Sylvia plath poem critical appreciation " Ariel "

Critical Appreciation of                        “ARIEL”

‘Poem by Sylvia Plath’

          

                              Introduction;

The poem “Ariel” is cleverly written by Sylvia Plath. She explains how she enjoyed horse riding every week of her life. This horse riding is nothing but the journey of life. There is deep meaning hidden inside this poem. Each line stated in each stanza is meaningful and anyone can pick up several meanings from it. Everyone is doing this horse riding every day, but the irony is that no one is aware of it. Thus, the poet tells everyone to come out of the house and take a ride. This life is bounded between all those tasks which are not that important if we give a wise look at them. Therefore, the poet is explaining her own way to enjoy her ride.

Sylvia Plath is a poet who has written on various topics. She is very clear in her thoughts that she wants to explain to her readers. She is explaining the joy which is hidden in this life. Everyone can take this joy from any situation. If someone is wishing to take a ride of real life then he/she should take a look at this poem. You can imagine this life as beautiful only if you forget about those busy schedules and tiring tasks. Just follow what your heart says.

“Success is a journey, not a destination. The doing is often more important than the outcome”

                                          Title;

The poet has given a meaningful title to this poem. It’s “Ariel”. This title is very appropriate as “Ariel” is the name of the horse which the poet used to ride every week. This horse is the spirit of power and reflects speed. The ride which goes beyond sun rays is so beautiful. No one can avoid problems in life. These problems may be hot like sun rays but if the person goes with the speed of horse then these problems are nothing.

 “Sometimes it's the journey that teaches you a lot about your destination”

The poet is explaining everything in her own style and in a very diplomatic way.

Critical Analysis;

Sylvia Plath, a confessional and autobiographical poetess, is known to us for her extremely subjective poetry. Most of her poems focus the fears and psychological problems she has had.

"Ariel" is one of her posthumous poems. This is a complicated poem rich in imagery and meaning. In 'Ariel', the experience of riding a horse becomes a metaphor for the process of writing a poem... "Plath's attainment of poetic mastery". "Ariel" draws its own myth of transcendence through the ecstasy of physical motion, an ecstasy which is seen as transitory and self-destructive.

“Find ecstasy in life; the mere sense of living is joy enough”

 The poem is highly metaphorical in that "Ariel" is the name of her favorite horse; it can be the "Ariel" in Shakespeare's "Tempest" with aerial powers beyond human imagination. Ariel" in Hebrew means "lion of God." The poem moves from "Stasis in darkness" to the "cauldron of morning". It is the journey from scratch to accomplishment; a ride into the eye of the sun, a journey to death, a stripping of personality and selfhood. Like her other poems, she puts down her grievances and resentment for her family and friends as well as society at large. 

Ariel is in a state of inaction. There is complete darkness, an image of hopelessness. She visually creates an altar "pour of tor", probably, there for her crucifixion. She is "God's lioness" all ready to surge forward passionately.

“Passion is energy. Feel the power that comes from focusing on what excites you”

 She and the "Ariel" are unified. They are moving forward making their way through the soft and hard soil. She finds it difficult to hold onto the neck of the fast moving horse. The proposed favors and incidents of past have cast much gloom over her but she has resolved to shake them off.

The "Black sweet blood mouthfuls" of temptations proffered by others(her dominating mother's Expectations and praise of success for example) or now "Shadows" Left Behind in that breathe on darkness. Now " something else/ hauls me through the air" and that is the force spirit of aerial!

“Enjoyment is an incredible energizer to the human spirit”. 

She has freed herself like "Godiva" who rode "naked on a horse" so that her husband would reduce taxes on the public. She is tired of the "dead stringencies" and limitations that life brought to her. She is in a state of ecstasy and pleasure that she foams creating a "glitter of seas". She is unable to decide whether she is an arrow which is to kill or dew that is to be killed. However, she is expecting to reach the destination i.e. light in "red" or perhaps "death" in the "red".

“While I thought that I was learning how to live, I have been learning how to die”.

Themes;

Transformation:

On its surface, "Ariel" is about a wild horseback ride. But when we read just a little bit more closely, we see that the poem is interested less in the actual horseback ride and more in the transformation that happens within the speaker as she's on that horse. The speaker transforms from a woman who tries to hold onto Ariel for dear life, to a woman who summons the power of the horse and who is no longer afraid to lose her grip. She finds freedom in this transformative experience and learns to channel the wild energy of Ariel.

Power:

When "Ariel" begins, the speaker is powerless. Ariel takes off at a wild gallop, and the speaker can't control her horse at all. The cool thing about the poem, though, is that instead of gaining power by taking control of the horse, the speaker gains her power by submitting to the horse, by becoming "at one" with the horse's will. By giving up her desire and need for control, and learning to let loose, the speaker is able to channel the power of the natural world.

Man and the natural world: 

Man and the natural world? It's more like "woman" and the natural world in this case. "Ariel," tells the story of the speaker's transformative experience when she gets up close and personal with nature, and she learns to give up her desire for control and accept the craziness of Mother Nature. While at first,t the speaker is fearful of Ariel (and who could blame her?), by the end of the poem the speaker becomes "at one" with her horse. She learns that the way to gain power is not to attempt to change Ariel, but to accept her wild nature. Nature's gonna do what it's gonna do; we're all just along for the wild ride.

Death:

Sylvia Plath: her name's almost synonymous with suicide in popular culture, so it's really no surprise that "Ariel" deals with death. But don't get too down when reading this poem; death here is actually a pretty positive thing. It's more of a metaphorical death than a real death—it's about the transformation of a fearful woman into a powerful woman. The death in the poem is the death of the speaker's former, fearful self. Good riddance, if you ask me. As far as Plath's poetry goes, death in "Ariel" is pretty darn optimistic.

Conclusion:

This poem is probably Plath's finest single construction because of the Precision and depth of its images. In it account of the ritual journey towards the centre of life and death, Plath perfect method of leaving from image to image in order to represent the mental process.

The poem has dazzling imagery, Vived emotional resonance, historical and biblical allusions, and a breathtaking sense of movement.

 Critics tend to discuss the poem as an exploration of several different subjects, including: Poetic creativity; sexuality; judiasim; animism; suicide and death; self realization and self transformation and mysticism.

"Ariel" doesn't give us much in terms of setting. The poem begins before dawn, in darkness, and ends as the creepy, red sun is rising. We get only little flashes of the scenery around our speaker—the furrowed ground, the dark berries. Still, the poem uses those brief snippets of the landscape to underscore the speaker's transformation from frightened rider to unrestrained spirit merging with creation.

You see, at the end of the poem, the speaker is "at one" with the "arrow" that is Ariel. Along the way, tough, she's also at one with the fields around here: "And now I  /Foam to wheat, a glitter of seas" .Even the sound of the setting is fusing into one with the physical surroundings: "The child's cry / Melts in the wall". In the way that the speaker joins the horse in a kind of cosmic fusion, she's anticipates that move by fusing into the setting as well.

 Sylvia Plath's poem "Ariel" dramatizes this very feeling, this oh-no-what-is-happening-to-me-make-it-stop feeling. And it works on two levels; it's both about losing your grip on a horse that is galloping way too fast, and about losing your grip in a more metaphorical way—losing your grip on life itself.

Plath, who suffered from severe depression and eventually killed herself, knew what it was like to lose her grip on her experience of the world. If you've ever felt a bit out of control, a bit like the world is flying by too fast, then "Ariel" is the poem for you.

“The eagle has no fear of adversity. We need to be like the eagle and have a fearless spirit of a conqueror!”