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A Poet’s Triumph sample essay
There are many things that fascinate an ordinary reader in Sylvia Path’s poems; her brilliant poetic language, her unique allegories, her attitudes toward life and death, and the boldness with which she expresses her feelings and thoughts. She allures her reader with vivid images, intoxicates him/her with her intense feelings, and provokes one to ask endless questions.
It seems that Sylvia Plath’s ultimate goal in life was perfection in her work as a poet (O’Rourke, 2003). In fact, the intensity of her feelings and emotions and her voluntary readiness to experience every aspect of life around her to the fullest has led to the development of the unique aesthetic beauty and strengths that distinguish her poetic expressions, while being a destructive force behind her life that might have been an ultimate cause of her suicide.
The poet is a human being just like every one of us. He/she feels and perceives the world in the same way that most people do; however, what might distinguish a poet form an ordinary person, is his/her readiness to look deeper and to feel every slightest emotion to its full. This endless search, first for the meaning behind every tiniest aspect of human experience, and then for the best way to express this unique perception in one’s work, is the agony behind the existence of every poet, brave enough to explore the full range of life’s offerings and to convey one’s highly personal understanding of life and death, love and hatred, happiness and despair.
Sylvia Plath’s two outstanding poems, namely, “Ariel” and “Lady Lazarus”, have appeared in the collection of works Ariel published after the poet’s death in 1963 (O’Rourke, 2003). In them, the power and magnitude of her poetic verse is fully revealed. “Lady Lazarus”, as suggested by the name referring to The New Testament story of resurrecting a dead man, addresses the questions of life and death, however, in a unique way typical for its author. Her picture of death in “Lady Lazarus” is vivid and stunning, sometimes shocking in its realism:
I rocked shut
As a seashell.
They had to call and call
And pick the worms off me like sticky pearls.
Plath is not afraid to explore the meaning of death and to draw parallels with her own life. For example, she says that, “The first time it happened I was ten.” It is possible that she refers to some tragic childhood experience. One of such experiences, for example, was the death of her father. Indeed, “death” can be used to describe the way a person feels when loosing a loved one or going through another shocking experience. For example, we frequently hear people referring to such experiences as if “a part of me has died”, or “as if I myself was dead for a moment”, etc.
Apart from using her poetic abilities to create a picture of death, Plath reveals her capability to go through this experience several times:
I have done it again.
One year in every ten
I manage it --
As a poet, she has not only been able to experience every rage of human emotion to such extent as to compare it with dying, but has also acquired an ability to cope with such tragic experiences of her life successfully, so that she could welcome another one and survive in case it occurs in her life once again. However, she admits that even for her there is a limit to the number of “deaths” she could endure, and compares herself to the cat, which, according to the popular belief, has nine lives:
I am only thirty.
And like the cat I have nine times to die.
She also admits that, like her poetic talent, she has mastered an art of experiencing life in its every aspect, one of which is “dying”:
Dying
Is an art, like everything else,
I do it exceptionally well.
I do it so it feels like hell.
I do it so it feels real.
Thus, author does not only claims to have mastered the “art of dying”, which alone causes her to stand out from the crowd of ordinary people not able to endure such an experience, but she also reveals that one of the reasons for which she subjects herself to going through such extreme act is the need to “feel real”. Returning to our discussion of the poet’s life, this need to feel the realness of living might be essential to Plath, keeping in mind her ability to get absorbed in the depths of her feelings and emotions and the need to still be able to communicate her experiences through her writing.
While in “Lady Lazarus” there is a sense of absolute control and even optimism regarding death, there is also hidden drama of her life – while she has mastered her art of poetry as well as art of accepting whatever life has to offer, going through its sad side over and over again wears her out due to her high sensitivity and poet’s determination to embrace life in its fullest.
“Ariel” is essentially different from “Lady Lazarus”. Its plot is more unclear and, as it seems, is purposefully left ambiguous. Plath seems to be concerned mostly with conveying the feeling that she has experienced through creating the specific atmosphere in her poem, which she does successfully with the use of her poetic techniques. In fact, this poem was created after the author took a horseback ride, during which the horse bolted (O’Rourke, 2003). At first, the reader is at difficulty when trying to decide what the poem is about. After reading it several times, it begin to appear that “Ariel” abstractly communicates the feeling of helplessness or the loss of control:
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 ...
Sylvia Plath’s later life, after the failure of her marriage and deep overall disappointment resulting from it, seems to have sprung out of control as well (O’Rourke, 2003). As a true poet she has embraced her grief and expressed it in her work, giving the world a collection of her best poems assembled in Ariel. The curious thing about her last book is the fact that Plath has purposefully excised personal details that would portray the reason for her grievances (O’Rourke, 2003). She has done it with such assiduousness, as if determined to manifest her poetic gift over her life’s situation.
In both, “Lady Lazarus” and “Ariel”, Sylvia Plath has manifested her exceptional poetic talent as well as her unique personality: vivid images, mystical realities, brilliant allegories and boldly stated individual views. As a true poet she has never failed to face life’s circumstances with an open heart and to use her unique emotional perception of them in her writing. She has achieved her ultimate goal by giving the world her best poetry while facing her life’s worst tragedy.
Works cited:
O’Rourke, Meghan. “Poetry’s Lioness: Defending Sylvia Plath From Her Detractors”. 28 Oct. 2003. SLATE. 30 July 2006
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