Freedom runs wild,
No one can stop hiding,
Dark pains flow through my veins
But earthy evil cannot destroy spiritual power
So by Sycorax, witch with blue eyes
Woman of the earth, from Algiers’s tides
This tree holds me here
Year after year—no more.
Another hand of earthly power,
The wizard of Milan rose to prosper,
Could not serve himself without spiritual assistance
He set me free to serve his deeds
Freedom, I thought!
But my wish came with a condition,
Prospero’s deeds must be done,
Once completed, debts repaid, no more master.
The creation of storms, lulling songs, sweet sounds of manipulation
The perpetual desire to drift to dreams
Trance-like states abound
My presence known to none but one
Behold, the exercise of mine power over all
Working, spelling, listening, doing
Not free from the one till the deed is done.
My art satisfactory, Prosper’s desires fulfilled
Our agreement remembered, my wishes were granted,
Freedom, high-day!
High-day, freedom!
The one be gone, the wilds return,
Ariel the spirit runs free.
But the wilds provide little power to the power:
No boats in the water and the tides don’t change,
No minds full of thoughts and there’s nothing to twist,
Freedom from thy master is not freedom from thyself,
Freedom runs wild,
So let the high-days be gone because the spirits aren’t listening.
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Throughout The Tempest, Ariel is the means by which the freedom of others is taken away, and on a quest for freedom himself. The main section in The Tempest that inspired this poem is in Act I (1.2.238-1.2.285), where Prospero and Ariel discuss Ariel’s desire for freedom, and Prospero explains the circumstances that Sycorax put Ariel in plus the fact that Ariel is indebted to Prospero for his freedom from Sycorax’s prison. Additionally, I had Ariel quote Caliban’s false cry of freedom from 2.2.181.
Ariel at a practical level is the controller of freedom on the island. He is one that can manipulate nature; he is the destroyed of freedom—and yet he is not free himself. By associating his quest for freedom with Caliban’s as I did in this poem, it humanizes Ariel’s power because it shows that control, as Ariel has (or Prospero has through Ariel), is irrelevant to freedom, because there is no way to control the control itself. Ariel’s ability to affect the world has little to do with whether or not he is free and much to do with so happens to be within his wake. Without Prospero or Sycorax or some system around him to put things in his jurisdiction, whether or not Ariel’s power can have any effect is not up to him.
This poem makes Ariel as invisible as the control he represents, because even once he has the freedom to act as he wants, he still does not have the freedom to be as he wants to make other things be as he wants. Just as everyone on the island—and more everyone in the world, one could argue—is incapable of being entirely free whether or not they are aware of the issue, control itself desires to be free but can’t. Ariel, a bit like Caliban, is both supernatural—powerful and magical—and normal, no more free than anyone else. Maybe more, being supernatural isn’t so "unnormal" in the first place.