'Sylvia Plath's Joy'

A time of day, dawn, made sharp by anticipated interruption; a house animated by children, their happiness, their demands, their balloons and playthings; the potential for violence innate in all beauty, as well as the awful beauty of violence; the feeling of elation at filling a house with the clacking of a typewriter, and the fear of the silence when the typing ends: these elements are my personal “Ariel,” and I tire of the more rhetorical and showy poems—“Daddy,” “The Applicant,” “Lady Lazarus”—upon which Plath made her notorious name. “Ariel” ends with a poem, “Words,” about the season that T. S. Eliot called “midwinter spring” and Wallace Stevens called “the earliest end of winter”: March, when, in New England (a region all three poets share), the sap runs. Plath’s keystrokes in the quiet house are like “Axes / After whose stroke the wood rings.” Before, echoing away from her, they become like horses’ “indefatigable hoof taps”—“riderless,” as in a funeral procession. Add to the available accounts of Plath (there are so many) this, please: nobody brought a house to life the way she did. “Ariel,” despite the tragedy that attends it, is a book with much joy between its covers.

- Dan Chiasson 

Sylvia Plath, self-portrait