Welcome to my first ever poetry review!
To start, let it be known that I don’t read very much poetry. This is actually the first time I’ve read an entire collection cover to cover. Typically, if I’m reading poetry, it’s a singular poem that Rattle has sent me in my email.
I initially bought Ariel because I had the wonderful thought that maybe I could read a few poems in the morning and use them as my journaling topic for the day. Of course, that’s not how it worked out. I avoided the book altogether until I decided I would sit down one evening and read a few poems just to get familiar with the tone. Then, I proceeded to read all of them.
Initial Thoughts
As a big fan of The Bell Jar, I’m somewhat familiar with Plath’s writing style, and I expected there to be a lot of depth and darkness in these poems. I wasn’t disappointed. Each poem addresses strong feelings and emotions, encapsulating the tumultuous mental state Plath was experiencing herself at the time.
What I didn’t expect, as someone wholly unfamiliar with Plath’s poetry (and poetry in general), was to see how often she focused on something many people would consider a completely mundane event. One poem in this collection, The Rabbit Catcher, is about her seeing rabbit traps while walking with her husband. Of course, the larger metaphor in the poem is about how different she and her husband were as people.
Using these seemingly mundane events to express broader emotions isn’t wholly unique to Plath, I don’t think, but it did seem to be her signature style throughout this collection. She has a poem about the rabbit traps, a poem about going to the eye doctor, a poem about her arguing neighbors, many poems about being a mother, and so on.
Each of these poems are about experiences that many people go through every day, but she turns those experiences into something unique that reveals much more about herself as a person and her view of the world. Some of you may be thinking, “Yes, that’s what poetry is,” but I think Plath’s style here is really unique to her and creates a different way of communicating her ideas.
There is something very unintentional about her poetry. We can even see this in the way she describes the poems herself. Rather than delve into any “hidden meanings” in the poem, she simply describes them at a surface level. For example, she describes the poem “Ariel” as: “Another horseback riding poem, this one called ‘Ariel’, after a horse I’m especially fond of.”
To me, this makes the poetry seem wholly sincere and unpretentious. She seems to fixate on a moment of life and let her emotions flow through her to describe this moment, rather than fixate on the emotions she was feeling and try to inflict them upon the reader herself. Because of this, we experience the moment the same way she experienced it at the time, and we can feel the depth of her emotion organically instead of being manipulated into that state. I think that’s why I felt like I just couldn’t put down the book. It would have felt like I was abandoning her.
Imagery
Plath uses extremely striking imagery throughout her poems, which was my favorite part of reading them. I love strong, evocative imagery.
To give some examples, I collected a few of my favorite lines throughout the poems in the book:
- Marble lillies/exhale their pallor like scent… “Barren Woman”
- Instead, the dead injure me with attentions, and nothing can happen. “Barren Woman”
- Out of the ash/I rise with my red hair/And I eat men like air. “Barren Woman”
- My night sweats grease his breakfast plate. “The Jailor”
- If the moon smiled, she would resemble you.
You leave the same impression
Of something beautiful, but annihilating. “The Rival” - The grasses unload their griefs on my feet as if I were God. “The Moon and the Yew Tree”
- It drags the sea after it like a dark crime… “The Moon and the Yew Tree”
There are many more lines I underlined and related to, but these were some of the most striking images I thought she used throughout the book. She uses a lot of personification in her poetry, and I think that helps the reader really picture the image she’s conjuring. The line “Marble lillies/exhale their pallor like scent” evokes the image of radiant, pale lillies practically glowing in the moonlight. I’m picturing bright, white lillies growing by a small pond. The moonlight strikes them just right, so they shimmer against the dark grass. Of course, Plath hasn’t said any of this, but what she has said is plenty enough to create this image.
Similarly, “My night sweats grease his breakfast plate,” tells us so much in one single sentence. The speaker’s night sweats could be from night terrors, anxiety, menopause, etc. Regardless, it has a negative connotation. Then, the language of, “grease his breakfast plate” leaves a sour taste in one’s mouth. It’s not exactly an appetizing image, which tells the reader that the speaker probably isn’t pleased to be making this breakfast. As the first line in the poem, it has set the tone impeccably.
In her poems, the moon is also used a lot as a strong, reoccurring image. She seems to have a fascination with it that’s present throughout her writing. The moon is a dominating presence, and it is alluded to as having a strong pull or impact on the speaker of the poems. Of course, the moon controls the tides, and is a consistent, striking feature in the night sky, so Plath’s fascination makes sense.
As Her Last Words
This collection of poetry was published posthumously by Plath’s husband after Plath had committed suicide. They were her last writings, left on her desk, presumably ordered for publication. He changed the order of the poems and removed some that he felt were either demeaning to the topic of the poem (one was a very negative portrayal of some of her neighbors) or simply not as strong as other poems in the collection.
The book I have is Ariel: The Restored Edition, which means it contains all of the poems Plath intended to be in this collection, as well as the original edition published by her husband. There is a forward by Plath’s daughter that I thought was an interesting read, and it addresses how her father manipulated the original manuscript.
Without getting into the controversy around his choice too much, his daughter insists that there was never any malintent on her father’s part. He wanted to portray Plath’s work in the best light possible, which is why he made the changes he did. For what it’s worth, I’m very glad there was a restored edition. Even if some of the poems aren’t as strong as others, none of her poems are “bad” or not worth including.
As her last words, I think they give a clear picture of what she was experiencing in the months leading up to her death. There are strong themes of hopelessness and frustration throughout the poems, but also moments of wonder and acceptance. I think the contrasting emotions show the complexity of depression and mental illness. It’s not necessarily one feeling all the time. It can be the highest of highs and the lowest of lows, or a general low with glimmers of lights, or general happiness with moments of extreme lows that are too much to handle.
There’s no “one size fits all” when it comes to mental illness, and I think Plath’s last work is a clear written representation of that.
Overall, I’m really glad to have purchased this collection, and I feel inspired to try out more poetry. I would recommend this collection to anyone who enjoys poetry in general, or to those who are already fans of Plath’s work. For those who don’t read poetry regularly, it may not be the best introduction to poetry considering it’s a fairly dark collection. If I ever make a post about my favorite poems, some of the ones from this collection will certainly be on it.
The Lit Wiz