread, your being its spiritus movens, and everything I've learnt from you so far.
I think I'm ready to discuss a handful of poems from the remaining material, should you - and perhaps Obscureason, or someone else - like to read them with me.
Bloodorange wrote: "Connie - I think this poem exemplifies problem with Ariel really well. It's beautiful. I have marked it on the list of poems I would love to read and discuss if we were to choose some poems instead..."I have the same feeling, Bloodorange. We seem to be seeing the same themes over and over again in this collection of poetry. I enjoyed our introduction to Plath, but I'm ready to move on too. I appreciate everyone's insightful contributions to this discussion. We could stop now, or if you have a couple of favorites you would like to read together, I'll be glad to read them with you. (Let's pick a few that are not about suicide!)
Connie wrote: "(Let's pick a few that are not about suicide!) ..."I've still been following (lurking on) the discussion, and would be grateful if you found a few like that to enjoy.
You guys have done very well here. :)
Connie wrote: "We could stop now, or if you have a couple of favorites you would like to read together, I'll be glad to read them with you. (Let's pick a few that are not about suicide!) "I've honestly, seriously tried to choose some - I did my homework a month ago when the idea of selecting a few poems to discuss came up, and I prepared a list of poems which looked interesting - including Elm, Poppies in October, and the bee poems. I went back to the list a moment ago, reread the poems and found that instead of mysterious, they all felt haunted to me now.
Will you consider me a complete wimp if I tell you I have no favourites in Ariel to discuss?
That's fine, Bloodorange. I had read some poems of Emily Dickinson last year with a f2f group, and she had some poems that were about depression and death. But Dickinson also wrote magical poems about nature that balanced things out. I was comparing that experience to reading "Ariel" where almost every poem has something negative in it. It's understandable considering Plath's emotional state and marriage problems, but so much negativity drags down the reader.It's been a real pleasure reading with you and the other participants in this discussion.
This is my review of "Ariel":
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
Thank you, Connie. I love how you stressed the positives in your review...
Bloodorange wrote: "Thank you, Connie. I love how you stressed the positives in your review..."I have been away, and have missed the vigour, learning and enjoyment of the exchange! I might post a couple of remaining poems if anyone wishes to continue ...
It's nice to have you back, Obscureason. If you have a couple last poems, I'll try to make a few comments but this is a busy time for me.
2015: The Year of Reading Women
Books mentioned in this topic
Sylvia Plath: A Literary Life (other topics)Giving Up: The Last Days of Sylvia Plath (other topics)
American Isis: The Life and Art of Sylvia Plath (other topics)
Embodying the Monster: Encounters with the Vulnerable Self (other topics)
Sleepless Nights (other topics)
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Authors mentioned in this topic
Edgar Allan Poe (other topics)Ingrid Jonker (other topics)
Ingrid Jonker (other topics)
That said, don't count my vote because I think I'm going to be away from this thread for a bit. :)
..and with that, I do hope you'll understand if I bow out for now - I too, really have a lot of other commitments.
Thanks, you guys have been great!