Ariel: The Restored Edition: A Facsimile of Plath's Manuscript, Reinstating Her Original Selection and Arrangement Book

I have always meant to read a book about the life of Sylvia Plath and to learn about the whole Ted Hughes adventure - but something there is that doesn't love that kind of voyeurism and to date I have avoided it. There is a sense, however, where I think Plath's poetry is so intensely personal that it would make sense to read it knowing more of the story of the American poet who killed herself on the bleak winter's day in the year in which I was born.

This 'reinstatement' of Plath's Ariel has a foreword by Frieda Hughes, her daughter. It is a touching and interesting introduction to the poems and to the significance of a life as seen by her daughter.

Frieda makes some interesting comments about the nature of art, poetry and artist - and other collective creations. The most interesting of all is how much we like to pretend we 'know' an artist by their poetry - but too often it works the other way around and the artist becomes a shadow we think of as being filled out by their poems. My favourite example of this is Beethoven who wrote both the forth and fifth symphonies at exactly the same time. If they were a reflection of his mood at the time then clearly he suffered from some kind of multiple personality disorder.

This collection of poems contains some of Plath's most disturbing and confronting poems. Daddy, for example, and Lady Lazarus are terribly difficult poems to read, even if they are perhaps the easiest poems to understand in this collection - they are raw and yet crafted at the same time. Plath more than any other poet is to be read aloud. These are poems that work as music and getting the music of the poems right is an important part of 'getting' the poems.

The book also contains a series of 'Facsimile drafts of the poem "Ariel"' and there are eleven versions of the poem reprinted here. There is a terrible idea that people who do not know much about poetry believe that a great poet is somehow someone who can pop off a poem in one go and there it sits before them complete and perfect. This is rarely, if ever the case. A writer only becomes a writer when they learn that the creative process is a process. And most importantly, that that process is iterative. It is also important to think that if she spent quite so long writing the poem it might pay to spend a proportionate amount of time reading the poem.

Before we go, I want to quote Plath's, Tulips:

The tulips are too excitable, it is winter here.
Look how white everything is, how quiet, how snowed-in
I am learning peacefulness, lying by myself quietly
As the light lies on these white walls, this bed, these hands.
I am nobody; I have nothing to do with explosions.
I have given my name and my day-clothes up to the nurses
And my history to the anaesthetist and my body to surgeons.

They have propped my head between the pillow and the sheet-cuff
Like an eye between two white lids that will not shut.
Stupid pupil, it has to take everything in.
The nurses pass and pass, they are no trouble,
They pass the way gulls pass inland in their white caps,
Doing things with their hands, one just the same as another,
So it is impossible to tell how many there are.

My body is a pebble to them, they tend it as water
Tends to the pebbles it must run over, smoothing them gently.
They bring me numbness in their bright needles, they bring me sleep.
Now I have lost myself I am sick of baggage ----
My patent leather overnight case like a black pillbox,
My husband and child smiling out of the family photo;
Their smiles catch onto my skin, little smiling hooks.

I have let things slip, a thirty-year-old cargo boat
Stubbornly hanging on to my name and address.
They have swabbed me clear of my loving associations.
Scared and bare on the green plastic-pillowed trolley
I watched my teaset, my bureaus of linen, my books
Sink out of sight, and the water went over my head.
I am a nun now, I have never been so pure.

I didn't want any flowers, I only wanted
To lie with my hands turned up and be utterly empty.
How free it is, you have no idea how free ----
The peacefulness is so big it dazes you,
And it asks nothing, a name tag, a few trinkets.
It is what the dead close on, finally; I imagine them
Shutting their mouths on it, like a Communion tablet.

The tulips are too red in the first place, they hurt me.
Even through the gift paper I could hear them breathe
Lightly, through their white swaddlings, like an awful baby.
Their redness talks to my wound, it corresponds.
They are subtle: they seem to float, though they weigh me down,
Upsetting me with their sudden tongues and their colour,
A dozen red lead sinkers round my neck.

Nobody watched me before, now I am watched.
The tulips turn to me, and the window behind me
Where once a day the light slowly widens and slowly thins,
And I see myself, flat, ridiculous, a cut-paper shadow
Between the eye of the sun and the eyes of the tulips,
And I have no face, I have wanted to efface myself.
The vivid tulips eat my oxygen.

Before they came the air was calm enough,
Coming and going, breath by breath, without any fuss.
Then the tulips filled it up like a loud noise.
Now the air snags and eddies round them the way a river
Snags and eddies round a sunken rust-red engine.
They concentrate my attention, that was happy
Playing and resting without committing itself.

The walls, also, seem to be warming themselves.
The tulips should be behind bars like dangerous animals;
They are opening like the mouth of some great African cat,
And I am aware of my heart: it opens and closes
Its bowl of red blooms out of sheer love of me.
The water I taste is warm and salt, like the sea,
And comes from a country far away as health.

One night when I was in the middle years of high school I was staying overnight at a friends house and we were doing home work and smoking cigarettes and we had a poem we needed to have read for English the next day. It was Plath's Tulips and it was insanely difficult - infinitely more difficult than perhaps is reasonable to expect two 16-year-old boys (or there-abouts) to read and understand. Anyway, we were science nerds and poetry was far too other-worldly for us. All the same, I was madly in love with my English teacher and was keen to impress by coming to some understanding of the poem.

I remember we started reading it and could make no sense of it at all. So, we stopped and went through it line by line, stopping at the end of each line and talking about what it could all mean. It was a slog, but suddenly we started getting a sense of the woman in the poem being in hospital and then of all that blood.

I have read this poem hundreds of times since that night. About ten years ago I decided that it ought to be read in much the same voice that you might read these lines from TS Eliot:

My nerves are bad to-night. Yes, bad. Stay with me.
'Speak to me. Why do you never speak? Speak.
'What are you thinking of? What thinking? What?
'I never know what you are thinking. Think.'

You know, neurotic. But I now think that is quite a wrong reading of the poem. I think the right reading (at least at the moment) is quite a straight and calm voice, but with a hint of perplexity in the tone, but only a hint, just enough to be detectable, and no more. Much the way Maggie Smith does Love Among the Lentils by Alan Bennett.

If I was to give advice on coming to this poem for the first time - obviously you need to pay close attention to the relationship between the woman in the poem and the 'others' in the poem, all of the others, not least the tulips themselves. But also the nurses and the nuns and those who are implied as being there even if they never actually are. And then how often red and white are contrasted and how red on white is so often about blood in our culture and in this poem. And of course, water and all the things that water can signify.

I love the way an act of love by someone (in sending tulips) can become like a series of hooks dug into the flesh of the person they are sent to. I love how peacefulness had previously meant avoiding being noticed and in becoming white and then the sudden redness of the tulips disturbs all that. How they stop being inanimate and become like wild animals needing to be put behind bars. I love how the tulips become the projection of this woman's incredibly complex relationship with her husband and children. "They have swabbed me clear of my loving associations" and look at that word 'associations' - what a terribly important word that is. For that is what the tulips do not allow her - to remain clear of her associations.

This is a complex poem and one that requires a careful study of the imagery and most important, a feeling for the music of the words on the page. It is, and has been for a very long time, one of my very favourite poems.

Bird Brian has started a page here of reviewers reading their reviews.

This is my effort: