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.
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