Ariel

“If the moon smiled, she would resemble you.
You leave the same impression
Of something beautiful, but annihilating.
Both of you are great light borrowers.
Her O-mouth grieves at the world; yours is unaffected,


And your first gift is making stone out of everything.
I wake to a mausoleum; you are here,
Ticking your fingers on the marble table,
looking for cigarettes,
Spiteful as a woman, but not so nervous
And dying to say something unanswerable.


The moon, too, abases her subjects,
But in the daytime she is ridiculous.
Your dissatisfactions, on the other hand,
Arrive through the mailslot with loving regularity,
White and blank, expansive as carbon monoxide.


No day is safe from news of you,
Walking about in Africa maybe, but thinking of me.”

tragic read

very excellent poems. but also quite racist in some places which i have never really seen people talk about when recommending it? idk it just shocked me a bit which i suppose it shouldn't have?

Sylvia has an immense power, being able to bond and freed, to punish and love, to teach and learn, all in the same move. I wish i could had meet her, there is so much to be thankful for.

I loved reading Sylvia Plath as a teen. I read the Bell Jar a long time ago, but I know that was just scratching the surface of her writings. I'm quite curious about her life.
As an adult, I'm no longer as emotional and full of angst. I do think that the writing is amazing, thoughtful, and emotional.

The writing is very dark and enigmatic, filled with images of the color red, animated by her desire for relief and for death. It is hard to read, hard to understand, but one can only see the high quality of her writing. I need to mention that she used racial slurs several times and loose comparisons to the Holocaust.

This collection of poems was published posthumously.

This is my first foray into Plath and I'm pretty much a noob with poetry in general. I'll be honest: I struggle. I wonder if I need to be in the right frame of mind, or whether should the poems drag me from the real world into a better place? I'm not sure.

It's not what I was expecting, maybe that's it. Now that I know that, I should have another go; find some lines that I get and hold onto them. There are other worlds than these.