Sylvia Plath

‘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.

WhiteGodiva, I unpeel—
Dead hands, dead stringencies.

And now IFoam to wheat, a glitter of seas.
The child’s cry

Melts in the wall.And I
Am the arrow,

The dew that fliesSuicidal,
at one with the drive
Into the red

Eye, the cauldron of morning.

Ariel is the poem that gives its name to Sylvia Plath’s most celebrated collection, which was published in 1965. It was published posthumously, two years after Plath committed suicide. The fact that Plath chose ‘Ariel’ as the title for the collection is to me very important; I think that in a sense it can be read to define the episode of incredible creative outpouring that was the few years before she died (this was when she wrote Daddy, Lady Lazarus, Fever 103 and other seminal works).I feel that this poem is about the creative process, and specifically the process of writing poetry. It is very enigmatic, spiritual, and almost erotic in places — we find very physical descriptions. ‘Ariel’ is a name that we probably most associate with the spirit character in Shakespeare’s The Tempest, who is servant to the magician Prospero. This definitely adds to the mystical and magical quality that surrounds the notion of the Muse, or creative process, in the poem. However, Ariel was also the name of the horse Plath used to ride when she was living in Devon. The poem describes a woman riding a horse.Set at dawn, the poem begins with “Stasis in darkness”. I love this opening line; it is soft-footed, like the quiet before a storm. There is anticipation; the rider is still in the dark of the stable. But then she is suddenly out, and riding. She becomes “God’s lioness”. I love the lioness; it is such a strong, but determinedly feminine image. The rider is on an almost divine mission here; she is strong, and provocative (this part reminds me of that final, devastating line in Lady Lazarus: “And I eat men like air”.)As you rush through these swift stanzas (that create a breathless effect, when read aloud) you can almost feel the wind rushing past you, with the “Pivot of heels and knees”. “How one we grow”, writes Plath; she is one with her horse, one with Ariel, and one with her creative process or Muse. There is an interesting duality here; although Plath describes herself as “one” with the horse, Ariel also has a “neck I cannot catch”. This is fascinating to me because it perfectly captures the nature of the creative process, which is so very hard to pin down or define. When she is riding (or writing) she feels in complete harmony with this force, and yet it remains somehow elusive and mysterious. This mystery persists as Plath writes, “Something else/ Hauls me through air”. What is this force?This poem (and much of Plath’s other work) contains many physical images. In this wonderful, exhilarating metaphor for the act of writing a poem, the whole body is involved: “heels and knees”, “sweet blood mouthfulls”, “thighs, hair” etc. I think that it is perhaps because she wrote such personal or ‘confessional’ poetry – using her own emotional experiences as subject matter – that Plath makes this poem so physical; she puts her whole being into the writing of a poem. She puts her real experiences in there. Perhaps that is why she describes herself as being physically hauled through the air, here; “I unpeel”, she writes. (I also personally think that there is always an element of wanting to shock, with Plath. Being a woman, it is somehow more shocking for her to use personal, physical images, and she uses this to provoke and get our attention. In a similar way, she included many Holocaust images in her other poems.)A part of this poem that particularly moves me is where Plath writes, “A child’s cry / Melts in the wall.” In the final year of her life, when Plath was writing many of the poems for Ariel, her children were still very small. She used to get up before dawn every day to write. I am sure this is why the poem is set at dawn, though dawn is also a beautifully symbolic moment of the day; it is a non-time, a time when everybody else is asleep. It is like how time seems to stop while a poem is written, and can then resume once it is done. I love to picture Plath writing in the early morning, the thunder of Ariel’s hooves in her head — such a powerful time of creativity. Real life — the “child’s cry” — attempts briefly to enter the poem, but cannot distract the poet from her craft. She thunders on, “Suicidal, at one with the drive/ Into the red/ Eye, the cauldron of morning.”

Reviewed by Emily Ardagh

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‘L’Albatros’ by Charles Baudelaire

Souvent, pour s’amuser, les hommes d’équipage
Prennent des albatros, vastes oiseaux des mers,
Qui suivent, indolents compagnons de voyage,
Le navire glissant sur les gouffres amers.

À peine les ont-ils déposés sur les planches,
Que ces rois de l’azur, maladroits et honteux,
Laissent piteusement leurs grandes ailes blanches
Comme des avirons traîner à côté d’eux.

Ce voyageur ailé, comme il est gauche et veule!
Lui, naguère si beau, qu’il est comique et laid!
L’un agace son bec avec un brûle-gueule,
L’autre mime, en boitant, l’infirme qui volait!

Le Poète est semblable au prince des nuées
Qui hante la tempête et se rit de l’archer;
Exilé sur le sol au milieu des huées,
Ses ailes de géant l’empêchent de marcher.

Continue reading ‘L’Albatros’ by Charles Baudelaire →

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‘The Swan’ by Rainer Maria Rilke (Translated by Robert Bly)

This clumsy living that moves lumbering
as if in ropes through what is not done,
reminds us of the awkward way the swan walks.

And to die, which is the letting go
of the ground we stand on and cling to every day,
is like the swan, when he nervously lets himself down
into the water, which receives him gaily
and which flows joyfully under
and after him, wave after wave,
while the swan, unmoving and marvelously calm,
is pleased to be carried, each moment more fully grown,
more like a king, further and further on.

I am so sad that my German is non-existent, apart from the odd greeting or pleasantry. I would so love to be able to read and understand this poem in its original language, but for now Bly’s superb translation will have to do. Continue reading ‘The Swan’ by Rainer Maria Rilke (Translated by Robert Bly) →

W.B. Yeats

‘To a young girl’ by W. B. Yeats

MY dear, my dear, I know
More than another
What makes your heart beat so;
Not even your own mother
Can know it as I know,
Who broke my heart for her
When the wild thought,
That she denies
And has forgot,
Set all her blood astir
And glittered in her eyes.

I absolutely love this poem. It is from Yeats’ 1919 collection, The Wild Swans at Coole, which is amazing, and which contains most of my favourite of his works. I tend to prefer Yeats’ earlier work because I am more drawn to Romantic poetry than I am political poetry. I first read To a young girl when I was a teenager, and it felt to me at the time that Yeats was speaking directly to me, and that he understood me; I remember that feeling distinctly.

For me, this poem is the voice of the older, male poet to a young girl full of Romantic notions. When I was a teenager, I was more besotted with Yeats, Keats and the Bronte sisters than any of the spotty, obnoxious boys in my class! It is only for this reason, I think, that for me this poem was more about a young girl’s wild, Romantic, idealist ambitions fancying herself as a poet, rather than any romantic (with a small ‘r’) ideals of love. I love the way that this wise, worldly voice tells the young girl that he understands “What makes [her] heart beat so” — her Romantic ideas — her naivety? — and that though most adults might have forgotten how they were themselves in youth, he has never forgotten.

There was something very comforting in this poem for my teenage self, to feel that someone as erudite and successful (the absolute pinnacle of what success meant to me at the time) as Yeats could speak in this way to a young girl. It was a comfort to hear in this poem that he valued the “wild” spirit of youth and that idealism, because there is obvious disapproval of the older woman (“she broke [his] heart for her”) and “denies/ And has forgot”. There is the idea here that though youth can be naive and sometimes really cringe-worthy, it is something nevertheless precious and pure. Whenever I read over the poems I wrote as a teenager, many of them do make me cringe at my earnestness and naivety. However, I would never want to lose them and some part of me envies the girl who wrote them.

As always with Yeats, the language is exquisitely lyrical — especially those final two lines, I just love: “Set all her blood astir/ And glittered in her eyes”.

Reviewed by Emily Ardagh

W.H. Auden

The Unknown Citizen’ by W. H. Auden

(To JS/07 M 378
This Marble Monument
Is Erected by the State)

He was found by the Bureau of Statistics to be
One against whom there was no official complaint,
And all the reports of his conduct agree
That, in the modern sense of the old-fashioned word, he was a saint,
For in everything he did he served the Greater Community.
Except for the war till the day he retired
He worked in a factory and never got fired,
But satisfied his employers, Fudge Motors Inc.
Yet he wasn’t a scab or odd in his views,
For his union reports that he paid his dues,
(Our report of his union shows it was sound)
And our Social Psychology workers found
That he was popular with his mates and liked a drink.
The Press are convinced that he bought a paper every day,
And that his reactions to advertisements were normal in every way.
Policies taken out in his name prove that he was fully insured,
And his Health-card shows that he was once in hospital but left it cured.
Both Producers Research and High–Grade Living declare
He was fully sensible to the advantages of the Installment Plan
And had everything necessary to the Modern Man,
A gramophone, a radio, a car and a frigidaire.
Our researchers into Public Opinion are content
That he held the proper opinions for the time of the year;
When there was peace he was for peace; when there was war he went.
He was married and added five children to the population,
which our Eugenist says was the right number for a parent of his generation,
And our teachers report he never interfered with their education.
Was he free? Was he happy? The question is absurd:
Had anything been wrong, we should certainly have heard.

This is the first poem that I have posted on request, and I would like to say that I am more than happy to take requests; I like a challenge, and I also really want to write about poems that interest you, dear readers.

The unknown citizen, when I first read its title and opening epigraph, reminded me of ‘The Tomb of the Unknown soldier’ in Paris, and the nameless graves of northern France. The sight of all those unnamed dead, remembered only in their capacity as soldiers, is of course unspeakably tragic, but I find there to be also something quite estranging there, because there are no names, no faces, no stories. Each of those men had a story that no statistic, rank or number could tell, and the same is true with The unknown citizen.

But I’m getting the tone all wrong. Auden’s poem is humorous, and satirical; it is the voice of the authorities ‘summing up’ a man’s life by statistics. It is bureaucracy gone mad. It is a tribute, by the “State” (with its ominous capital ‘S’) to an apparently satisfactory member of its population. The voice in this poem, though humorous, is also an unsettling one… almost ‘Big Brother-like” in its self-satisfied, false omniscience.

The poem starts by informing us that this unknown citizen was exemplary, in that “no official complaint” was ever made against him, that he was a “saint” for serving the “Greater Community”, being a soldier, and never getting fired from his factory job. He had sufficiently “ordinary” views as to never upset anything, “paid his dues” and occasionally socialised with his “mates” for “a drink”… like a good little consumer. The poem goes on to tell us that he read the newspaper every day, and had “normal” reactions to the advertisements”. There is a catalogue of information here, but by the end of the poem we realise that we still know nothing about this man; nothing that matters about the person has been recorded. The citizen remains “unknown” — he has been dehumanised — and this is a seriously dangerous situation being described, if you think about what was happening in Germany at the time Auden was writing this in 1939.

I think that the rhyme scheme of this poem (which you will notice is the simplest imaginable: ABAB etc.) adds to the satirical tone of the poem. Auden is very clever in the way he uses this almost sing-song rhyme scheme to add to the effect he creates. There is something trite about this rhyming voice, and over-conventional… and something sickening in its false-benevolence.

We continue to be bombarded with uninteresting information about this unknown citizen. He was “fully insured”, and conformed to buying all the modern appliances and comforts that were advertised to him. He had the “proper opinions” at the right time, and “added five children to the population”. All of this information is delivered with humour, for example, Auden writes about the five children, “our Eugenist says it was the right number for a parent of his generation”.

At the end of the poem, a question is posed: “Was he free? Was he happy?” But the questions are dismissed quickly as “absurd”, for, “Had anything been wrong, we would surely have heard.” This is a very cutting and ironic-toned ending to the poem, which so effectively evokes the idea of the sort of direction many feared society was headed in Auden’s day (just look at Orwell and Huxley’s distopian novels). Auden wrote this piece soon after he moved to New York from England (in ’39).

Reviewed by Emily Ardagh