Ariel

"Ariel" is a poem written by the American poet Sylvia Plath. It was written on her thirtieth birthday, October 27, 1962, and published posthumously in the collection Ariel in 1965. Despite the poem's ambiguity, it is understood to describe an early morning horse-ride towards the rising sun. Scholars and literary critics have applied various methods of interpretation to "Ariel". Style and structure "Ariel" is composed of ten three-line stanzas with an additional single line at the end, and follows an unusual slanted rhyme scheme. Literary commentator William V. Davis notes a change in tone and break of the slanted rhyme scheme in the sixth stanza which marks a shift in the theme of the poem, from being literally about a horse ride, to more of a metaphoric experience of oneness with the horse and the act of riding itself. Context It has been speculated that, being written on her birthday as well as using the general theme of rebirth, "Ariel" acted as a sort of psychic rebirth for the poet. The poem, written just five months before her eventual suicide, thus, not surprisingly given its name as well, is one of her Ariel poems. "Ariel" was the name of the horse Plath rode at a riding school on Dartmoor in Devon. Ted Hughes, Plath's husband, comments: ARIEL was the name of the horse on which she went riding weekly. Long before, while she was a student at Cambridge (England), she went riding with an American friend out towards Grantchester. Her horse bolted, the stirrups fell off, and she came all the way home to the stables, about two miles, at full gallop, hanging around the horse’s neck. Interpretations