by Sylvia Plath
Feather dusters fanning their hands in a sea of bean flowers, Creamy bean flowers with black eyes and leaves like bored hearts.
Is it blood clots the tendrils are dragging up that string?
No, no, it is scarlet flowers that will one day be edible.
Now they are giving me a fashionable white straw Italian hat And a black veil that molds to my face, they are making me one of them.
They are leading me to the shorn grove, the circle of hives.
Is it the hawthorn that smells so sick?
The barren body of hawthorn, etherizing its children.
Is it some operation that is taking place?
It is the surgeon my neighbors are waiting for, This apparition in a green helmet,
Shining gloves and white suit.
Is it the butcher, the grocer, the postman, someone I know?
I cannot run, I am rooted, and the gorse hurts me With its yellow purses, its spiky armory.
I could not run without having to run forever.
The white hive is snug as a virgin,
Sealing off her brood cells, her honey, and quietly humming.
Smoke rolls and scarves in the grove.
The mind of the hive thinks this is the end of everything.
Here they come, the outriders, on their hysterical elastics.
If I stand very still, they will think I am cow parsley, A gullible head untouched by their animosity,
Not even nodding, a personage in a hedgerow.
The villagers open the chambers, they are hunting the queen.
Is she hiding, is she eating honey? She is very clever.
She is old, old, old, she must live another year, and she knows it.
While in their fingerjoint cells the new virgins
Dream of a duel they will win inevitably,
A curtain of wax dividing them from the bride flight, The upflight of the murderess into a heaven that loves her.
The villagers are moving the virgins, there will be no killing.
The old queen does not show herself, is she so ungrateful?
I am exhausted, I am exhausted----
Pillar of white in a blackout of knives.
I am the magician's girl who does not flinch.
The villagers are untying their disguises, they are shaking hands.
Whose is that long white box in the grove, what have they accomplished, why am I cold.
The Arrival of the Bee Box
I ordered this, this clean wood box Square as a chair and almost too heavy to lift.
I would say it was the coffin of a midget Or a square baby
Were there not such a din in it.
The box is locked, it is dangerous.
I have to live with it overnight And I cant keep away from it.
There are no windows, so I cant see what is in there.
There is only a little grid, no exit.
I put my eye to the grid.
It is dark, dark,
With the swarmy feeling of African hands Minute and shrunk for export, Black on black, angrily clambering.
How can I let them out?
It is the noise that appals me most of all, The unintelligible syllables.
It is like a Roman mob,
Small, taken one by one, but my god, together!
I lay my ear to furious Latin.
I am not a Caesar.
I have simply ordered a box of maniacs.
They can be sent back.
They can die, I need feed them nothing, I am the owner.
I wonder how hungry they are.
I wonder if they would forget me If I just undid the locks and stood back and turned into a tree.
There is the laburnum, its blond colonnades, And the petticoats of the cherry.
They might ignore me immediately In my moon suit and funeral veil.
I am no source of honey
So why should they turn on me?
Tomorrow I will be sweet God, I will set them free.
The box is only temporary.
Stings
Bare-handed, I hand the combs.
The man in white smiles, bare-handed, Our cheesecloth gauntlets neat and sweet, The throats of our wrists brave lilies.
He and I
Have a thousand clean cells between us, Eight combs of yellow cups, And the hive itself a teacup, White with pink flowers on it.
With excessive love I enameled it
Thinking Sweetness, sweetness.
Brood cells grey as the fossils of shells Terrify me, they seem so old.
What am I buying, wormy mahogany?
Is there any queen at all in it?
If there is, she is old,
Her wings torn shawls, her long body Rubbed of its plush
Poor and bare and unqueenly and even shameful.
I stand in a column
Of winged, unmiraculous women, Honey-drudgers.
I am no drudge
Though for years I have eaten dust And dried plates with my dense hair.
And seen my strangeness evaporate, Blue dew from dangerous skin.
Will they hate me,
These women who only scurry, Whose news is the open cherry, the open clover?
It is almost over.
I am in control.
Here is my honey-machine, It will work without thinking, Opening, in spring, like an industrious virgin
To scour the creaming crests As the moon, for its ivory powders, scours the sea.
A third person is watching.
He has nothing to do with the bee-seller or with me.
Now he is gone
In eight great bounds, a great scapegoat.
Here is his slipper, here is another, And here the square of white linen He wore instead of a hat.
He was sweet,
The sweat of his efforts a rain Tugging the world to fruit.
The bees found him out,
Molding onto his lips like lies, Complicating his features.
They thought death was worth it, but I Have a self to recover, a queen.
Is she dead, is she sleeping?
Where has she been,
With her lion-red body, her wings of glass?
Now she is flying
More terrible than she ever was, red Scar in the sky, red comet Over the engine that killed her The mausoleum, the wax house.
Wintering
This is the easy time, there is nothing doing.
I have whirled the midwifes extractor, I have my honey,
Six jars of it,
Six cats eyes in the wine cellar,
Wintering in a dark without window At the heart of the house Next to the last tenants rancid jam And the bottles of empty glitters Sir So-and-sos gin.
This is the room I have never been in.
This is the room I could never breathe in.
The black bunched in there like a bat, No light
But the torch and its faint
Chinese yellow on appalling objects Black asininity. Decay.
Possession.
It is they who own me.
Neither cruel nor indifferent,
Only ignorant.
This is the time of hanging on for the beesthe bees So slow I hardly know them, Filing like soldiers
To the syrup tin
To make up for the honey Ive taken.
Tate and Lyle keeps them going, The refined snow.
It is Tate and Lyle they live on, instead of flowers.
They take it. The cold sets in.
Now they ball in a mass, Black
Mind against all that white.
The smile of the snow is white.
It spreads itself out, a mile-long body of Meissen,
Into which, on warm days, They can only carry their dead.
The bees are all women, Maids and the long royal lady.
They have got rid of the men,
The blunt, clumsy stumblers, the boors.
Winter is for women
The woman, still
at her knitting, At the cradle of Spanish walnut, Her body a bulb in the cold and too dumb to think.
Will the hive survive, will the gladiolas Succeed in banking their fires To enter another year?
What will they taste of, the Christmas roses?
The bees are flying. They taste the spring.
II
Facsimile of the manuscript for Ariel and other poems
III
Facsimile drafts of the poem 'Ariel'
To give a sense of Sylvia Plath's creative process, here follow the working drafts in facsimile for the title poem 'Ariel.' The drafts are variously numbered and dated by Sylvia Plath. The first four drafts were written on the pink Smith College Memorandum paper, as were various other drafts of the Ariel poems. The poem 'Ariel' was accepted for publication by the Observer and was eventually published in the Observer on the third of November 1963, under a variant title, 'The Horse.' A typeset proof of the poem from the Observer is appended to the end of this section. It was corrected by Sylvia Plath in mid-December 1962.
APPENDIX I
'The Swarm'
The bee poem 'The Swarm' appears on the contents page of the Ariel and other poems manuscript with parentheses around it in Sylvia Plath's own hand. She did not include the poem within the manuscript itself. Ted Hughes included it in the U.S. version of Ariel when it was first published in 1966. This restored edition maintains Sylvia Plath's editorial decision and does not include the poem in the main body of Ariel and other poems. The poem follows, along with a facsimile of a typescript draft.
The Swarm
Somebody is shooting at something in our town----
A dull pom, pom in the Sunday street.
Jealousy can open the blood,
It can make black roses.
What are they shooting at?
It is you the knives are out for At Waterloo, Waterloo, Napoleon, The hump of Elba on your short back, And the snow, marshalling its brilliant cutlery Mass after mass, saying Shh,
Shh. These are chess people you play with, Still figures of ivory.
The mud squirms with throats,
Stepping stones for French bootsoles.
The gilt and pink domes of Russia melt and float off
In the furnace of greed. Clouds! Clouds!
So the swarm balls and deserts
Seventy feet up, in a black pine tree.
It must be shot down. Pom! Pom!
So dumb it thinks bullets are thunder.
It thinks they are the voice of God Condoning the beak, the claw, the grin of the dog Yellow-haunched, a pack dog,
Grinning over its bone of ivory Like the pack, the pack, like everybody.
The bees have got so far. Seventy feet high.
Russia, Poland and Germany.
The mild hills, the same old magenta Fields shrunk to a penny
Spun into a river, the river crossed.
The bees argue, in their black ball, A flying hedgehog, all prickles.
The man with grey hands stands under the honeycomb Of their dream, the hived station Where trains, faithful to their steel arcs,
Leave and arrive, and there is no end to the country.
Pom, pom. They fall
Dismembered, to a tod of ivy.
So much for the chariots, the outriders, the Grand Army.
A red tatter, Napoleon.
The last badge of victory.
The swarm is knocked into a cocked straw hat.
Elba, Elba, bleb on the sea.
The white busts of marshals, admirals, generals Worming themselves into niches.
How instructive this is!
The dumb, banded bodies
Walking the plank draped with Mother France's upholstery Into a new mausoleum,
An ivory palace, a crotch pine.
The man with grey hands smiles----
The smile of a man of business, intensely practical.
They are not hands at all
But asbestos receptacles.
Pom, pom! 'They would have killed me.'
Stings big as drawing pins!
It seems bees have a notion of honor, A black, intractable mind.
Napoleon is pleased, he is pleased with everything.
O Europe. O ton of honey.
APPENDIX II
Script for the BBC broadcast 'New Poems by Sylvia Plath'
In a letter from December 14, 1962, later published in Letters Home: Correspondence, 1950-1963, Sylvia Plath wrote to her mother, Aurelia, that she 'spent last night writing a long broadcast of all my new poems to submit to an interested man at the BBC'. The man referred to at the British Broadcasting Corporation was Douglas Cleverdon. The script that follows includes notes for 'The Applicant', 'Lady Lazarus', 'Daddy', 'Sheep in Fog' (which was not included in Sylvia Plath's manuscript Ariel and other poems), 'Ariel', 'Death & Co.', 'Nick and the Candlestick', and 'Fever 103deg.'
These new poems of mine have one thing in common. They were all written at about four in the morning--that still, blue, almost eternal hour before cockcrow, before the baby's cry, before the glassy music of the milkman, settling his bottles. If they have anything else in common, perhaps it is that they are written for the ear, not the eye: they are poems written out loud.
In this poem, called 'The Applicant', the speaker is an executive, a sort of exacting super-salesman. He wants to be sure the applicant for his marvelous product really needs it and will treat it right.
This poem is called 'Lady Lazarus'. The speaker is a woman who has the great and terrible gift of being reborn. The only trouble is, she has to die first. She is the phoenix, the libertarian spirit, what you will. She is also just a good, plain, very resourceful woman.
Here is a poem spoken by a girl with an Electra complex. Her father died while she thought he was God. Her case is complicated by the fact that her father was also a Nazi and her mother very possibly part Jewish. In the daughter the two strains marry and paralyze each other--she has to act out the awful little allegory once over before she is free of it.
In this next poem, the speaker's horse is proceeding at a slow, cold walk down a hill of macadam to the stable at the bottom. It is December. It is foggy. In the fog there are sheep.
Another horseback riding poem, this one called 'Ariel', after a horse I'm especially fond of.
This poem--'Death & Co.'--is about the double or schizophrenic nature of death--the marmoreal coldness of Blake's death mask, say, hand in glove with the fearful softness of worms, water and the other katabolists. I imagine these two aspects of death as two men, two business friends, who have come to call.
In this poem, 'Nick and the Candlestick', a mother nurses her baby son by candlelight and finds in him a beauty which, while it may not ward off the world's ill, does redeem her share of it.
This poem is about two kinds of fire--the fires of hell, which merely agonize, and the fires of heaven, which purify. During the poem, the first sort of fire suffers itself into the second. The poem is called 'Fever 103deg'.
Notes
By David Semanki
SECTION I, Ariel and other poems
The printed poems follow the order of Sylvia Plath's manuscript Ariel and other poems. The definitive edition of each poem derives from Sylvia Plath's manuscript. All of the poems in the manuscript are present in The Collected Poems, edited by Ted Hughes.
Sylvia Plath in the manuscript uses three dots under punctuation that she wants to restore. All the dashes within the poems of this edition are now one standard length unlike in The Collected Poems. All the underlined words that appear in the manuscript have been changed to italics. Some poems contained within this volume differ from the version published in The Collected Poems. The poems, as previously published, may contain punctuation and spelling not dictated by the manuscript. We have here printed the poems in accordance with Sylvia Plath's manuscript.
Here follows a complete listing of Sylvia Plath's punctuation and word choices in contrast to the version printed in The Collected Poe
ms, arranged thus: restored edition] Collected Poems
Morning Song 4 statue] statue. 8 distils] distills The Couriers 10 Alps,] Alps. 12 grey] gray Thalidomide 5 appal] appall The Applicant 1 person] a person A Secret 17 secret!] secret ... 26 head!] head - 27 drawer.] drawer! 33 Do] 'Do 40 stampede -] stampede! 41 twirling,] twirling gutterals.] gutturals!
The Jailor title: Jailor] Jailer 28 subversion] subversion, 45 me.] me!
Cut dedication: for] For Elm dedication: for] For the dedication has been placed in parentheses
The Night Dances an extra line-space reintroduced between stanzas 7 and 8, dividing the poem into equal halves of 14 lines each
The Detective 15 No-one] No one Death & Co 1 Two. Of] Two, of Lesbos 10 a schizophrenic] schizophrenic 11 panic.] panic, 26 you,] you. 27 Mama] mama 39 t.b.] T.B. 41 Hollywood] in Hollywood 52 jewel.] jewel! valuable.] valuable! 63 They] He The Other an extra line-space reintroduced between stanzas 8 and 9, dividing the poem into equal halves of 16 lines each