Word Wednesday - Ariel

 So the poetry theme continues for Word Wednesday, but this Wednesday I'm going to share with you one of my favourite poems by one of my most favourite writers, Syliva Plath. I know most people tend to think of her as a rather melancholy or morbid literary figure, which I suppose isn't helped by the fact that her demise and eventual suicide seems to be more famous than her work. However, I choose instead to focus not on the gas oven but on her passion; to me, she was so passionate about life that it eventually drove her mad. And I feel that this poem is a prime example of that.

Ariel
Sylvia Plath

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

God's lioness,
How one we grow,
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.