Plath had the visionary ability to separate herself from the layers of her being and to look upon these layers as something emanating and unraveling from her essential self. She used images of swirling smoke and unpeeling garments to describe her "unloosening"--a dissolving process in which her ego separated first from her physical body and then from the motions of her life processes.
After
her physical matter and life processes were laid aside, she unraveled herself
from sensory information, her body of sensations. As her sense impressions flowed
from her, she uncovered bodies of emotion and her powerful body of intellect.
These swirling layers would slowly waft away and uncover bodies of higher thought
that exceeded pure rationality and contained the power of unmaterialized archetypal
thought substance.
In Ariel, the dissolving process culminates in her ego freeing itself and merging with the spiritual Sun:
"...............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."
The equivalent sounds of "I" and "eye" merge her egohood with the physical and spiritual Sun in what mystics refer to as the "sound ether" which is the vibrational basis for all form.
After the "Stasis in darkness" beginning, Ariel becomes pure motion. The horseback ride, like boat and train rides in other poems, not only explores her ego's journey through incarnation, but refers to the subtle equivalence of the ego with motion. She "foams" to wheat, merges with glittering water, "flies" like suicidal dew becoming "one" with the "drive" to solar union. Her ego doesn't merge with a collection of "things", but with the creative forces and motions that unite all things.
The things are the nouns, the "dead stringencies". Her unraveling demands a language of verbs. What we call nouns are nodal points formed by denser conglomerations of interweaving verb powers.
Getting There: Ariel's Dark Counterpart
"Getting There" tells of an unraveling that is a spiritual prerequisite to the Ariel stage. Here the ego's motion in life and in body is a dark, Germanic mechanical monster, an Ahrimanic double comprised of the terrible wheels that catch Isadora's scarf and deprive the blood of the life enriching oxygen:
"The gigantic
gorilla interior
Of the wheels move, they appall me ---
The terrible brains
Of Krupp, black muzzles
Revolving, the sound
Punching out Absence! Like cannon.
It is Russia I have to get across, it is some war or other.
I am dragging my body
Quietly through the straw of the boxcars.
Now is the time for bribery.
What do wheels eat, these wheels
Fixed to their arcs like gods,
The silver leash of the will ----
Inexorable. ..............."2
Her fear of Absence challenges her growth towards freedom. At this stage the "Daddy" doppelganger is beginning to be torn away, probably because of her marital difficulties. What once threaded and weaved through her entire being can now be slowly ripped out because of her husband's enstrangement. Marital infidelities have begun the process of shedding the coat of the dark interior double.
"........It is a trainstop, the nurses
Undergoing the faucet water, its veils, veils in a nunnery,
Touching their wounded,
The men the blood still pumps forward,
Legs, arms piled outside
The tent of unending cries ----
A hospital of dolls.
And the men, what is left of the men
Pumped ahead by these pistons, this blood
Into the next mile,
The next hour ----
Dynasty of broken arrows! ......."2
The polar opposite of Ariel's arrow! In Ariel the ego merged with the solar bound gesture of the arrow, here it is caught up in the inexorable slowness of a double ridden body and can only stand back and witness the failed motions of generations of egos through time immemorial. Blood, instead of being the vehicle for the movement towards the Christ Sun, drips and mixes into the Earth mud of racial atavism.
"There
is mud on my feet,
Thick, red and slipping. It is Adam's side,
This earth I rise from, and I in agony."2
Compare these blood images to similar images in Cut. Her blood bears the heavy weight of racial memory from which she can rise through Christ like agony. After unspeakable horror, the black train of terror becomes a nuturing cradle and the pure unadorned ego may be born into the next stage:
"The
carriages rock, they are cradles.
And I, stepping from this skin
Of old bandages, boredoms, old faces
Step
up to you from the black car of Lethe,
Pure as a baby."2
Lethe cannot permanently wash away this horror, but the Poet achieves the breathing room of the wide open Ariel spaces and prepares for the next stage in the next cycle of time.
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1From the Collected Works of Sylvia Plath. Edited by Ted Hughes. HarperPerennial Edition©1981.Page231.
2From the Collected Works of Sylvia Plath. Edited by Ted Hughes. HarperPerennial Edition©1981.Page247.
3From the Collected Works of Sylvia Plath. Edited by Ted Hughes. HarperPerennial Edition©1981.Page172.
4"From the Collected Works of Sylvia Plath. Edited by Ted Hughes. HarperPerennial Edition©1981.Page162.