Word: plathe
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These are not undiscovered manuscripts--everything in the restored version of Ariel has appeared elsewhere--but any excuse to reread Plath is a good one. We think of anger as an ugly emotion, but in poems like "Lady Lazarus" and "Daddy," Plath refines it to a state so pure that it becomes almost unbearably beautiful. Her poems unfold in a burnt winter landscape, lit by cold, melancholy sunlight and littered with strangled, frozen hopes, where her only chance is to draw strength from pain. "Beware," she cautions in "Lady Lazarus," "Out of the ash/ I rise with my red hair...
...what has changed in Ariel: The Restored Edition? Twelve poems have been reinstated--poems that Hughes removed, he later wrote, because they were "personally aggressive." Well, yes. In "The Rabbit Catcher," Plath assumes the role of a bunny strangled by wire snares set by a man with whom she has a "relationship." "The Other," a poem about infidelity, begins with the line "You come in late, wiping your lips"--an opening-bell knockout. Rarely is the façade of marital bliss shown up so bleakly as in "The Detective": "This is the smell of years burning, here in the kitchen...
Frieda Hughes is inclined to be charitable toward her father, who did, after all, raise her after Plath's death. "Why would anybody in their right mind want to publish something that was mean and nasty about them?" she asks. "It's human nature not to want...
That is true, but it's not the whole story. Ted Hughes' Ariel ends with "Edge," a poem about a dead woman. And that's how we have come to see Plath: as a woman who lost the battle with depression and killed herself. But that's not how she saw herself, at least not at that point, and the restored Ariel reminds us of that. It ends with the poem Plath put last: "Wintering," about suffering endured and hope renewed. "The bees are flying," its closing line reads. "They taste the spring." --Reported by Andrea Sachs
...POETRY: Plath is back...