Ariel by Sylvia Plath: Summary

The poem Ariel by Sylvia Plath begins with a faintly recognizable narration of the incident of riding the horse; we get the impressions that the rider has probably gone to the horse stable and while just trying to ride, the horse scampers with the girl clinging on to its neck.


Sylvia Plath (1932-1963)

But in the reeling speed and in the darkness of the dawn, she can have no feeling. It is all stasis; there is no sense of movement. And there is no movement either. Nest follows a ‘substances pouring of sights of blue hills in the dawn. She becomes gradually aware of the distance being traversed. In the second stanza, the speaker identifies herself with lady Godiva, a rebellious Irish woman, who rode naked through the streets in protest of her husband’s too high tax on the people.

In stanza three, she sees the horizon (brown arc) made brighter by the coming sun. But the arc is also that of the horse’s neck (line 9). She seems to catch the glimpse of the people passing by: “nigger eyes…..shadows”, and she also hears a child cry on the way (24). She sees furrows of ploughed fields (6), splits and passes (7) berries with thorns (11), seas of wheat fields (23), and finally the flying of evaporating dew, with which she identifies herself (28). These fleeting images and sounds are what partial reminiscences she has of the frenzied scurry of the horse. Plath implicitly reinterprets the experience as symbolizing the race of life, the pressure of existence, the struggle to control and overcome many kinds of constrains, the suicidal thrush towards death and the process of growing up into the adult world. More importantly, she makes it symbolize the female protest against the “dead hands, dead stringencies” (21) of the male dominations and inhumanities by identifying herself with Godiva a similar female rebel. This is from where readers enter into the subtext of the feminist theme of protest in the poem. As she wheels by sticking to the horse, she has sensations focusing on the body; she feels as if her mouth is full of blood (signaling death) and her thighs are peeling off. A ‘something else’ also hauls her through the air (16). But at the end of the poem, she feels as if she is evaporating like the morning dew and dissolving into the elements; she says that she is an arrow being shot into the face of the sun (red eye, cauldron of morning). The sun is the symbol of the male traditions which she means to protest and avenge. But the dissolution is not extinction; it is rather a rebirth and salvation of the protesting female. The poem can be read in the context of the feminist uprising of the late twentieth century, like the other poems of the collections Ariel.

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Sharma, Kedar N. "Ariel by Sylvia Plath: Summary" BachelorandMaster, 25 Nov. 2013, bachelorandmaster.com/britishandamericanpoetry/ariel-summary.html.