Sylvia Plath is among the most celebrated and controversial poets of postwar America. Her intense, emotional verse draws on her personal experiences, and she is considered a key figure in the Confessional poetry movement. Plath admired other Confessional poets such as Robert Lowell and Anne Sexton, but Plath’s use of extended metaphors and literary allusions often distances her from the Confessional movement. Plath’s efficient, symbol-rich verse stands in a category of its own.

Plath only lived 30 years and wrote “Ariel” on October 27, 1962—her 30th birthday. Her first poetry collection, The Colossus and Other Poems, was the only one published during her lifetime. Ariel, her second poetry collection, was published two years after her death in February 1963. The collection and its title poem are named after the character “Ariel” from William Shakespeare’s The Tempest. “Ariel” defies categorization but visits themes common in Plath’s work such as female creativity and the fragmented self.

Poet Biography

Sylvia Plath was born in Boston, Massachusetts on October 27, 1932. Plath’s father, Otto Plath, was a German immigrant and professor of biology at Boston University, where he studied insects. After the birth of Plath’s brother Warren in 1935, the Plath family moved to Winthrop, Massachusetts to be closer to Plath’s maternal grandparents. Plath published her first poem at eight years old and published in a variety of magazines and newspapers while in Winthrop.

Plath’s father died in 1940 due to complications related to untreated diabetes. Plath turned away from her Unitarian upbringing after her father’s death and never returned to religion. Plath’s father inspired many of her later poems, such as “Daddy,” which appears in her 1965 collection Ariel. After her father’s death, Plath’s family relocated to Wellesley, Massachusetts, where she attended Bradford Senior High School. After graduating in 1950, Plath attended Smith College.

In Plath’s third year of college, Mademoiselle magazine offered her a guest editor position. Plath was disappointed with the experience and her treatment by the magazine. While working for Mademoiselle in New York, Plath attempted to meet Dylan Thomas, a poet she admired. Her failure to meet Thomas led to her first major depressive episode. Plath underwent electroconvulsive therapy at McLean Hospital, and made her first of many suicide attempts, in August 1953. Plath remained at the hospital for six months before returning to college. Upon graduating in 1955, Plath obtained a scholarship to study at the University of Cambridge in England.

Plath continued to publish throughout her university education. In 1956, she met Ted Hughes, another poet. The two would marry within five months of meeting. Plath and Hughes moved to the United States and settled in Boston, where Plath attended Robert Lowell’s poetry seminars. Lowell and Anne Sexton, another attendee of Lowell’s seminars, encouraged Plath to write from personal experience. During this time, Plath wrote many of the poems that comprised 1960’s The Colossus and Other Poems. Plath’s daughter, Frieda, was also born that year.

Plath’s second pregnancy miscarried in 1961, and she wrote about this experience in some of her later poems. Plath completed her first novel, The Bell Jar, in August of 1961. The novel fictionalizes Plath’s experiences in university and as guest editor of Mademoiselle magazine. After Plath finished the novel, she and Hughes moved to North Tawton in Devon. She gave birth to her son Nicholas there in 1962. In June of that year, Plath drove her car into a river in another suicide attempt. One month later, Plath discovered that Hughes was having an affair with another woman. In September of 1962, the couple separated. This separation led to Plath’s greatest creative outburst. She wrote most of the posthumous collection Ariel between October 1962 and January of the next year.

Plath published The Bell Jar under a pseudonym in 1963. Critics mostly ignored the novel. Plath’s depression worsened throughout that year. She experienced insomnia, weight loss, agitation, and suicidal thoughts as a result of her illness. Plath’s attending nurse found her dead by suicide on February 11, 1963.

Poem Text

Plath, Sylvia. “Ariel.” 1965. Poetry Foundation.

Summary

“Ariel” progresses through a series of fragmented images that collect into a short narrative of the speaker riding a horse into the morning sun. The first stanza begins with “[s]tasis [and] darkness” (Line 1) before noting the water and hills in the distance (Line 3). The second stanza draws connections between the speaker and their female horse, until they become “one” (Line 5) through the “[p]ivot of heels and knees” (Line 6).

The speaker and the horse progress through “[s]hadows” (Line 14) in the fifth stanza until “Something else / Hauls [the speaker] through air” (Lines 15-16) by the beginning of the sixth. In the seventh stanza, the speaker compares themselves to a “[w]hite / Godiva” (Lines 19-20) as she “unpeel[s]” (Line 21) their clothes. Afterwards, they become part of the landscape and the “glitter of seas” (Line 23) that they ride toward.

The speaker calls themselves “the arrow” (Line 27) in the last line of the ninth stanza. In the 10th stanza, they claim to be “the dew that flies” (Line 28) headlong into the rising sun, which they call the “cauldron of morning” (Line 31).