Sylvia Plath

Today we celebrate one of the greats, as we note the birth date of Sylvia Plath (October 27, 1932--February 11, 1963), American poet whose best-known works, such as the poems “Daddy” and “Lady Lazarus”, starkly express a sense of alienation and self-destruction closely tied to her personal experiences and, by extension, the situation of women in mid-20th-century America.

Her only novel, The Bell Jar, is a thinly veiled autobiography detailing the life of Esther Greenwood, a college woman who struggles through a mental breakdown in the 1950s. Plath examines coming of age in a hypocritical world in this introspective novel, which is noted for its symbolic use of bottles and jars and black-and-white colors and its symbols of imprisonment and death.

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