Ariel -- Sylvia Plath

(Poem #129) Ariel 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. -- Sylvia Plath

I haven't the slightest idea what this poem is about. But I think it's
absolutely brilliant. The sheer unadulterated _power_ of the words is
simply stunning.

thomas.

[Biography]

Sylvia Plath was born in Boston in 1932. She grew up in a comfortably
middle-class style and attended Smith College. She suffered a breakdown
at the end of her junior year of college, but recovered well enough to
return and excel during her senior year, receiving various prizes and
graduating summa cum laude. In 1955, having been awarded a Fulbright
scholarship, she began two years at Cambridge University. There she met
and married the British poet Ted Hughes and settled in England, bearing
two children. Her first book of poems, The Colossus (1960), demonstrated
her precocious talent, but was far more conventional than the work that
followed. Having studied with Robert Lowell in 1959 and been influenced
by the "confessional" style of his collection Life Studies, she embarked
on the new work that made her posthumous reputation as a major poet. A
terrifying record of her encroaching mental illness, the poems that were
collected after her suicide (at age 31) in 1963 in the volumes Ariel,
Crossing the Water, and Winter Trees are graphically macabre,
hallucinatory in their imagery, but full of ironic wit, technical
brilliance, and tremendous emotional power.

    -- the Academy of American Poets