Ariel – Sylvia Plath (1965)

Ariel by Sylvia Plath, first published posthumously in 1965, is a cornerstone of confessional poetry and a defining collection in 20th-century literature. Comprising forty poems written primarily during the final months of her life, Ariel encapsulates the raw, unfiltered intensity of Plath’s inner world and poetic evolution. The collection captures her most explosive and lyrical work, embodying a deep psychological exploration that blends personal trauma, mythic resonance, and existential dread into a singular poetic voice.

Plot Summary

In the dark before dawn, a cry splits the silence – not of anguish, but of birth. A child, golden and wailing, is cast into a world that does not wait. The mother stands near, uncertain, her body already drifting from the infant like mist from glass. Love opens the scene, not soft and maternal, but uneasy, as if nature itself doubts the arrangement. Within the sterile white of hospitals and homes, a woman steps forward, her breath fogging windows, her hands bruised with expectation. Already, her body is no longer her own – just a vessel, a mirror, a shadow drifting through domestic rituals and hospital sheets.

The landscape begins to shudder. A rabbit is caught in the trap, not the animal, but the snare that waits in marriage, in silence, in the corseted life of a woman who no longer recognizes her name. There are wires between her and the man who waits with still hands, wires that hum with past betrayals and present neglect. The rooms she walks through are full of quiet menace. Her skin tightens against the force of the air. She slices her thumb open and celebrates the rush of red as if it were a kind of liberation, a rebellion against numbness.

Around her, the world continues to speak in riddles. Advertisements ask for applicants, plastic wives, dolls with sewn mouths and rubber limbs. The voices of the living blur with those of the dead. And still, she listens. A voice, a whisper, begins to rise from inside. Not all wounds are visible. Some are made of silence, of mirrors turned inward. She sees herself in the polished chrome of motherhood, her breasts and stomach bruised by expectation. But there is a power rising, a wildness gathering like a wave, elemental and unspoken.

At the center of the gathering storm stands a figure who has risen from ash and linen, smiling with a mouth full of secrets. She has died before – once, twice, many times – and returned each time more luminous, more terrifying. Her body is a site of resurrection, of spectacle. She sheds her skin in layers, defiant and theatrical. The men who watch her do not understand what it is they see. They want to possess her, claim her scars, but she is fire, and she is fury. She eats men like air.

In sterile rooms filled with tulips and linen, she finds no peace. Even the flowers have become sharp, accusatory. They bloom like wounds, too red, too alive. She lies still, a patient, an exhibit, struggling to disappear. The nurses pass without faces, and her body becomes a field for the dead. She listens to the sea inside her own ears and dreams of vanishing beneath its silence.

She speaks now in veils and riddles. Secrets curl in her throat like knives. In the shadows, a jailer waits. He speaks with hands, not words. He burns her with quiet glances. His love is a shackle, and she is a paper doll stitched with screams. She dreams of escape but finds herself rewoven each morning into the fabric of his need. Her days become rituals of endurance. Still, she carves space for her voice – a red line across white paper, a scream stitched into the silence.

The trees outside offer no refuge. Even nature reflects her disquiet. The moon is not a goddess but a wound, pale and unblinking. The yew tree points upward, cold and indifferent. In its shade, she becomes a priestess of grief, her prayers unanswered. But still she waits, her body electric with transformation.

One morning, she climbs upon the back of a horse named Ariel and rides into the dawn. The world blurs, breaks apart. Her body splits and reforms. She becomes light, wind, an arrow slicing through the red eye of the morning. In that moment, she is not woman but force, not broken but infinite.

There are others who haunt her edges – children with breath like lilies, husbands who vanish into smoke, lovers with mirror eyes. The woman she faces in the kitchen is not a friend but a rival, a reflection warped by jealousy and silence. Together, they dance a dance of venom and denial, their laughter cut through with knives. Between them hangs a curtain of words that will never be spoken. In their shared silence, there is only rot, fat, and the slow smog of despair.

And still, a voice calls from the sea. A mother, or perhaps a Medusa, tangles in the cables of memory. Her body is red and pulsing, her voice full of salt. She arrives unbidden, parasitic, trailing the umbilicus of guilt. The daughter recoils, but cannot cut the line. Love, here, is a suffocating wave, a weight on the chest.

Time collapses. The past rises like steam from broken stone. A funeral plays out in fragments – a boot, a coffin, a wife staring into the hills. The body is dressed and folded, made ready for the soil. The daughter watches from the balcony, her hands clenched with understanding. Death is not a single moment but a thousand small disconnections – a fading face, a drawer of still linens, a hat left on the grass.

And then the bees. Once, there was a man who loved bees, who spoke their language. Now, she tends to their hives alone. In the honeycomb of memory, he is both father and ghost. The swarm speaks of empire, of betrayal, of the unbearable weight of inheritance. She opens the bee box and listens to the hum of centuries. The bees know things that men have forgotten.

Winter arrives not with snow, but with silence. The hive is still. The queen sleeps. The workers curl into themselves. The poet, too, withdraws. Her last words are not cries, but cuts – precise, glinting. The air closes around her like a shroud, soft and silver. Somewhere outside, the tulips bloom again, red as blood, loud as birth.

Main Characters

As a poetry collection, Ariel does not feature conventional characters. Instead, the central voice is Plath’s own poetic persona—variously fragmented, resurrected, vengeful, motherly, mythic, and elemental. This voice shifts and morphs across poems, but it remains unmistakably Plathian in its fierce introspection and lyrical authority.

• The Speaker: Across poems such as “Lady Lazarus,” “Daddy,” and “Ariel,” the speaker emerges as a composite of Plath’s identities: survivor, daughter, artist, and woman in a patriarchal world. She is both victim and executioner, exposing her wounds and her rage in searing verse.

• Figures of Authority: Father, husband, doctor—these archetypes recur as oppressive presences. In “Daddy,” the father figure looms as a fascistic monument, while in “The Applicant” and “The Jailer,” masculine authority is interrogated and deconstructed.

• Mythic and Elemental Entities: Horses, bees, the moon, the sea, and fire often function as animate forces or companions, mirroring the speaker’s psychological states and metaphysical reach. These elements are deeply personified and imbued with symbolic charge.

Theme

• Death and Resurrection: The cycle of annihilation and rebirth is at the heart of Ariel, most famously embodied in “Lady Lazarus.” Death is not simply an end but a performative and almost sacred gesture of transformation.

• Femininity and Patriarchy: Plath explores the brutal constraints of domesticity, motherhood, and objectification. In poems like “The Applicant” and “Purdah,” she critiques societal roles imposed on women, often with biting satire.

• Identity and Fragmentation: The dissolution of self is dramatized throughout the collection. The speaker undergoes continual shape-shifting – from horse-rider to Godiva, from child to elemental force – illustrating a fractured yet forceful search for agency.

• Nature as Mirror and Menace: Natural imagery abounds – bees, tulips, poppies, moonscapes – yet it is rarely tranquil. Nature becomes both a mirror of the speaker’s psyche and a stage for existential drama, brimming with both violence and beauty.

• Art as Survival: The act of writing becomes synonymous with existence itself. The sharp linguistic precision of the poems reflects Plath’s belief in poetry as a means to impose order, express trauma, and achieve transcendence.

Writing Style and Tone

Plath’s style in Ariel is marked by fierce lyricism, compressed imagery, and an unrelenting emotional cadence. She crafts her lines with surgical precision, cutting deep into personal and collective memory. Her diction ranges from the clinical to the surreal, often juxtaposing delicate beauty with grotesque imagery. Repetition, enjambment, and sound play heighten the hypnotic rhythm, while the syntax mirrors the tumult of her inner life. There is little room for abstraction – every metaphor is visceral, every symbol blooded.

The tone of Ariel is uncompromising and volatile, shifting between despair, rage, ecstasy, and ironic detachment. It pulses with an urgency that suggests both personal crisis and poetic awakening. This is a voice that does not ask for permission – it declares, indicts, resurrects. Even when the speaker appears to relinquish control, as in moments of surrender to death or madness, the poems themselves remain fiercely composed and exacting. The intensity is relentless, but it is also deeply cathartic, offering the reader a raw encounter with language at the brink of life and death.