Ariel - Analysis

From Stasis in darkness to an unbearable speed

The poem’s central claim is that a private act of motion—riding, fleeing, being carried—can become so total it erases the rider’s separateness, turning selfhood into pure drive. It begins with a blunt stillness: Stasis in darkness. The first sensation is not a landscape but a state, and even the next image, substanceless blue, feels like color without matter. From there the poem accelerates into bodily mechanics—Pivot of heels and knees—as if the speaker has clicked into a new mode of being where thought is replaced by propulsion.

Tone follows that acceleration: from hushed and suspended to fierce, almost exultant, then finally to something frighteningly absolute. The poem doesn’t simply describe speed; it makes speed feel like a spiritual condition, a force that can grant transcendence or demand a price.

God’s lioness: power that is borrowed and possessed

The address God’s lioness is both coronation and warning. A lioness is muscular, lethal, and purposeful—an emblem of female power—but she belongs to God, not to herself. That possessive frames the ride (or ride-like flight) as a kind of possession: the speaker is powerful only by being taken up into a larger force.

Even the grammar enacts this merging. How one we grow collapses the boundary between rider and the thing she rides or becomes. The body’s heels and knees are no longer personal details; they are the jointed hinge of a single organism. The poem’s energy comes from this tension: the speaker wants the unity (one we), yet unity also means surrendering control.

The neck I cannot catch: desire outrunning the self

Midway through the opening rush, the poem introduces a pursuit that can’t be completed: The brown arc / Of the neck I cannot catch. On the surface, this is a rider reaching toward a horse’s neck—especially plausible given that Ariel was the name of Sylvia Plath’s horse—yet the image also works as a deeper emblem of longing. The speaker can see the curve, feel its motion, but can’t seize it as an object. The thing she depends on to move forward is also the thing she cannot fully grasp.

This failure to catch becomes a pattern. The poem keeps throwing forward—through distances, through air—without allowing a stable point of contact. Motion is liberation, but it is also the condition that prevents intimacy, rest, and comprehension. The speaker is carried into a state where she can only be in pursuit, never in possession.

The berry episode: sweetness turned into hooks

The sudden close-up of Nigger-eye berries is one of the poem’s most jarring compressions: a racially charged name, a tight visual detail, and a shift from panoramic speed to sharp, mouth-level contact. The berries are cast dark / Hooks, a phrase that makes them both tempting and violent. What should be natural sweetness becomes something that catches, pierces, or drags.

When the speaker takes them in, they become Black sweet blood. The poem forces sweetness and injury into the same mouthful. This is a key contradiction: the ride is intoxicating, but intoxication here is inseparable from harm. Even pleasure arrives with barbs. The berries suggest that the world the speaker passes through is not neutral scenery; it snags the body, stains it, and makes the act of taking in life feel like taking in blood.

White / Godiva and the stripping down to pure motion

After the berries and Shadows, the poem announces an escalation: Something else / Hauls me through air. The agency shifts again. The speaker is no longer choosing speed; speed is choosing her. That prepares the startling self-portrait: White / Godiva. Lady Godiva is a figure of nakedness in public, an exposure that can be read as protest, sacrifice, or humiliation. Here it becomes a moment of radical unpeeling: I unpeel.

But what comes off is not only clothing. The poem strips away constraint itself: Dead hands, dead stringencies. That phrase suggests old grips—rules, duties, inherited pressures—clinging like rigor mortis. The ride becomes a purge: anything rigid, anything grasping, is left behind. The tone here is fiercely cleansing, yet the adjective dead hints that liberation is occurring in the neighborhood of death, not safely away from it.

Motherhood at the wall: a cry that cannot follow

The most human interruption arrives almost like a brake that fails: The child’s cry / Melts in the wall. The cry is not answered or even carried; it dissolves. The wall is a domestic boundary, a house boundary, perhaps the boundary of responsibility itself. If the earlier images were about merging (with the lioness, with the drive), this is about severing. The poem acknowledges an attachment that should be adhesive—child to mother—only to show it liquefying into architecture.

This is where the poem’s exhilaration turns morally and emotionally sharp. The speaker’s momentum makes ordinary claims on her—care, response, presence—seem distant and unreal. It’s not that she denies the child; she registers the cry vividly. The cruelty is in the physics of the poem: at this velocity, the cry cannot travel with her.

The arrow and the suicidal dew: the final merging

The culminating transformation is bluntly declared: I / Am the arrow. An arrow is purpose without hesitation, a self reduced to trajectory. Immediately, the poem refines the image into something smaller and stranger: The dew that flies. Dew is delicate, transient, usually stationary on grass. Making it fly is already an intensification; calling it Suicidal gives that flight a fatal destination.

The final target is not simply morning but a living eye: Into the red / Eye, a phrase that fuses sunrise with an organ of seeing. The poem ends inside heat and origin: the cauldron of morning. A cauldron is a vessel that boils things down. The speaker, having unpeeled everything rigid, is now boiled into essence—pure drive, pure forwardness—at the cost of remaining a person who can stop, turn, or return.

A sharp question the poem refuses to answer

If the speaker becomes at one with the drive, what exactly is gained—freedom, or an obliteration that only looks like freedom? The poem’s most seductive moments (Foam to wheat, glitter of seas) are also the moments that wash out particulars, as if beauty itself is part of the mechanism that carries her toward the red eye. The poem doesn’t ask us to judge her; it asks us to feel how easily ecstasy can turn into a form of disappearance.

The poem’s lasting tension: ecstasy versus responsibility

Ariel holds its contradictions in a tight fist: a woman becomes ferociously alive by surrendering to motion, yet that same surrender makes her less available to the living world. The language keeps switching between the bodily and the elemental—Thighs, hair beside wheat and seas—as if the speaker is crossing out her own scale, moving from human obligations to weather and myth. That crossing is thrilling, but it is also isolating. By the time she is the arrow, she cannot be mother, rider, or even witness; she can only be flight into the day’s burning center.