In Through the Out Door

By jonathan barker, Student

Analysis of Sylvia Plath's "Ariel"

An essay hosted at LiteratureClassics.com

Jonathan Barker
Rutgers College

In Through the Out Door

In Sylvia Plath’s poem, Ariel, she explores the unifying connection of a spiritual or disembodied realm with the physical or embodied realm. One aspect of the poem deals with Plath’s embodied experience of her ride with Ariel, but another deals with her disembodied spirit that is free to move within its own world. Like Prospero’s horse in The Tempest, Plath’s Ariel also serves as a vehicle of transformation between worlds. What makes Plath’s poem special is the way in which she connects the physical event of her ride with Ariel to her metaphysically transforming identities which she experiences.
Plath begins the poem in a spiritual “stasis in darkness” and then moves toward a “substanceless blue.” The poem initially uses images of black and color in order to indicate movement toward a more enlightened state. However, Plath is careful to make the reader aware that this is a “substanceless” color which she views, for there are still rocky peaks and great distances in the world she now occupies. The next Stanza begins with the words “God’s lioness,” generating a powerful image of the womanly spirit. Both she and Ariel possess this spirit, and each feed off each other and grow together.
Plath brilliantly draws this spiritual connection between her and Ariel to the physical connection of the horse and rider. During riding, the pressure of one’s “heel and knees” directs the horse in speed and movement. It is the physical contact of the rider’s heels and knees upon the horse that forms the pathway of communication between the horse and rider. In other words, Plath and Ariel are deeply in sync on both a spiritual and physical level. These two levels build upon each other in the first six stanzas. Part of the effect of having short lines throughout the poem and three line stanzas is to make the reader aware of a dancing within worlds of the physical and metaphysical.
Plath is very aware of the two interacting worlds at play here. She places the word furrow hanging off of the second stanza. A transformation takes place between the second and third stanza, when the furrow “splits and passes.” It is as if the two interacting worlds of the physical and spiritual now become two separate and distinct entities right in front of her eyes. “The furrow splits and passes,” indicative of the physical world removing itself while she tries to possess the spiritual world, represented by “the neck [she] cannot catch.” Again, Plath interplays her embodied ride with Ariel to her disembodied spiritual transformation. Just as the cartoon image of a carrot attached to a stick placed in front of a mule, so too the spiritual representation of the horse’s neck is placed in front of Plath and drives her forward, but never to catch up with it.
In this way, she identifies herself with the Blacks, a people who have been held in bondage and prosecuted amidst dreams of freedom and greatness. Again, she makes this spiritual transformation of her changed identity through the image of Ariel. This transformation occurs between stanzas two and three, where she relates the horse’s black eyes to “berries cast dark.” However, the image of bright eyes that become blackened swiftly moves to the death image of “dark hooks” that pierce “black sweet blood mouthfuls.” The word “Shadows” is left standing alone, as if the image of death is a constant shadow on Plath. However, she believes there is also something else that is driving her towards the spiritual realm besides the sole experience of death. The vehicle for this drive is represented by Ariel, which “hauls her through air.” Plath’s body “flakes” off where she makes her physical connection to Ariel- at the heels. She is like the image of Lady Godiva who becomes physically bare for the sake of her people.
However, Plath is becoming spiritually naked for the sake of herself. She looses her body and all of the constrictions it imposes on her. “I unpeel- Dead hands, dead stringencies.” In becoming the representation of Godiva, , she is careful to place the word “White” alone in order to describe Godiva’s image. Plath unpeels a part of herself in order to achieve her imagistic representation of Lady Godiva. As she does this, the color of the poem changes as well from darkness to “substancesless blue” to “Black” and now to “White.” Traditionally, the color white symbolizes purity, and I think that is exactly the image Plath intends to place upon the reader by powerfully placing the word alone at the top of stanza seven. Plath may view her real self as her sole or spirit, and her body as merely a shell that contains her sole. As a result, by becoming disembodied, she is becoming more pure because her real self now stands alone and is free to move about in a spiritual world; a world restricted from an embodied sole. Plath is transforming out of physical self and into “a glitter of seas,” or a spiritual body that can move rapidly in its own medium, taking the shape of any container it is placed into, as a liquid does.
It is interesting that she describes herself as “Foam[ing] to wheat.” Wheat is an ancient source of physical nourishment, and yet Plath does not need physical nourishment in her subsequent transformation into “a glitter of seas.” Again, Plath is interplaying closely her spiritual and physical worlds. Although she has become part of a metaphysical sea, she hears “The child’s cry.” It stands alone upon a line break to emphasize the fact that she understands the existence of the child’s cry for nourishment and love, but it “Melts in the wall.” The next line is simply “And I.” It occurs at another line break to emphasize that she is separate from those physical needs that melt into a wall beyond her. She is “the arrow” that can pierce those walls.
However, there is a price to pay for her ability to pierce these walls seperating physical and spiritual realms. She is “suicidal, at one with the drive into the red.” The line “Into the red” stands alone at a line break. There is again a dramatic change in color of the poem from her previous image of “white Godiva,” now “into the red.” Plath understands that she is making an extreme sacrifice for her ability to become the “dew that flies,” unbound by walls. And yet, she possesses this extreme drive to become “suicidal…into the red eye.” By the end of the poem, she enters into the red eye, the eye that can see all worlds. However, her ability to perceive the metaphysical world is not without sacrifice. This eye that she enters into is “the cauldron of morning.” Cauldrons are a symbol of plenty and fertility, and Plath connects this very well in her image of morning or rebirth. However, Cauldrons were also often used in ritualistic human sacrifices. It is important to recognize that Plath shoots herself “into the red eye.” She sacrifices her own body in order to enter into her new dawn; “the cauldron of morning.”
In the draft version of “Ariel”, Plath includes the line “Eye, the cauldron of morning” in the last stanza. She chooses to leave this line by itself in the final draft, however, because it symbolizes her breaking away from all that she once was. In other words, once she chooses to make that final suicidal jump, there is no turning back and she is left departed from all aspects of her physical realm. In the final step of her transformation, she is changed into something completely separate from the process of that transformation. As in The Tempest, Ariel is released in the epilogue after he has served Prospero’s efforts. So too, is it clear that Plath does not include Ariel in her final journey “into the red.” Ariel has served her purpose of getting her thus far, and now leaves Plath as she quakes into a new and total separate world.