The Books: Ariel, by Sylvia Plath

Daily Book Excerpt: Poetry. Next book on the shelf:

Ariel: Poems by Sylvia Plath, by Sylvia Plath

These poems take tremendous risks, extending Sylvia Plath’s essentially austere manner to the very limit. They are a bitter triumph, proof of the capacity of poetry to give to reality the greater permanence of the imagined. She could not return from them.
— George Steiner, The Reporter

The controversy surrounding the publication of Ariel, Sylvia Plath’s posthumous work, is well-known to Plath fans, but I’ll just list the essential details. In the final months of her life – the fall of 1962, essentially – Plath experienced a trauma in the dissolution of her marriage to poet Ted Hughes (my post about him here). They had two baby children, Frieda and Nicholas. They split up. Plath had been living in the country with Hughes, in England, but in the wake of the separation, she moved to what was basically a cold-water flat in London. She had the two children with her. Ted was now with another woman. Plath, on fire with grief and loss and rage, started writing the poems that would not only make up Ariel, but that would make her name for all time. She had published another book of poetry, earlier, called The Colossus, and it had made barely a splash. There are some good poems in The Colossus, ones I love, but the voice is a bit arch, a bit precocious – a lot of Plath’s earliest poems are arch, careful, and while there are deeps of emotions struck from time to time, they remain on the surface of things. Her metaphors, already in place (the big man in black who stalked the landscape, the draw of death, animals, mirrors), remain metaphors – carefully chosen by the poet, whom we were never allowed to forget. But in the fall of 1962, all of that fell away. At an astonishing rate which worried her friends, Sylvia started writing 2, 3, and in some cases I believe, even 4 poems a day – and these were not dashed-off scribbles. Each poem went through meticulous drafts. She worked these things. I say that because there is an assumption that Plath went into some fevered zone of scribbling, but that is not accurate. She was pouring this stuff out of her, yes, but her control remained. She put each poem through rigorous drafts. It is hard to imagine the pace that she must have been working at in order to get all of this done, when you include the fact that she was also taking care of two small babies by herself. You can see why her friends were worried. She was probably sleeping only 3 hours a night. She would wake up at 3 a.m., and work until morning. That was her only alone time. Read as a whole, these are scary fucking poems. Read chronologically, they are unbearably bleak, and you want to race back in time and go help Sylvia out, taking the kids off to playgrounds so she can get some sleep. These are the poems everyone knows. Lady Lazarus, Daddy, Fever 103, Munich Mannequins, the terrifying “bee sequence” poems, Medusa, A Birthday Present, Ariel – I mean, just one of these is enough, but to see her pace, and to see how sometimes she would write two of these phenomenal poems in the same day is astonishing. In my birthday post to Plath I included a couple of recordings that she made that fall at the BBC, of her reading Lady Lazarus and Daddy. They are hair-raising.

The thing that remains so startling about Plath is NOT the fever-pitch of her emotions. We all can have fever-pitched emotions, especially if we aren’t sleeping well. That is nothing out of the ordinary. What is startling to me is her control. And THAT is the artist. These weren’t so much excavations, or explorations – but explosions from deep within her – and yet, she managed to work them, in a chilly hard-eyed way that was always one of Plath’s stocks-in-trade. This woman was a hard hard worker. And pair that with a fever-bright emotionality – you get Plath. But so many people have one without the other, and their art suffers. You can have all the control in the world and you might not write a poem like Lady Lazarus or one of the bee poems. You might have all the deep feelings in the world but no way would you be able to wrestle those “bee poems” into shape, giving each one a defining structure and specific imagery – so that each one leads inevitably to the next. Plath was a cold-eyed ruthless editor on the one hand, and a weeping raging ball of emotions on the other. For a brief season, those two sides came together, and unfortunately, she killed herself in February of 1963, so we’ll never know how she would either end up reconciling those two sides, or letting each one have its day, finding balance.

I persist in thinking she might have “made it” if the winter in England of 1962-63 hadn’t been so brutal, the worst winter in decades, perhaps a century. England shut down. Electricity failed. Plath had no water from time to time, and had to work hard heating the pipes to get water. She was snowbound, icebound. It was a hard hard winter. England is not prepared for such events, they don’t have snowplows on the ready, and Plath was brutalized by the difficulties of her situation. I have no way of knowing, and there is certainly speculation that her suicide was meant to be an attempt – she had gone to see the downstairs neighbor just before – maybe she hoped he would come up and check on her? I don’t know what to think about that, but I do know that she was already weakened by the events of 1962, she was still breastfeeding, for God’s sake, worn down, heartbroken, in a rage at what had happened … and the physical difficulties of the city shutting down left her in a state where everything washed away, and she couldn’t take it anymore. She had already tried to commit suicide in college. In that one, she meant business. She crawled into a crawl-space in her basement after taking a bunch of pills, a place no one would ever think to look for her. But she vomited, and was eventually found and saved. She had been thrashing about in the stone crawl space, banging her cheek against the wall, and that left a scar that was always on her cheek. A reminder.

The “fall poems” of Ariel are the really fiery ones. The raging ones. Lady Lazarus, Daddy, Medusa. You cringe reading them. But as December and January come, the pace slows down a bit (she dated each poem, so you know what she wrote when), and the poems get colder, shorter, and calmer. One of the telltale signs of impending suicide is that eerie calmness which can also manifest itself as sudden happiness, contentment. That’s why baffled parents say, when their child kills him/herself, “But she seemed to be doing so well suddenly! She had been so upset a month earlier, but in those last days, she was almost peppy!” That’s when you need to get really scared. Because the decision has been made, and there is a relief in finally making the decision.

Her poems start to get some resolve in them. She wouldn’t have been capable of Lady Lazarus in January of 1963. She didn’t need the rage anymore. What she needed was to prepare. Those final poems are the preparation poems.

Before she died, she wrote up an order of the poems she wanted to be in her next collection (that which would be Ariel). She thought it out meticulously.

Some of the poems had been published in literary and poetry journals while she was alive, and there were definitely friends who said to her, “Hon, are you okay? These are great, but I’m really really scared.” After she died, the entire manuscript was found, with her Table of Contents showing the order. Ted Hughes (and, through extension, his ghoulish sister Olwyn Hughes) became the executor of the Plath estate. They had not been formally divorced, and there was no will, no transferring of her material back to her ownership, which might have avoided the controversy following. Ted Hughes made what I believe was a very bad decision, something that would come back to haunt him again and again over the following years. He decided to ignore Plath’s stated order of poems, and instead re-arranged them so that they are chronological. Now who knows why he did this. Perhaps it was in self-defense. “See this order? This is the order she wrote them. She was tailspinning down, and only when you read them chronologically can you see how badly she was. So THIS IS NOT MY FAULT.” I don’t fault him for anything he did by the way. He was in a terrible position, and was left a widowed man with two babies – in what had really been a trial separation. Who knows, they might have worked it out. I doubt it, but he may have thought they might have worked it out. And suicide is brutal. Not to the person who decides to leave this earth, but to those left behind. It is an indictment. The suicide gets the final word, for all time. It is a vehement “The End, you motherfuckers”. It is an accusation, it points fingers – even when the person has NOT left behind 40 poems that accuse everyone she has ever met of being villains. I mean, these Ariel poems are brutal, no matter which way you slice it. And I believe that Plath had every right to write them. Art is not polite, and art is not meant to make your family proud. You have to write what you want to write. If you burn bridges, well then maybe that bridge needed to be burned. Plath knew this was explosive stuff. As a matter of fact, she had already written her novel, The Bell Jar, and had said explicitly that it could not be published until after her death, because it would hurt too many people. Her own mother said that after she read The Bell Jar, her main response was that it was “an act of base ingratitude”. Shut up, bitch.

So. Hughes ignored Plath’s ordering – which was more positive, believe it or not. In her order, the first word of the collection was “Love” and the last word of the collection was “Spring”. I don’t know how anyone on the planet could read Ariel and ever find any hope in it, but Plath wanted to leave the possibility open that there could be hope, and her order was very specific about that. See what I mean, about her being an artist in control of herself? She thought this out. And Hughes ignored it. (But what is fascinating to me is that nobody would have even KNOWN about this if Hughes himself hadn’t spilled the beans in the Notes section of the Collected Poems, which he also edited. There, he provided Sylvia’s chosen-order, there he came clean with what he had done. Who would have known otherwise?)

Ariel was finally published in 1966 with the poems ordered chronologically. It is a very very different book than the one Plath envisioned, although the poems are the same. The ordering is everything. In Hughes’ version, the poems are a slow march towards the inevitable end. In Plath’s version, there are highs, lows, and in-betweens. And the end is not a done deal. (After all, when she was writing the poems, she was alive. Not until the moment of her death was death a done deal.) There are other controversies regarding the words Plath left behind, and the infamous “burning of the journals” that Hughes was quite open about. I think it’s probably the burning of the final journals that is seen as most unforgivable to Plath fans. I mean, the myth of those missing journals is so acute that my friend Cara wrote an international-thriller about the two of us, and our friend Tracey, on a James Bond-like mission to find them (please note that that entire text is peppered with quotes from Plath. The whole thing is genius). I still hope they turn up some day. I bet Olwyn Hughes has them. That’s my guess. Olwyn Hughes took those journals and hid them away. Break into her house and search her closets and cupboards. I think Ted Hughes was protecting his sister in his comment that he destroyed the journals. Olwyn was always nasty to Sylvia, and her ghoulish behavior as executor of the Plath estate is well-known and, to me, outrageous: it would be like having your greatest enemy in charge of how you are seen posthumously.

The controversy surrounding the ordering of the poems in Ariel never really stopped over the decades. And finally, in 2005, a “revised Ariel” was published, with Plath’s original order, with facsimiles of her own typewritten revised manuscript pages. It is a gorgeous volume, with a wonderful foreword by her now-grown-up daughter Frieda Hughes, a terrific writer in her own right, and finally we can read Ariel in the order that Plath wanted. Of course, you can read the poems in any order you want to, and nothing was stopping anyone from reading through Ariel skipping around from poem to poem so that you were reading it the way Plath had planned. I myself have done that. But still: that controversy, at least, has now been put to rest. An old wrong has been righted. (I don’t think Ted Hughes was a “villain”, by the way, and his edited “Collected Poems” of Sylvia Plath is a phenomenal volume – a work of generosity and scope – but I think he made a bad call with Ariel. We all make bad calls in life from time to time, and it would be nice to think that raving groups of horrible maniacs who DEFACE your dead wife’s grave weren’t holding you accountable for 40 years for killing the mother of your children. Morons. Awful people.)

I have both versions of Ariel of course. I have the version that had been out since 1966, with a foreword by Robert Lowell, the one with Hughes’ ordering. Then, in 2005, I bought the “revised Ariel”. I’ll get to that one when I get to it.

The foreword by Lowell is brief. They knew each other, back in Boston. Not well, not at all well, but peripherally. He had no idea that she had these types of poems in her. Nobody did. That was one of the shocking things. The Colossus was clever, a little bit obnoxiously so, and polite and careful: a good girl trying to write about deep dark things. To have the poet of The Colossus suddenly burst into full-form with poems such as Lady Lazarus, Fever 103, and etc. etc. was startling to everyone. That was the big deal about them. Plath was well-known in poetry circles before that, of course. She had been getting poems published since high school, winning prizes and awards. But in many ways, she always had the good girl wrestling with the bad girl inside her – a typical experience for 1950s-era female artists, and, hell, even now. (See Black Swan.) She needed permission to “be bad”. Her mother was controlling and had high expectations of her daughter. Plath was expected to be a virgin, all that other nonsense, which might be benign for some types of girls, but was LETHAL for a girl such as Plath. It created a split personality, a deep fissure running through her psyche, and it was when she finally fell into that fissure, and wrote from there, that she found her true voice.

I really like Lowell’s thoughts here in the Foreword:

In these poems, written in the last months of her life and often rushed out at the rate of two or three a day, Sylvia Plath becomes herself, becomes something imaginary, newly, wildly and subtly created – hardly a person at all, or a woman, certainly not another “poetess,” but one of those super-real, hypnotic, great classical heroines. This character is feminine, rather than female, though almost everything we customarily think of as feminine is turned on its head. The voice is now coolly amused, witty, now sour, now fanciful, girlish, charming, now sinking to the strident rasp of the vampire – a Dido, a Phaedra, or Medea, who can laugh at herself as “cow-heavy and floral in my Victorian nightgown.” Though lines get repeated, and sometimes the plot is lost, language never dies in her mouth.

I’ve always seen Ariel as closer to performance-art than poetry, and Plath even makes that explicit in “Lady Lazarus”, which reads as a striptease, a burlesque.

But today I’ll excerpt one of the perhaps-lesser-known poems in the collection. It is to her baby son, Nick.

Here she is holding Nicholas in the summer of 1962, as her marriage was breaking apart (during a visit from her mother, who is sitting to Plath’s right, cut off in this photo).

Tragically, Nicholas took his own life a couple of years ago, and the sadness I felt when I heard was profound. My thoughts immediately flew to Frieda, powerful, brave Frieda, who had lost her mother as a baby, and then, in quick succession, her father and her brother. She’s a writer herself. I look forward to seeing whatever she decides to do next.

The power of the poem below sneaks up on you. It is quieter than the bravado in her shrieking-Maenad poems like Fever 103 and Daddy. It is domestic. She stands over her son’s crib, in the candlelight. This is one of the “October 1962” poems. Here’s the freakin’ kicker. She wrote two other poems on that day – “Purdah” and “Lady Lazarus”. The mind boggles. It’s almost, though, like you can feel her resting in this poem. Taking a breather.

However, don’t let the nighttime images and the baby boy fool you. She senses a threat everywhere. Nick is the “one solid the spaces lean on, envious” – a fantastic line. Terrifying. Reminiscent of, oh, the monoliths floating through space in 2001. It is frightening to imagine a tiny baby boy being a solid that “the spaces” are “envious” of. Look out.

And I don’t know if she was ever so passionate, so loving, as she was in this line which brings me to tears: “The blood blooms clean in you, ruby.” There is a knowledge here that her pain has nothing to do with him, but is impacting him. “The pain you wake to is not yours.” It is the same as the line from another poem, “Child”, where she says that she wants to fill her child’s eye with good things, like “color and ducks” (and this is I believe the saddest lines Plath ever wrote:) but instead the child looks up from the crib and sees a

troublous
Wringing of hands, this dark
Ceiling without a star.

I have often thought that Plath killed herself to spare her children such a mother. I’m not saying it’s right, or proper. I’m just saying I can imagine where she was coming from. What kind of child deserves a mother whose face is a “dark ceiling without a star”?

Nick and the Candlestick

I am a miner. The light burns blue.
Waxy stalactites
Drip and thicken, tears

The earthen womb
Exudes from its dead boredom.
Black bat airs

Wrap me, raggy shawls,
Cold homicides.
They weld to me like plums.

Old cave of calcium
Icicles, old echoer.
Even the newts are white,

Those holy Joes.
And the fish, the fish –
Christ! they are panes of ice,

A vice of knives,
A piranha
Religion, drinking

Its first communion out of my live toes.
The candle
Gulps and recovers its small altitude,

Its yellows hearten.
O love, how did you get here?
O embryo

Remembering, even in sleep,
Your crossed position.
The blood blooms clean

In you, ruby.
The pain
You wake to is not yours.

Love, love,
I have hung our cave with roses,
With soft rugs –

The last of Victoriana.
Let the stars
Plummet to their dark address,

Let the mercuric
Atoms that cripple drip
Into the terrible well,

You are the one
Solid the spaces lean on, envious.
You are the baby in the barn.