Written by Sage Calder; ed. assistance by Nancer Ballard.
I recently found myself rereading Sylvia Plath’s final manuscript, Ariel and other poems. I had read the collection several times before, but this was my first time reading the “Restored Edition” — the manuscript exactly as Plath left it. This edition also contains a foreword that casts an entirely different light on the book for me. In the introduction, Plath’s daughter, Frieda, notes that her mother described the book as, “beginning with the word ‘Love,’ and ending with the word ‘Spring.’” Frieda recognizes that her mother wrote the book to talk about the end of her marriage to fellow poet Ted Hughes, and move toward a new life. In contrast to these intentions, Plath left Ariel as her final manuscript before committing suicide in 1963.
Reading Frieda’s foreword, which is both insightful and earnest, I began thinking about Ariel in relation to the heroine’s journey — first as a collection of poetry, and also as the final collection of poetry before Plath’s death.
By shedding the men in her life who hurt her and reconnecting with her own feminine power, Plath is tracking toward a heroine’s journey in Ariel. The quest of the heroine is wholeness, which normally implies continuing to live your life. In her real life, Plath was unable to do this — she killed herself and was never able to separate herself from the presence of her husband, since she continued to receive financial support from him and even potentially sought reconciliation. I am not Plath and could not possibly know her life well enough to characterize it as a hero’s journey or a failed heroine’s journey.
Instead, I look to the last poem, which indeed ends with the word “spring.” Plath ends the collection with a series of poems about bees and in her final stanza wonders — “Will the hive survive, will the gladiolas/ Succeed in banking their fires/ To enter another year?” We have come to associate these bees with Plath herself. And she ends — “The bees are flying. They taste the spring.” Plath succeeds in presenting to us a work displaying the heroine’s journey — she writes herself as a heroine who succeeds in leaving her husband and other harmful men in her life behind her. Like the bees, the Plath who is the speaker of the Ariel poems not only plans on surviving into the spring — she already has.