Read ‘Ariel’ here and ‘Sheep in Fog’ here

It begins how we all begin: “Stasis in darkness”, the amniotic void. But as in the rush of childbirth, stillness is displaced with violent immediacy. We are delivered roaring into being, stasis turned to speed with no gradation. And the world emerges, a pour of colour – “substanceless blue” – as we charge forth into existence.

Ariel is her horse, a name of biblical significance – “God’s lioness”, Jerusalem itself. The religious symbolism speaks to the sacredness of the experience. The poem relates connection (“How one we grow”) between horse and rider that culminates in complete self-transcendence – oneness with animal, with landscape, with life. As the poetic voice achieves an immersed state of flow, the overbearing ‘I’ of Plath’s oeuvre melts into the trajectory of the moment. All is a whirlwind of movement – a “pivot of heels and knees” – as she abandons the limits of herself. Meanwhile, her horse is “sister” to the blur of land. There can be no separations. Everything is a manifestation of everything else.

The poem is absolute speed. Enjambed lines force the eye onto consecutive ideas without pause. Even Plath cannot hold on (“the neck I cannot catch”), but in pinning her thighs to the horse and embracing momentum, she discovers ecstasy. The universe, oft the oppressor, becomes a mere cycle of visceral sense impressions. Passing berries cast their “hooks”, but she cannot linger in their invitation to taste. The landscape is an unsharpened blur of shadows. Lines condense to single words. We launch ever forward with abandon.

For now she is beyond wilful control:  “Something else”, she writes, “Hauls me through the air.” Her relationship with self begins to change, personal turmoil blown away until she is merely a sum of body parts: thighs clamped to the horse; hair billowing behind. Godiva stripped bare, she begins to “unpeel” all that is surplus to the experience. The enjambed “White” highlights the purity of her becoming – a clear, blissful emptiness, the clarity of a canvas awaiting colour. Her shedding – the “dead hands, dead stringencies” – is not negative. Here death is positive, a dispensing with the unnecessary.

Having left behind the dead-weights of existence, she discovers a new idea of self. The enjambed ‘I’ signals a realisation that the abandonment of identity leads to reunification. As she “Foams to wheat, a glitter of seas”, relinquishing her connection to the material world, a more abstract but liberating existence beckons. Glum everyday concerns like the responsibility of motherhood “melts in the wall”, oppressive domesticity contrasting with the infinite landscape flowing around her. She has become dangerously precise, an “arrow” flying into the breaking dawn. Her “suicidal” impulse remains, but it is rebirth, not oblivion, that she seeks.

Dawn blooms on the horizon, a burning red, but the pace is not relinquished. It is fundamental that the poem finishes with her roaring into the sunrise. The final line breaks mid-stanza, emphasising the continuity. She will not return to stasis, will not pause for breath. The ecstasy in that final image lies in her emphatic charge towards the new day. We sense her desire for this freedom to last indefinitely. She will ride forever, and the darkness will never catch up.

It is significant, then, how ‘Sheep in Fog’ begins: “The hills step off into whiteness.” Now the poetic voice is static, and the world – separate from her – is what moves. The changed pace is striking: the flight of ‘Ariel’ replaced with a ‘step’; the assonant ‘a’ in “stars / Regard me sadly” grinding us to a trudge. The “substanceless blue” and hot “cauldron of morning” are now smothered in a claustrophobic fog, blank as amnesia, a barrier between her and the world. We are in a contrasting psychological space, where Plath is no longer actor but passive object, judged negatively by “people or stars”. The world around her is personified – stepping hills, the train’s “line of breath” – but she is the inverse, a mere object of criticism, lacking agency.

Ariel, her beloved horse, makes a return. But, though only a few months have passed, vitality has been drained from both rider and steed. “God’s lioness” is now “the colour of rust”, connoting a has-been, worn-out beast. The pair no longer pound through the morning, but tread carefully down a foggy hillside. Is it hooves that echo like “dolorous bells”, or the ring from some nearby church? Either way, the adjective signals a preoccupation with death, contrasting the hope-filled vitality of ‘Ariel’. There, she moved from darkness towards a final radiance, but in ‘Sheep In Fog’ she moves in the opposite direction, deeper into an encroaching despair. Plath writes, “All morning the / Morning has been blackening”, the repeated word stressing the homophonic “mourning”, a subtle hint at a darker concern lurking just below the surface.

Indeed, ‘Sheep in Fog’ is successful for all that it does not say. The titular ‘Sheep’ never appears, but it is no stretch to read it as Plath herself. Like sheep, she feels passive, her existence defined by the will of others. The metaphorical “flower left out” depicts a world sapped of vitality, a life once charged with colour now sinking withered into the black soil.

The poem’s power comes in the quietness of these sad images. In many Plath poems despair can be charged with grandeur. But ‘Sheep In Fog’ remains hauntingly grounded, its voice blankly objective. “My bones hold a stillness” pinpoints a feeling of complete emptiness, a hollowing loss beyond the hysterics of despair. Only once do emotions slip out, when she notes: “the far / Fields melt my heart.” We imagine a temporary lift in the fog, a sudden glimpse of distance, and with it a reminder of that rush earlier in the year and the hope of rebirth that imbued her poems from that time. Remembered happiness often strikes harder than sadness alone.

And so we return to where we began: a dark space, “Starless” and “fatherless”, beyond the intruding opinions of the world. It is self-absence, yet a contrast to the joyful transcendence of ‘Ariel’. There, she shed excess to become one with the universe; here, she sees escape only through self-obliteration. She calls it “a heaven”, but we cannot understand it in the Christian sense, some glorified rejoining with God. Now, paradise means non-existence, to fold back into that amniotic “dark water”, to be forgotten by a callous world that continues indifferently in her absence.

Together, these poems document Plath’s struggle in her final year, a struggle heightened by the abandonment of her husband and the sudden imposition of single motherhood. ‘Ariel’ remains her most ecstatic poem because in it she glimpsed a vibrancy beyond the quotidian bleakness. But the horse couldn’t run forever. She came, eventually, to a halt, and there the darkness caught up. ‘Sheep In Fog’ explores the loneliness of her final months and her despair in being unable to move beyond the pains of the world. Her desire for communion proved brief and unsustainable. Sadly, she saw only one path left. The success of these poems lies in their power to shed light on the darkest corners of human experience, and in that illumination, despite the tragedy they prefigure, they will always bring some comfort to those feeling lost in this world.