Take a look at this picture. Especially the top lines, which show symbols for the principle elements of alchemy (Fire, Air, Water, Earth) and the crucial elements of the alchemical process (Lead, Tin, Iron, Gold, Copper, Mercury, Silver). Plath’s collection Ariel is loaded with alchemy. Scholars know that Plath’s mother Aurelia studied and wrote her master’s thesis on Paracelsus, the most famous alchemist. They might also know that Plath wrote her own thesis, “The Magic Mirror,” drawing from and quoting alchemical text. Scholar Nephie Christodoulides has a great piece about this subject that you can find here, along with seeing a picture of an alchemical caduceus Plath carved in high school.
With Plath’s interest in psychology having read tons of Freud and Jung, she would have been exposed to Jungian alchemy as well, which uses the lead-to-gold idea as a metaphor for personal growth and reaching one’s highest potential. There’s a lot of gold in Plath’s Ariel poems, literally and metaphorically. Many have written about how Ariel is a transformational journey. That’s alchemy. We’re all hopefully alchemizing and becoming better all the time. Alchemy is all through Shakespeare and Chaucer, two of Plath’s favorites. And of course there is what Ted Hughes has written of and about his personal use of alchemy within his literature. Books that Plath owned, such as The Unicorn: William Yeats’ Search for Reality by Virginia Moore, A Skeleton Key to Finnegans Wake by Joseph Campbell, and a host of books on Mormonism are chock-full of alchemical detail and explanation of the processes. There’s just no way Sylvia Plath didn’t know about alchemy.
Back when I first began my Plath work, writing what would become Fixed Stars Govern a Life: Decoding Sylvia Plath (2014, Stephen F. Austin State University Press), I didn’t know squat about alchemy. I am still, by no means, an expert, save for getting the basic principles down from reading some of the texts that Plath read. As I first got into this work, I couldn’t get away from the metals and chemicals! They were everywhere in Ariel: tin, arsenic, mercury, lead, silver and gold. And the elements of air, water, earth and fire were everywhere too. It could not be ignored.
Alchemy is a centuries-old, weird, coded language of symbols and expressions that were designed to keep magical secrets. Sometimes the language is sexual, sometimes violent, sometimes even incestuous. It’s confusing just to look at it. Many geniuses were alchemists, including Leonardo da Vinci, Benjamin Franklin, and Sir Isaac Newton. And genius writers such as the aforementioned Shakespeare, Chaucer, and Dante. What you need to know is that it’s all metaphor. Like poetry. That much is easy to understand.
Sometimes Plath directly named these alchemical elements in her Ariel work, like the “fat gold watch” in “Morning Song” and the “pure gold baby” of “Lady Lazarus.” The “earthen womb” in “Nick and the Candlestick” or the “crude earth” in “Berck-Plage.” Sometimes in Plath’s work the earth is mountains or tor. Fire, water, and air are even more obviously apparent across the Ariel poems.
It seems to me that spanning the Ariel collection, Plath avoided mentioning the Iron element, save for the “iron lung” of “Paralytic.” This would make sense, as hard, cold iron is considered the most masculine of the elements (fiery red copper is the feminine one). Ted Hughes had used the word “iron” liberally across his poems written during his time with Plath. You’ll find iron in Hughes’ “Macaw and Little Miss,” “The Horses,” “Wind,” “November,” “Pike,” “Sunstroke,” and more, and this excludes all of his allusions to iron in prison bars, bullets, cannonballs, and so on. And who knows if he shared ideas with Sylvia about his developing children’s story, The Iron Man? In mysticism, we say, “What we put our minds on grows.” Maybe Plath just didn’t want to give Hughes any more power.