Thoughts on Ariel by Sylvia Plath

I have long been a fan of Sylvia Plath, having read The Bell Jar several times, and I also love poetry, so I was very happy when I found this copy of Ariel; I took the opportunity to read it before putting it up for sale in my okay store.

The poet Robert Lowell wrote a glowing introduction, extolling the creative rush the poet had in the months before her final suicide attempt was, well, final.

From "Lady Lazurus":

The second time I meant
To last it out and not gee back at all.
I rocked shut

As a seashell.
They had to call and call
And pick the worms off me like sticky pearls.

Dying
Is an art, like everything else.
I do it exceptionally well

This poem shows the cry for help she was making. Another poem gepares these multiple attempts to the lives of a cat. She at that time was on number 4 of 9 lives. The imagery is powerful, and haunting.

I wonder how many people read Sylvia Plath out of curiosity, romanticizing suicide, especially since copies of her semi-autobiographical work, The Bell Jar, fly out of my bookstore, and are primarily purchased by women in their late teens and early 20s. As I read Ariel and other Poems, I was startled that Sylvia Plath gave the people in her life such obvious notice that she was suicidal. Even after multiple serious attempts, the doctors brought her back and sent her home. She wrote copiously to her mother, who wrote her back, but did not jump on a plane in alarm. Her husband was elsewhere with another woman (who years later killed herself and their child in an exact copy of Sylvia's suicide), and did not intervene. Magazine publishers read and published exerpts from her work, but did not take it to a more human level.

The truth is that this gifted poet was the mother of 2 children whose lives were endangered by her turning on the gas in the apartment, and changed forever by her dying. She deserved better from her society than having them ignore her naked need. And finally, there is nothing romantic about putting your head in a gas oven. You don't look romantically beautiful and limp afterward- The Journal of Forensic Science, Vol. 7, 1962, "Carbon Monoxide Poisoning" by Theodore Rowan, M.B., B.S. and Frank C. Coleman, B.A., M.D. "describes variations from those looking more or less natural pink to those with a cyanotic appearance from marked flushing of the capillaries and veins of the face and neck with bluish-red blood, resembling acute or subacute suffocation."

So- While we can enjoy the poems for the art that they are; and I do believe that her imagery, use of metaphor, and ability to find words to describe raw emotions is genius, I believe that it is important to remember that this is reflective of subjective human experience; a state experienced at a particular point in time, not a prescription. You know- like your parents always asked- "If everybody was jumping off a bridge, would you jump too?"

Note: My copy of this book is the original collection selected and edited by Sylvia Plath's husband, Ted Hughes. A new edition, verbatim to Sylvia's manuscript, with an introduction by her daughter, Frieda Hughes, has just been issued, with mixed reviews. Both versions have their merits. The original selections have been made by her husband, and edited for "redundancy", with his opinions about redundancy providing some censorship as well. We also have the benefit of the English Poet Laureate's eye for how a poem needs to flow, with an intimate knowledge of the poet. The new volume gives us a chance to see the work as she wanted it to be, and to see the previously hidden work of a great artist, colored by the emotional tenor of the daughter she left behind.