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23 of 23 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
The original Ariel, November 14, 2005
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.
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57 of 64 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
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."
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30 of 33 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
An Insightful Depiction of a Human Condition, November 15, 2000
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.
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