Ariel

Question 1

Ariel

Answer 1

1. Shakespeare’s ‘The Tempest’ - imagery recurs throughout her poetry (e.g. ‘Full Fathom Five’)
2. Hebrew - ‘lion of God’ (note Plath makes it feminine - lioness)
3. Plath’s horse - Devon

Question 2

Then the substanceless blue
Pour of tor and distances.

Answer 2

from stasis to movement (‘The Horses’)

Question 3

How one we grow,
Pivot of heels and knees!

Answer 3

exclamatory celebration of the harmony between horse and rider

Question 4

—The furrow/

Splits and passes, sister to
The brown arc

Answer 4

enjambment

Question 5

Berries cast dark
Hooks—

Black sweet blood mouthfuls

Answer 5

obstacle - impeding her forward momentum

metaphorically - burdens placed upon women - domestic expectations - mother and wife

plosive alliteration & startling juxtaposition of ‘blood’ and ‘sweet’ - abject, sensory imagery

Question 6

Flakes from my heels

Answer 6

shedding skin - casting off ‘stringencies’

transformation - transcending her own physicality

Question 7

White
Godiva, I unpeel—

Answer 7

purity of white - cf. ‘Tulips’, ‘Edge’

shedding off burden of motherhood, marriage, society

first person - self-assurance - identity?

allusion to Lady Godiva who shed her clothes in protest and rode on a horse - tension between vulnerability and power

Question 8

The child’s cry

Melts in the wall.

Answer 8

first explicit reference to her domestic duties/perceived burden of motherhood

‘wall’ - physical boundary - speaker has transcended physicality - she is ‘foam’/’wheat’/’glitter’

permeability of natural world with the domestic

destabilising or liberating

Question 9

I
Am the arrow

Answer 9

Bell Jar quote: The last thing I wanted was infinite security and to be the place an arrow shoots off from.

Question 10

Suicidal

Answer 10

lack of restraint - embracing whatever may come of this uncontrollable forward momentum - fearlessness

Anne Sexton - ‘talked death with burned up intensity’

Question 11

with the drive
Into the red

Eye, the cauldron of morning.

Answer 11

literally - sunrise

metaphorically/figuratively - conflagration - culmination of this transcendence/transformation - birth/renewal or a death/conflagration?

Question 12

When was Ariel written?

Answer 12

On her final birthday in 1962

Question 13

What does Plath’s allusion to Lady Godiva show us?

Answer 13

Plath’s allusion to Lady Godiva, who stands up for her beliefs against her husband’s wishes, captures the growing feminist spirit of the time.

Question 14

What did Al Alvarez say about the Ariel collection

Answer 14

‘In a curious way, the poems read as though they were written posthumously.’ - Al Alvarez

Question 15

How did Robert Lowell describe Plath later poems?

Answer 15

Robert Lowell described Plath’s later poems as akin to ‘playing Russian roulette with six cartridges in the cylinder’