Sylvia Plath - Selected Poems from Ariel (1965)

'Morning Song' is one of Plath's most tender poems, yet its tenderness is shot through with unease. Plath presents the mother-child relationship not as instant, instinctive love but as something strange, mechanical and even estranging at first, which only gradually warms into attentive care. She does this through unsettling imagery, a tone of detachment, and a final movement toward sound and life.

The poem's famous opening simile sets the tone: 'Love set you going like a fat gold watch.' The baby is compared to a wound-up timepiece — precious ('gold') but mechanical, a thing set in motion rather than a person embraced. Plath makes even love feel manufactured here, so that the reader senses the mother's distance from her own child rather than a rush of feeling.

That distance deepens in the central image. The mother insists 'I'm no more your mother / Than the cloud that distills a mirror to reflect its own slow / Effacement'. The comparison is startling: she sees herself not as a nurturing source but as a cloud that is gradually rubbed out, effaced, as the child takes over. Plath presents motherhood as a kind of self-erasure — the mother giving way to the new life — rather than as simple fulfilment.

Yet the poem moves, characteristically, toward life and sound. By the close the mother rises to the baby's cry and listens as 'The clear vowels rise like balloons.' The simile is light and ascending; after the cold watch and the effacing cloud, the poem ends on the buoyant music of the child's first sounds. The arc from mechanical opening to rising vowels traces the mother's slow movement from detachment toward attentive tenderness.

A reader who knows the selection feels how distinctive this ambivalence is. Plath's other poems of the child — 'Balloons', 'You're' — also treat the infant with wonder, but 'Morning Song' is unusual in admitting the mother's strangeness to her own baby. Plath presents the relationship honestly: love here is not automatic but achieved, emerging out of distance into a fragile, listening care.

Plath presents death not as a single thing but as a range of stances toward the self: a defiant art to be performed in 'Lady Lazarus', an icy completion in 'Edge', and a tyranny to be destroyed in 'Daddy'. By treating death so differently across the selection, Plath makes it the arena in which the self struggles for control.

In 'Lady Lazarus', death is staged as a grim, repeatable skill. The speaker declares that 'Dying / Is an art, like everything else', and treats her near-deaths as a kind of macabre performance for a crowd. Plath presents death here not as an ending but as something the speaker masters and survives, rising 'out of the ash' to 'eat men like air'. Death becomes the stage for a vengeful, defiant power.

'Edge' presents death utterly differently — as a cold, sculptural completion. 'The woman is perfected', the poem begins, and Plath arranges the dead mother and her children into a finished, statue-like stillness. Here death is not performance but conclusion: the unsettling word 'perfected' makes death sound like the achievement of a flawless, closed form. The calm, detached tone is far more disturbing than any cry of pain.

In 'Daddy', death is something the speaker inflicts rather than suffers — she must kill off the dead father who still controls her. The poem drives toward the violent release of 'Daddy, daddy, you bastard, I'm through', as the speaker symbolically destroys the father (and the patriarchal power he embodies) in order to live. Death here is a weapon turned against a tyrant.

Across the selection, then, Plath presents death as inseparable from the self's fight for control: it can be performed, completed or inflicted. Whether any of these is a true victory is left open — the rebirth of 'Lady Lazarus' is vengeful, the 'perfection' of 'Edge' is chilling. That refusal to make death simply terrible or simply triumphant is exactly Plath's power.

'Lady Lazarus' is Plath's fiercest poem of survival, in which death is staged as a public art and rebirth arrives not as salvation but as vengeance. Plath presents the speaker as a showwoman who has died and returned more than once, and through a tone of savage performance, a vocabulary of spectacle and a final image of predatory resurrection, she turns the suffering self into a figure of frightening power.

The poem's central conceit is that dying is a skill to be performed. 'Dying / Is an art, like everything else. / I do it exceptionally well', the speaker boasts, and the brittle confidence of that boast is shocking: Plath makes near-death into a talent, almost a vocation. The matter-of-fact tone, set against the horror of the content, is the poem's most disturbing method — it forces the reader to confront how a self might come to treat its own destruction as expertise.

Plath sharpens this by presenting the speaker as a spectacle for a paying crowd. 'There is a charge // For the eyeing of my scars, there is a charge / For the hearing of my heart', she announces, casting herself as a sideshow exhibit and the onlookers as ghoulish customers. The repetition of 'there is a charge' enacts a relentless, commercial counting, so that the suffering body becomes a thing consumed by spectators — a sharp piece of female anger at being looked at and used.

The poem builds, characteristically, toward transformation. 'Out of the ash / I rise with my red hair / And I eat men like air.' The short, rising lines and the phoenix image promise rebirth — but Plath refuses to make it gentle. The verb 'eat' turns the resurrected woman into a devouring force; the rebirth is not into peace but into vengeful appetite. The red hair flares like fire, and the speaker rises not to be saved but to take revenge on the 'men' who have watched and used her.

The poem's power is that it will not let us separate triumph from monstrousness. The speaker survives and reclaims her power, yet she does so by becoming a creature of fire and appetite, condemned still to 'do it' again. Plath presents rebirth, then, as real but poisoned: the self that survives abuse rises magnificent and terrible at once, and the theatrical staging hints that even this triumph is something willed and performed rather than simply felt.

There is real truth in the proposition: Plath's poems are rarely portraits of other people, and even the 'father' of 'Daddy' is less a man than a structure of power the speaking self must escape. But I will argue the proposition is only half-right. Plath's poems are indeed about a self under pressure — yet that self is not simply confessed; it is constructed, masked and dramatised, so the poems are about the making of identity as much as its suffering.

The clearest evidence is Plath's use of personae. 'Lady Lazarus' speaks not as Sylvia Plath but as a theatrical survivor, a showwoman who performs her deaths for a crowd. 'The Applicant' ventriloquises a salesman hawking a wife as an appliance, a 'living doll' fitted to a buyer. These are masks, and the gap between the mask and any real person is the point: Plath examines identity by dramatising it, not by reporting it. To read these speakers as straightforward autobiography is to miss the craft.

Even where the material seems most personal, the self is presented as something assembled under pressure. In 'Daddy' the speaker builds the father into a colossus, a 'bag full of God', then a boot she has lived inside — and the poem is the labour of constructing, and then destroying, that oppressive figure in order to free the self. The childish chant-rhythm shows the speaker still half-trapped in a child's identity; the violent close, 'Daddy... you bastard, I'm through', is the self struggling to remake itself as separate and adult.

The proposition's strength is that this self is genuinely 'under pressure' — squeezed by death, by men, by patriarchal power, by the demand to be a 'living doll'. In 'The Applicant' the human being is dissolved entirely into a product, identity reduced to what can be sold. Plath presents a self constantly in danger of being emptied out, packaged or annihilated.

So the proposition is half-right. Yes, the poems are about a self under pressure rather than about real people. But to stop there is to underrate Plath's art: the self in Ariel is not merely confessed but performed, masked and built. Plath explores identity as a construction the self must fight to control — and that, not raw autobiography, is the source of the poems' power.

'Edge' is Plath's coldest and most disquieting poem, in which death is presented not as agony or release but as a flawless completion. Through its chilling diction of 'perfection', its disturbing fusion of death and motherhood, and the detached gaze of the moon, Plath stages death as the achievement of a closed, sculptural form — and the calm of that staging is more terrible than any cry.

The poem's opening line is its key: 'The woman is perfected.' The passive verb makes death sound like a process of completion, as if the woman has been finished like a work of art, and 'perfected' carries a horrible double sense — both 'made flawless' and 'brought to an end'. Plath presents death here not as something that happens to the self but as the self's final, accomplished form; the dead body even 'wears the smile of accomplishment', as though dying were a task well done.

Most disturbing is the way Plath fuses death with motherhood. The dead children are imagined 'coiled, a white serpent, / One at each little / Pitcher of milk, now empty'. The image is tender and monstrous at once: the children are gathered back to the mother's body as if for feeding, yet the milk is 'empty' and they are still as serpents. Plath presents a motherhood that has folded its children back into death — a grotesque inversion of nurture, in which completion means the closing-up of life rather than its giving.

The poem's gaze then lifts to the moon, and here the tone reaches its icy extreme. 'The moon has nothing to be sad about, / Staring from her hood of bone.' The moon — often a maternal or feeling presence elsewhere in Plath — is here utterly indifferent, a skull-like watcher with 'nothing to be sad about'. Plath presents a universe that does not mourn; the woman's 'perfection' is observed by a cold, bony eye that registers no grief at all. The detachment is the horror.

What makes 'Edge' so powerful, and so resistant to a comforting reading, is its refusal of feeling. There is no rage here as in 'Daddy', no defiant performance as in 'Lady Lazarus' — only a calm, finished stillness. The poem presents death as perfection, and dares the reader to find that calm consoling or appalling. I read it as appalling precisely because it is calm: Plath shows a self and a motherhood completed into death, and a cosmos that watches without sorrow. The poem's chilling quiet is its final, unanswerable statement.

The proposition cuts to the heart of how Plath should be read. The popular image of her poetry is of raw feeling spilling onto the page — and her imagery is certainly violent: cut thumbs, ovens, the imagery of the camps, a woman devouring men. But I will argue the proposition is right: in Ariel the violence is not a symptom of breakdown but an instrument of mastery. Plath controls extreme material through tight form, exact tone and dramatic distance, so that her most savage images are acts of artistic command, not collapse.

The clearest evidence is the yoking of the domestic and the brutal in 'Cut'. A thumb sliced in the kitchen becomes a battlefield of 'redcoats', a 'celebration' of blood, a 'million soldiers'. The accident is small; the imagery is enormous and almost gleeful. This is not a loss of control but a deliberate, witty exaggeration — Plath turns a domestic mishap into a controlled performance of violence, mastering pain by transforming it into extravagant, knowing metaphor. The control lies in the artistry of the excess.

The same mastery shapes the anger of 'Daddy'. The poem reaches for the most violent imagery available — the boot, the army, even the imagery of the camps — to figure the father's oppressive power. This is the collection's most controversial method, and it deserves a fair word: some readers find the comparison of private suffering to historical atrocity a powerful enlargement of pain, while others find it an over-reaching appropriation that borrows a horror not the speaker's own. But whichever view one takes, the imagery is plainly controlled: it rides a sing-song nursery rhythm and an insistent 'oo' rhyme, so that the rage is shaped into a chant. Plath does not lose herself in fury; she choreographs it.

'Lady Lazarus' confirms the pattern. The speaker's rage at being watched and used — 'There is a charge / For the eyeing of my scars' — and her devouring rebirth ('eat men like air') are held inside a strict three-line stanza and a hard, driving rhyme. The form is a cage that intensifies the violence by containing it; the resurrection is theatrical, staged, performed. Even the gendered anger of the body here is an act of self-presentation, not an overflow.

There is a counter-case worth granting: the suffering in poems like 'Elm' can feel genuinely tormented, the female voice driven by a pain that seems to exceed the speaker's grip. But even there the torment is rendered in exact, deliberate images, not in formless cries. My judgement, then, is that the proposition is right and important. Plath's violence is a form of control: she takes the very material that might destroy a self — rage, the wounded body, the longing for death — and masters it through form, tone and the mask. The savagery of Ariel is not the failure of art but its most disciplined achievement.