Ariel: The Restored Edition: A Facsimile of Plath's Manuscript, Reinstating Her Original Selection and Arrangement
Ariel: The Restored Edition: A Facsimile of Plath's Manuscript, Reinstating Her Original Selection and Arrangement (P.S.) Sylvia Plath,
Publisher: Harper Perennial Modern Classics
ISBN: 0060732601
DDC: 811
Edition: Paperback; 2005-11-01
Summary:
Sylvia Plath churned out her final poems at the remarkable rate of
two or three a day, and Robert Lowell describes them as written by
"hardly a person at all ... but one of those super-real, hypnotic,
great classical heroines." Even more remarkable, she wrote them
during one of the coldest, snowiest winters (1962-63) Londoners have
ever known. Snowbound, without central heating, she and her two
children spent much of their time sniffling, coughing, or running
temperatures (In "Fever 103°" she writes, "I have been flickering,
off, on, off on. / The sheets grow heavy as a lecher's kiss."). Pipes
froze, lights failed, and candles were unobtainable. As if these
physical privations weren't enough, Plath was out in the cold in
another sense--her husband, Ted Hughes, had left her for another
woman earlier that year. Despite all this (or perhaps because of it),
the Ariel poems dazzle with their lyricism, their surprising and
vivid imagery, and their wit. Rather than confining herself to her
bleak surroundings, Plath draws from a wide array of experience. In
"Berck-Plage," for instance, clouds are "electrifyingly-coloured
sherbets, scooped from the freeze." In "The Night Dances," the poet
stands crib-side, reveling in her son's own brand of do-si-do: "Such
pure leaps and spirals--Surely they travel / The world forever, I
shall not entirely / Sit emptied of beauties, the gift / Of your
small breath..." Though at times they present the reader with
hopelessness laid bare, these poems also teem with the brightest
shards of a life, confounding those who merely look for the words of
a gloomy, dispassionate suicide. Plath rose each morning in the final
months of her life to "that still blue, almost eternal hour before
the baby's cry" and left us these words like "axes/After whose stroke
the wood rings..."
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