"Substanceless Blue Pour"

For a few weeks now, I’ve had the first three lines of Sylvia Plath’s “Ariel” stuck in my head:

Stasis in darkness.
Then the substanceless blue
Pour of tor and distances.

The first thing one might notice about these lines is the rhythm and the internal rhyme. It begins with a matched pair, broken over the first two lines: “Stasis in” almost rhymes with “darkness. / Then,” as “substanceless” almost rhymes with “distances” and “Pour” rhymes with “tor.” The rhyme of “Pour” with “tor” is nested inside the almost-rhyme of “substanceless” and “distances,” making “substanceless blue / Pour” a mirror image of “tor and distances.”

Plath gives us these matched sets, “Stasis in” with “darkness. / Then”, “substanceless blue / Pour” with “tor and distances,” and breaks two of the members of these matched sets across lines. The second and third lines are almost iambic, with each line’s divergence from iambic meter emphasizing its last word.

The poem describes hearing the sound of a child crying at dawn, an attenuated action that occurs in a single room, but so many of the images are of distance, or at least of travel: “Hauls me through air,” “I / Am the arrow.” She is stripped bare and loses herself to parental duty, writing “White / Godiva, I unpeel,” and “And now I / Foam to wheat, a glitter of seas.”

Philip Larkin’s “Aubade” also describes waking up in a room in the dark. For Larkin, the duty he awakes to is a distraction from his thoughts of death: “Postmen like doctors go from house to house.” What Plath wakes up to burns her away, is “the cauldron of morning.” Larkin’s sky, described in a single line near the end of the poem, is so different from Plath’s: “The sky is white as clay, with no sun.” Larkin’s sky is neither near nor far, not an expanse, a flatness. Margaret Atwood’s sky, in the poem “Nothing,” is “so near / you can taste it. It tastes of / salt.” ¹

Plath’s sky is far away, an expanse, without detail or substance. The most concrete word in Plath’s description of the sky is “tor,” but it is the foreground that the sky is a background to, not a part of the sky itself. Plath’s sky is not a heaven, but an erasure, a physical correlate to the self-erasure of parenting.

The poems in my personal canon are concrete, not abstract, and give up many of their secrets on a first reading: Larkin’s “This Be the Verse”, Borges’ “Mateo, XXV, 30”, Eileen Myles’ “An American Poem”, Whitman’s “Song of Myself”. My John Ashbery books collect dust. What “Ariel” is teaching me is the worth of poetry that remains obscure on a first, second, or hundredth reading.

1. Atwood, Margaret. “Nothing.” Selected Poems II, Houghton Mifflin, 1987