Ariel: Poems [Paperback]

Sylvia Plath (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: June 1966

"Sylvia Plath's last poems have impressed themselves on many readers with the force of myth."--The Critical Quarterly

"One of the most marvelous volumes of poetry published for a very long time."--Times Literary Supplement

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

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..."

From Publishers Weekly

Along with withholding (or allegedly destroying) one of Plath’s journals after her death in 1963, Plath’s husband, the late English poet laureate Ted Hughes, brought out a version of her second and final book of poems, Ariel, that differed from the manuscript she left on her desk. That edition—for which Hughes dropped 12 poems, added 12 composed a few months later, shifted the poems’ ordering and included an introduction by Robert Lowell—has become a classic. The present edition restores the 12 missing poems, drops the 12 added ones, and prints the manuscript in Plath’s own order, followed by a facsimile of the typescript Plath left, along with a foreword by Plath and Hughes’s daughter Frieda Hughes (Wooroloo), several hand- and typewritten drafts of the book’s title poem and notes by David Semanki. The original manuscript’s contents have been widely known since Hughes published them in the 1981 Collected Poems, but there is an undeniable thrill to reading Plath’s book as she left it—the lacerating "The Rabbit Catcher," left out of the Ted Hughes edition, comes third here, with its rhyme of "force" with "gorse," the flowers of which "had an efficiency, a great beauty,/ And were extravagant, like torture." As to whether this version is a better book, only time will tell. For now, despite Frieda Hughes’s repeated references to her father’s respect for Plath’s work, tally another shot in the Plath wars.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 85 pages
• Publisher: Harper and Row (June 1966)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0060908904
• ISBN-13: 978-0060908904
• Product Dimensions: 7.8 x 5.2 x 0.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 3.2 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (61 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #902,571 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Discover books, learn about writers, read author blogs, and more.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

48 of 50 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The original Ariel, November 14, 2005

By 

Ivy Lin (NY NY) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Ariel: The Restored Edition: A Facsimile of Plath's Manuscript, Reinstating Her Original Selection and Arrangement (Hardcover)

When Sylvia Plath stuck her head in an oven in 1963, she left behind a series of uniquely vicious, angry, cathartic poetry. One bundle was written between her separation from her husband Ted Hughes and her death in February 1963. The poems were entitled "Ariel" and she stopped working on them around November 1963. She wrote some more poems, the last ones days before her death, but they were not included in the original "Ariel" manuscript. After her death, Ted Hughes rearranged Ariel, taking out some of the original poems and inserting some of her last poems. Now, for the first time, we have the original Ariel manuscript, with all the excised poems reinserted and all the inserted poems excised.

The differences between the two "Ariels" are a study in psychology. Hughes' editted "Ariel" is tragic: the last poem, "Edge", was also the last poem Plath ever wrote, and is obviously a poem about death:
The woman is perfected.
Her dead
Body wears the smile of accomplishment,
The illusion of a Greek necessity
Flows in the scrolls of her toga,
Her bare
Feet seem to be saying:
We have come so far, it is over.

For Hughes, "Ariel" was a tragedy, with an angry and perhaps unbalanced woman fighting her internal demons until they ate her up "like air," as Plath would say in one of her most famous poems, "Lady Lazarus." Hughes' Ariel ends with Plath's figurative suicide. The guilt Hughes felt about his wife's death (he had an affair, and that set her off on her final manic depressive tailspin) was something he apparently never got over according to his family and friends. Before his death, he published a series of poems devoted to Plath called "Birthday Letters," and they are very touching -- a man facing death, still longing for a woman who died over 30 years ago. In "The Offers," (not in Birthday Letters), Hughes, Aeneas-like, meets Plath in the otherworld, and she sternly tells him, "This time, don't fail me."

Plath's "Ariel," however, is quite different. Yes, "Daddy" is there, as is "Lady Lazarus," and now also a scathing poem called "The Rabbit Catcher" in which Plath describes her bond with Hughes thus:
And we, too, had a relationship --
Tight wires between us,
Pegs too deep to unroot, and a mind like a ring
Sliding shut on some quick thing
The constriction killing me also.

Not exactly "feel good" poetry. However, Plath's "Ariel" is far from a poetic suicide note -- it is angry, it is vicious, but it is cathartic. The first word in the series of poems is "Love" and the final word is "spring." Reading Plath's "Ariel," one senses a woman excising her personal demons with words, stamping out her enemies (her husband, father, mother, romantic rivals) with poetic vitriol. The final poem included in Plath's manuscript is called "Wintering," but ends with the upbeat, life-affirming line: "The bees are flying. They taste the spring."

This edition of "Ariel" has a foreward by Plaths daughter, Frieda Hughes, in which she tries both to defend her father against his critics and to understand her mother's inner demons. She sums it up like this: "Representing my mother's vision and experience at a particular time in her life during great emotional turmoil, these Ariel poems -- this harnessing of her own inner forces by my mother herself -- speak for themselves." There's also replicas of Plath's original typewritten Ariel poems, and an interview with Hughes at the end of the book.

Hughes' "Ariel" is about a woman whose fury and anguish drives her to her grave. It perhaps reflects his own grief and guilt. Plath's "Ariel" is about a woman (perhaps Lady Lazarus) eviscerating her enemies, Medea-like, and then ready to live life again. That she ultimately failed to conquer her own demons does not diminish the revelation that is Plath's "Ariel." All her poems are collected chronologically in "Collected Poems". But this "Ariel" is a must for anyone interested in Sylvia Plath, her life, and most of all, her poetry.

62 of 69 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars "Love set you going," she wrote, "like a fat gold watch.", November 9, 2004

By 

Kevin Killian (San Francisco, CA United States) - See all my reviews
(HALL OF FAME REVIEWER)    (TOP 1000 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)   

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Ariel: The Restored Edition: A Facsimile of Plath's Manuscript, Reinstating Her Original Selection and Arrangement (Hardcover)

Now at long last, we get the "Ariel" we deserve. Plath's admirers have been waiting a long time, since at least the early 1980s when Ted Hughes first revealed that he had changed the order of the poems in his wife's final manuscript. He had added some poems--the final, freezingly depressing ones--and then re-arranaged the bulk of the book to leave an impression of a woman gone over the brink into a chilling fugue state. Now Frieda Hughes, Plath's daughter, 2 when her mother killed herself, has performed a ritual act of atonement to her mother's memory, and given us the original, "happy" (relatively speaking) ARIEL which we have never been able to see.

At $24,95, the book's a little expensive, but it feels as though money had been spent on its planning and execution, so you don't feel rooked. In one section, the gray paper on which the facsimile materials are printed is easy on the eyes, aiding the eye as it struggles with Plath's numerous emendations. We get the notes Plath wrote for her own use when she had to do that reading at the BBC towards the end, the more-British-than-thou reading we have grown to love and hate at the same time. Frieda Hughes contributes an interesting and contextualizing introduction in which she seeks to reconcile the differing viewpoints of her mother and father--a challenging task, but she's up to it. The book ends up with four of the bee-keeping poems--and another in the appendix, "The Swarm," which Sylvia kept changing her mind about including. Should she leave it in? Take it out? The title is in brackets. Thus the book ends with a hopeful note, with the freshness of Devon instead of the bleak London winter. It ends, pleasantly enough, with the words, "They taste the spring."

34 of 37 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars An Insightful Depiction of a Human Condition, November 15, 2000

By 

"neeterskeeter27" (http://www.neeterskeeter.com/new) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Ariel: Perennial Classics Edition (Paperback)

Ariel is a collection of the last poems Sylvia Plath ever wrote. Furthermore, the poems were written during the last months of her life, which were very bleak months indeed. Plath's husband, Ted Hughes, had just left her for another woman, and she was left to watch over her two young children in the middle of a freezing cold winter in a small apartment that was not heated. Because of these circumstances, a lot of the poems included in "Ariel" are depressing; however, the poems are also strikingly beautiful. They show the human condition at its absolute lowest point: hopeless, stark, terrifying.

Plath eventually ends her life by commiting suicide in a dramatic way: sticking her head in an oven and leaving it there. It was her third suicide attempt, and the other two were pretty dramatic as well. Plath addresses these suicide attempts, and how it felt to survive the other two, in one of her most famous poems from Ariel, "Lady Lazarus": "I have done it again./ One year in every ten/ I manage it-/ A sort of walking miracle/ my skin Bright as a Nazi lampshade.../ And I a smiling woman/ am only thirty./ And like the cat I have nine times to die./ This is Number Three./ What a trash/ To annihilate each decade.../ Dying Is an art,/ like everything else/I do it exceptionally well./ Herr God, Herr Lucifer Beware/ Beware./ Out of the ash/ I rise with my red hair/ And I eat men like air."

The Nazi theme continues in Plath's poem "Daddy", in which she accuses her father of being similar to Hitler, and compares her husband to her father as well, writing about how they both had negative influences in her life. "I have always been sacred of you,/ With your Luftwaffe, your gobbledygoo./ And your neat mustache/ And your Aryan eye, bright blue./ Panzer-man, panzer-man, O You-/ Not God but a swastika/ So black no sky could squeak through./ Every woman adores a Fascist,/ The boot in the face, the brute/ Brute heart of a brute like you..../ I was ten when they buried you./ At twenty I tried to die/ And get back, back, back to you./ I thought even the bones would do./ But they pulled me out of the sack, And they stuck me together with glue./ And then I knew what to do./ I made a model of you, A man in black with a Meinkampf look/ And a love of the rack and the screw./ And I said I do, I do./ So daddy, I'm finally through./ If I've killed one man, I've killed two-/ The vampire who said he was you/ And drank my blood for a year,/ Seven years, if you want to know./ Daddy, you can lie back now."

These are two of the most well-known examples of the bleakness but truthfulness in Plath's poetry. They reach toward the human emotions everyone knows- pain, sorrow, bitterness, lonliness. However, Plath also wrote some humourous and sweet poems which are included in Ariel, including poems about her children and good memories. These poems add a lightness to the book which is otherwise dark and dreary. Although the reader is tempted to hate a book filled with such depressing poetry, no one can resist loving it. This book is, in my opinion, one of the best poetry volumes of Twentieth Century American Literature, and it will find a place in your heart. If you have not read Ariel, I greatly recommend it. Through the autobiographical poems found within it you will connect with Plath's disillusionment and also come to know a great deal about the poetic genius' troubled life and last days.