Ariel: The Restored Edition
Sylvia Plath
- 256 pages
- English
- ePUB (mobile friendly)
- Available on iOS & Android
Ariel: The Restored Edition
Sylvia Plath
About This Book
"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When Sylvia Plath died, she not only left behind a prolific life but also her unpublished literary masterpiece, Ariel.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.
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I
Ariel and other poems
Morning Song
Love set you going like a fat gold watch.The midwife slapped your footsoles, and your bald cryTook its place among the elements.Our voices echo, magnifying your arrival. New statueIn a drafty museum, your nakednessShadows our safety. We stand round blankly as walls.I’m no more your motherThan the cloud that distils a mirror to reflect its own slowEffacement at the wind’s hand.All night your moth-breathFlickers 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 floralIn my Victorian nightgown.Your mouth opens clean as a cat’s. The window squareWhitens and swallows its dull stars. And now you tryYour 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 immaculateCauldron, talking and cracklingAll to itself on the top of eachOf 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 seaBlinding me with its lights, the lives of the deadUnreeling 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 shrieksMade 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 ringSliding shut on some quick thing,The constriction killing me also.
Thalidomide
O half moon—Half-brain, luminosity—Negro, masked like a white,Your darkAmputations crawl and appal—Spidery, unsafe.What gloveWhat leatherinessHas protectedMe from that shadow—The indelible buds,Knuckles at shoulder-blades, theFaces thatShove into being, draggingThe loppedBlood-caul of absences.All night I carpenterA space for the thing I am given,A loveOf two wet eyes and a screech.White spitOf indifference!The dark fruits revolve and fall.The glass cracks across,The imageFlees and aborts like dropped mercury.
The Applicant
First, are you our sort of person?Do you wearA 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? ThenHow can we give you a thing?Stop crying.Open your hand.Empty? Empty. Here is a handTo fill it and willingTo bring teacups and roll away headachesAnd do whatever you tell it.Will you marry it?It is guaranteedTo thumb shut your eyes at the endAnd 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, proofAgainst fire and bombs through the roof.Believe me, they’ll bury you in it.Now your head, excuse me, is empty.I have th...