Ariel: The Restored Edition

A Facsimile of Plath's Manuscript, Reinstating Her Original Selection and Arrangement

Sylvia Plath

• Publisher: Harper Perennial
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9780060732608
• eBook ISBN: 9780062669445
• Subtopic: Classics

“Made up of poems that are so original in their style and so startlingly accomplished in their confessional voice that they helped change the direction of contemporary poetry, Ariel is a masterpiece.”  — New York Observer

Sylvia Plath's famous collection, as she intended it.

When Sylvia Plath died, she not only left behind a prolific life but also her unpublished literary masterpiece, Ariel. When her husband, Ted Hughes, first brought this collection to the public, it garnered worldwide acclaim, but it wasn't the draft Sylvia had wanted her readers to see. This facsimile edition restores, for the first time, Plath's original manuscript—including handwritten notes—and her own selection and arrangement of poems. This edition also includes in facsimile the complete working drafts of her poem "Ariel," which provide a rare glimpse into the creative process of a beloved writer. This publication introduces a truer version of Plath's works, and will alter her legacy forever.

I

Ariel and other poems

Morning Song

Love set you going like a fat gold watch.

The midwife slapped your footsoles, and your bald cry

Took its place among the elements.

Our voices echo, magnifying your arrival. New statue

In a drafty museum, your nakedness

Shadows our safety. We stand round blankly as walls.

I’m no more your mother

Than the cloud that distils a mirror to reflect its own slow

Effacement at the wind’s hand.

All night your moth-breath

Flickers among the flat pink roses. I wake to listen:

A far sea moves in my ear.

One cry, and I stumble from bed, cow-heavy and floral

In my Victorian nightgown.

Your mouth opens clean as a cat’s. The window square

Whitens and swallows its dull stars. And now you try

Your handful of notes;

The clear vowels rise like balloons.

The Couriers

The word of a snail on the plate of a leaf?

It is not mine. Do not accept it.

Acetic acid in a sealed tin?

Do not accept it. It is not genuine.

A ring of gold with the sun in it?

Lies. Lies and a grief.

Frost on a leaf, the immaculate

Cauldron, talking and crackling

All to itself on the top of each

Of nine black Alps,

A disturbance in mirrors,

The sea shattering its grey one—

Love, love, my season.

The Rabbit Catcher

It was a place of force—

The wind gagging my mouth with my own blown hair,

Tearing off my voice, and the sea

Blinding me with its lights, the lives of the dead

Unreeling in it, spreading like oil.

I tasted the malignity of the gorse,

Its black spikes,

The extreme unction of its yellow candle-flowers.

They had an efficiency, a great beauty,

And were extravagant, like torture.

There was only one place to get to.

Simmering, perfumed,

The paths narrowed into the hollow.

And the snares almost effaced themselves—

Zeroes, shutting on nothing,

Set close, like birth pangs.

The absence of shrieks

Made a hole in the hot day, a vacancy.

The glassy light was a clear wall,

The thickets quiet.

I felt a still busyness, an intent.

I felt hands round a tea mug, dull, blunt,

Ringing the white china.

How they awaited him, those little deaths!

They waited like sweethearts. They excited him.

And we, too, had a relationship—

Tight wires between us,

Pegs too deep to uproot, and a mind like a ring

Sliding shut on some quick thing,

The constriction killing me also.

Thalidomide

O half moon—

Half-brain, luminosity—

Negro, masked like a white,

Your dark

Amputations crawl and appal—

Spidery, unsafe.

What glove

What leatheriness

Has protected

Me from that shadow—

The indelible buds,

Knuckles at shoulder-blades, the

Faces that

Shove into being, dragging

The lopped

Blood-caul of absences.

All night I carpenter

A space for the thing I am given,

A love

Of two wet eyes and a screech.

White spit

Of indifference!

The dark fruits revolve and fall.

The glass cracks across,

The image

Flees and aborts like dropped mercury.

The Applicant

First, are you our sort of person?

Do you wear

A glass eye, false teeth or a crutch,

A brace or a hook,

Rubber breasts or a rubber crotch,

Stitches to show something’s missing? No, no? Then

How can we give you a thing?

Stop crying.

Open your hand.

Empty? Empty. Here is a hand

To fill it and willing

To bring teacups and roll away headaches

And do whatever you tell it.

Will you marry it?

It is guaranteed

To thumb shut your eyes at the end

And dissolve of sorrow.

We make new stock from the salt.

I notice you are stark naked.

How about this suit—

Black and stiff, but not a bad fit.

Will you marry it?

It is waterproof, shatterproof, proof

Against fire and bombs through the roof.

Believe me, they’ll bury you in it.

Now your head, excuse me, is empty.

I have th...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Foreword by Frieda Hughes
• I. Ariel and other poems
• II. Facsimile of the manuscript for Ariel and other poems
• III. Facsimile drafts of the poem “Ariel”
• Appendix I. “The Swarm”
• Appendix II. Script for the BBC broadcast “New Poems by Sylvia Plath”
• Notes. by David Semanki
• P.S. Insights, Interviews & More . . .*
• Praise
• Also by Sylvia Plath
• Copyright
• About the Publisher