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Reading poetry has always felt like futile detective work for me, so I was pleasantly surprised by the impact this collection had on me!

“Ariel��, Sylvia Plath’s most famous poetry collection, was written in a “blood jet�� of creativity shortly before she committed suicide in 1963. The collection charts her emotional turmoil in the wake of her disintegrating marriage, the claustrophobic effects of domesticity, the salve of motherhood, and her conflicting attractions to both rebirth and self-destruction.

After her death, her husband Ted Hughes became the curator of the (unpublished) Ariel poems and unfortunately “sanitized�� the collection by removing what he deemed “confrontational�� poems and replacing them with other “less offensive�� poems. These missing poems, released in later collections, included those that portrayed him in a negative light (e.g. “The Jailer��, “The Rabbit Catcher��), commented on his infidelity (e.g. “A Secret��, “The Other��, “The Detective��), or insulted acquaintances of the couple (e.g. “Lesbos��).

This restored edition (published recently in 2004) for the first time reinstates Plath’s original arrangement. I personally found the “missing�� poems to be some of the most raw and evocative of the lot. For example, in “The Rabbit Catcher��, Plath describes a windy walk in the wild in which she comes across rabbit snares and imagines the game keeper waiting with almost sexual anticipation for the death of his prey. The symbol of the rabbit snares evolves into a metaphor for her marriage towards the end of the poem:

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.

In another poem, "The Courage of Shutting-Up", Plath describes the trauma of public silence on her husband's affair. Her tongue is compared to a relic that has been dried and hung up, like taxidermy, and she likens this state of forced silence to that of:

A country no longer heard of,
An obstinate independency
Insolvent among the mountains.

Many of the poems in this collection crackle with vivid, inventive imagery, explosive symbolism and memorable opening lines (e.g. My night sweats grease his breakfast plate as the opening to “The Jailor��). While reading, I could easily spend an entire evening dissecting a single poem, mining the various layers of meaning and supplementing with online research.

Overall, this was a moving, unsettling and illuminating reading experience, well worth the effort, and highly recommended, even for poetry virgins like me.

Mood: Melancholy and hopeful to equal degrees
Rating: 9/10

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