Representation of suffering in Ariel, Stings, Lady Lazarus, Wintering and Fever by Plath103°Sylvia Plath's poems evoke the worst of subjective errors. It is likely that some of our charged reactions are symptomatic of the times and the culture; but most of them seem to arise from the always too easy identification between the troubled poet and what might be the tone of imagery and rhythm of the poem under consideration. Because Plath worked so intensively on archetypal imagery (water, air, fire as bases for image patterns, for example), many of her poems could be read either as expressions of the type " dark » desert, or like the opposite, like a death by death. “Ariel,” the title poem of the collection that introduced Plath to the reading world so soon after her suicide in 1962, is an equally ambiguous poem, rich in its imagery, patterns of movement-stasis, light-darkness , earthfire. The progression in the poem goes from simple 'Stasis in Darkness', a negative condition as Plath indicates in the very similarly imaged poem 'Years', to ecstatic transformation through the movement of closure . That this is a poem about movement is clear from the second image, which seems to be a depiction of the faint morning light ("substanceless blue flow of tor and distances"), but which also emphasizes the image movement - flow, distances. . The eye of the reader, like that of the poet, is turned toward what is to come, and the scene that appears is always couched in imagery that includes words or animated impressions. Even the furrows of the earth move (“split and pass”). The antagonistic forces in the poem are those contrary to the movement evoked with so much passion. Facing the unity of...... middle of paper ......the end of "Ariel" suggests the same benizon, "I / Am the arrow, // The dew that flies / Suicidal, in harmony with the drive / In the red // Eye, the cauldron of the morning." “So let the elements be free”. . . "in harmony with the dew." Plath's will to move, this simple impact of energy and force, beyond "dead hands, dead restraints", is the power behind not only "Ariel", but also "Stings", "Lady Lazarus" , “Wintering” and “Fever”. 103°." The fact that she, with Shakespeare, found such violence as strong winds "auspicious" is an important clue to these passionate and sometimes difficult poems, poems important enough to us that we must learn to read them with an insight closer to Plath's, and to her equally personal thematic direction. Works Cited Linda Wagner, "Plath's 'Ariel': 'Auspicious Gales'", in Concerning Poetry, Vol. 10, No. 2, 1977, p... 5-7.