Sylvia Plath - The Cry of "Ariel" in Dawn's Black Light

 

 

February 12, 2013

 

Sylvia Plath’s Joy

http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/books/2013/02/ariel-and-sylvia-plaths-joy.html

 

Posted by Dan Chiasson

 

 

It is fifty years since Sylvia Plath killed herself, in her flat in London, near Primrose Hill, in a house where William Butler Yeats once lived. She was thirty-one. Her two children, Frieda, age three, and Nicholas, barely one, slept in the next room. Plath jammed some rags and towels under the door, then turned the gas on in the oven and laid her head inside. She was separated from her husband, the poet Ted Hughes, who had betrayed her; raising the children was left almost entirely to her. She wrote several dozen of the most extraordinary poems in the English language within the span of a few months, before the children awoke at dawn.

 

The care with which she prepared her own death scene, leaving out mugs of milk for the children, is the work of a person whose talent for hospitality never left her, though it took a macabre turn. This care extended to her book. On her writing table, she left a black spring binder that contained a manuscript she had completed some months earlier, “Ariel and Other Poems” (she had scratched out alternate possibilities: “Daddy and Other Poems,” “A Birthday Present,” and “The Rabbit Catcher”) and, beside it, a sheaf of nineteen additional poems that she had written since. Hughes published a book he called “Ariel,” derived from the manuscript, with the newer poems added, in 1965. Robert Lowell, who contributed a forward, is said to have exclaimed, when he opened and read the manuscript, “Something amazing has happened.”

 

The feeling that “Ariel” is a discovery, a revelation, has never really faded. For me, it is the great book of earliest morning—the “substanceless blue” of predawn, as the gathering light reveals a world of sense—data previously obscured. Many poets have prized that hour of the day for its clarity, for the clamor of the dawn chorus, or because of its vestigial associations with prayer. Plath took these essentially languorous, and deeply male, associations and added her own stopwatch urgency. Here is “Ariel,” her great title poem, in its entirety: 

Ariel

Stasis in darkness.
Then the substanceless blue
Pour of tor and distance. 

God’s lioness,
How one we grew,
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.

 

White
Godiva, I unpeel—
Dead hands, dead stringencies.

 

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

 

Melts in the wall.
And I
Am the arrow,

 

The dew that flies
Suicidal, at one with the drive
Into the red

 

Eye, the cauldron of morning.

There is nothing else like this in English; it is, I think, a perfect poem, perfect in its excesses and stray blasphemies (that “nigger-eye”), which make Plath Plath—that is to say, dangerous, heedless, a menace, and irresistible. The greatest thing in it, though, is a detail whose uncanniness will strike any new parent: “The child’s cry / Melts in the wall.”

 

The feeling of being inside the addled sensorium of a new mother—prey to the wild swings of mood, the flare-ups of unforeseen tenderness and rage—is inextricable from Plath’s sense of the urgency of passing time, time that, in “Ariel,” she runs toward and into, not away from or alongside of, as poets are supposed to do. That “child’s cry” was a cry, of course, for her, for Plath. In the most straightforward way, it brought “art” and “life,” those bedraggled abstractions, into real conflict. To master it in an image that brilliant is only a temporary solution, and so the poem careens to a close upon the word “suicidal,” an odd figurative occurrence of a word whose literal meaning Plath took very seriously.

 

“Melt” is the genius stroke. She uses it elsewhere, too, to describe the sound of crying. In “Lady Lazarus,” one of her best-known poems, Plath calls herself a “Pure gold baby / that melts to a shriek.” What makes “melt” so good in “Ariel,” though, is its materiality: the child’s cry from the adjoining room happens inside the wall, not in Plath’s ear or the child’s mouth. It is one of many details in “Ariel” that bring Plath’s surroundings to life; probably, there is no more vivid rendering in poetry of what it is like to share a small house or apartment with young children. (Coleridge’s “Frost at Midnight” is an important antecedent.) The Plaths’ house in Devon and their flat in London are brightly present in this poetry: the rose curtains, the kitchen knives, the “soft rugs / The last of Victoriana.”

 

“Nick and the Candlestick” is, for me, Plath’s greatest poem. Like “Ariel,” you can reduce it to show how much it dwells and thrives in excess. Plath, “a miner” in the blue light of dawn, wakes to check on her son, and finds him in some bonkers position in his crib. I have discovered my own children (one of them named Nicholas, partly after this poem) asleep standing up against their crib walls and even upside down, their small faces smashed against the mattress, snoozing blissfully. Each time I found them this way, I quoted Plath: “O love, how did you get here?” That is, of course, a question not only about position but about origin. “Nick and the Candlestick” redoes the birth of little Nicholas Hughes as the birth of Christ, an event that resets time. The eight lines near its middle strike me as some of the most compassionate remarks ever made about a child:

O love, how did you get here?
O embryo

 

Remembering, even in sleep,
Your crossed position.
The blood blooms clean

 

In you, ruby.
The pain
You wake to is not yours.

A time of day, dawn, made sharp by anticipated interruption; a house animated by children, their happiness, their demands, their balloons and playthings; the potential for violence innate in all beauty, as well as the awful beauty of violence; the feeling of elation at filling a house with the clacking of a typewriter, and the fear of the silence when the typing ends: these elements are my personal “Ariel,” and I tire of the more rhetorical and showy poems—“Daddy,” “The Applicant,” “Lady Lazarus”—upon which Plath made her notorious name. “Ariel” ends with a poem, “Words,” about the season that T. S. Eliot called “midwinter spring” and Wallace Stevens called “the earliest end of winter”: March, when, in New England (a region all three poets share), the sap runs. Plath’s keystrokes in the quiet house are like “Axes / After whose stroke the wood rings.” Before, echoing away from her, they become like horses’ “indefatigable hoof taps”—“riderless,” as in a funeral procession. Add to the available accounts of Plath (there are so many) this, please: nobody brought a house to life the way she did. “Ariel,” despite the tragedy that attends it, is a book with much joy between its covers.

 

Dan Chiasson’s fifth book, “Bicentennial,” will appear next year from Knopf.

Photograph: Bettmann/Corbis.

 

Read more: http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/books/2013/02/ariel-and-sylvia-plaths-joy.html#ixzz2Kua4PCpc