Ariel: The Restored Edition

"Plath’s Ariel —that is, not the Ariel published posthumously in 1965, but the manuscript she leaves behind when she dies, was first published as The Restored Edition about 15 years ago. She had shaped it carefully. It’s a volume of rebirth and hope: it begins with the word “love” and ends with “spring.” We sometimes caricature Plath as some kind of doom-laden depressive. That’s absolutely not what the trajectory of Ariel conveys. The poems I mentioned earlier, written in 1963, are very different in style, and none are in Plath’s Ariel manuscript. Before her death, actually, she tells Hughes that they are the beginnings of a new book. But Hughes is in a difficult position when Plath dies. It’s not as if her reputation was then what it has since become. So what he does, essentially, is to create a Selected Poems out of what she’s left behind. As a result, all these different styles get bundled together. For example, a poem like ‘Edge’ is in there alongside ‘Ariel’ and ‘Fever 103°’, but it doesn’t belong at all. It’s colder, more detached, bloodless, marmoreal. Hughes’s concern is to assemble a really strong book, but it’s not coherent stylistically in the way that Plath’s manuscript was. If you look in Collected Poems —which first appeared in 1981—to Hughes’s credit he lists at the back the Ariel poems in the order that Plath arranged them. So it was already possible to recreate Plath’s Ariel , even though the Restored Ariel wasn’t at that point published. Take away poems like ‘Sheep in Fog’, ‘Gigolo’, ‘The Munich Mannequins’, and ‘Totem’—all wonderful, but belonging to a later period—and you see that what makes Ariel coherent is Plath’s obsession with rebirth and transcendence. So many of these poems begin in stasis or darkness, followed by some form of eruption or acceleration. In ‘Purdah’, for example, all is calm and exquisitely poised, and then suddenly, there’s an eruption of murderous vengeance. In ‘Fever 103°’, what begins as lying in bed with a temperature ends with a rather comical transcendence. These poems play and re-play this journey of death or stasis and then rebirth or sudden movement. Ariel is a triumphant collection. It’s not a book about depression; it’s a book about overcoming the odds and eventually emerging victorious, whatever you’ve been through. This is also true of a sequence like the Bee poems: the last of them, ‘Wintering’, ends with the line “The bees are flying. They taste the spring.” The pattern recurs again and again. So often in her Ariel manuscript, Plath is thinking about how to convey speed through line breaks and through imagery. This is beautifully done in the title poem, where the landscape is blurring around her as she hurtles through it. Even the line breaks and the shape of the poem on the page demonstrate the speed at which she’s flying through this blurred landscape. That’s one of the first things that attracted me about Plath’s work: that sense of acceleration, of speed, of triumph, of transcendence that comes throughout those Ariel poems. And it’s absolutely what’s missing from those final poems in 1963. The colors have gone. Almost every Plath poem has a color in it—red usually, but also white, blue, and black. These last poems are almost completely washed out. Like ‘Sheep in Fog’, it’s a kind of aftermath poetry. All passion has been spent, she’s defeated, she’s exhausted, there’s nowhere to go, she’s trapped. Ariel —Plath’s Ariel —has a much more exultant atmosphere, and makes a louder boast as a result."