The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Sylvia Plath · a book of poems, edited and ordered by Ted Hughes after the author’s death · Faber and Faber, London, March 1965 · scored as the book as first published, its assembly by another hand weighed where it costs, on Plath’s English, read from knowledge; no text in hand, and quoted only where the words are certain
Mode
The lyric of extremity: dramatic address, incantation and black comedy in short driven lines, the speaking voice performing to an audience
Mythos
Resurrection as a rite and a fairground act; the father as god, Nazi, devil and vampire, and his exorcism; the self as queen of the hive; a Godiva ride into a sun that is also death; the woman perfected in death
Phase
From a newborn’s cry at morning to the fixed stars that govern a life: the editor’s order, which closes in death where the poet’s own closed in spring
Presentation
A slim book of short poems, nearly all of 1962 and the first weeks of 1963: free lines, often in tercets; five-line stanzas on one rhyme in “Daddy”; couplets in “Edge”; heavy enjambment, one- and two-word lines, slant and internal rhyme, repetition as incantation
Register
Between comedy and horror, held without slipping: tenderness, rage, glee and a cold, final stillness
Scale
One woman’s life at its edge: a hospital, a garden, a hive, a father, a husband, children, the body and the moon
Governing Proposition
A book of short poems, nearly all written in the last year of a young poet’s life, about her children, her marriage, her father, her body, her bees and her death, put together after that death by her husband in an order of his making. The wager of the book is that the lyric can speak extremity without losing command: that rage, terror, tenderness and black comedy can be held in one voice, in short lines driven by sound and timed like a performance, and that a private life pressed to its edge, the mother’s, the patient’s, the wife’s, the daughter’s, can be made to disclose conditions that hold beyond it.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
Sylvia Plath died in London on 11 February 1963. Ariel was published by Faber and Faber in London in March 1965, two years later, edited and ordered by Ted Hughes. Nearly all its poems were written in 1962 and the first weeks of 1963, in Devon and in London, and the greatest number of them in October 1962, after her separation from Hughes. “Tulips” is earlier, from March 1961; “Edge” and “Words” are among the last poems, from early February 1963. Her earlier book, The Colossus (1960), had been careful and formal in the manner of its period. Little of that manner survives here.
The book has two orders. Plath left a manuscript of her own, titled Ariel and Other Poems, in a black spring binder: about forty poems, opening with “Morning Song”, whose first word is love, and closing with “Wintering”, whose last word is spring. Hughes removed a number of the angrier poems of the marriage and added poems written after the manuscript was assembled, among them “Edge”, “Words”, “Balloons”, “Contusion” and “Kindness”, so that the book of 1965 ends not in spring but at “Words”, on the fixed stars that govern a life. Plath’s own order was published in 2004 as Ariel: The Restored Edition. The desk scores the book of 1965, the book read for forty years and the one that made the reach, and charges its assembly where it costs: on The Inevitable, The Living Form and The Inner Law. The restored order is context, not the object.
Both orders open on the same poem. “Love set you going like a fat gold watch”: the newborn is wound and set ticking, a made thing, and the mother stands back from it. “Morning Song” makes the birth, the estrangement and the waking to the cry in eighteen lines, and gives motherhood without sentiment. Its method is the book’s: the body seen as an object, mother and child as figures, a tone that holds comedy and something colder in one line. A slim book of short poems is weighed at its own scale, and it is weighed most on the poems that carry it: “Ariel”, “Lady Lazarus”, “Daddy”, “Tulips”, “Elm”, “The Moon and the Yew Tree”, “Morning Song”, “Nick and the Candlestick”, “Fever 103°”, the bee poems, “The Applicant”, “Cut”, “Poppies in July”, “Edge” and “Words”.
Movement II
“Tulips” is a poem of the hospital. The patient wishes to be erased, and the flowers will not let her: “The tulips are too excitable, it is winter here”. The flowers are the claim of the living against the wish to be nothing. The disclosure is exact. The wish is not dressed as despair or as peace; it is set against what it refuses, and the poem leaves both standing. The body and the hospital return in “Cut” and “Fever 103°”, and the book’s colours are fixed here: red against white, life against erasure.
“The Moon and the Yew Tree” opens on a statement: “This is the light of the mind, cold and planetary”. The yew and the moon carry a sacred order, Christian and pagan, seen in a light without warmth. It is the book’s cold sublime. “Elm” speaks from the depth, “I know the bottom, she says”, and the natural order of the book, elm, yew, poppies, bees and the moon, is always a mirror held to the self. That is its range and its bound: nature here is never merely nature.
The voice of these poems is new in Plath and new in its tone. Lowell’s Life Studies (1959), which she knew and admired, and Anne Sexton, her classmate in Lowell’s seminar, had already brought the private life into verse, and the path was not hers to open. What she added was the register: short driven lines in place of the rueful discursive voice, nursery-rhyme chant, glee and rage and incantation, a woman’s voice of violence and triumph. The stake was the whole of her life, written at the edge of breakdown.
Movement III
“Lady Lazarus” begins as a joke: “I have done it again. / One year in every ten / I manage it”. The poem is built as a resurrection rite crossed with a fairground striptease, death and return performed three times before a crowd, and it is timed like a stand-up routine. Its claim is a disclosure: suicide sold as spectacle, “Dying / Is an art, like everything else”. The close turns the act on its audience: “Out of the ash / I rise with my red hair / And I eat men like air”. The phoenix is also a threat, and every turn on the way to it is load-bearing.
“Daddy” is carried in five-line stanzas on one insistent rhyme in “oo”, the chant of a child, and the chant is the poem’s instrument. The father is made god, Nazi, devil and vampire, and the poem is the exorcism; the stake through the heart is its last act. The form is the knowledge: set in blank verse, the spell could not be broken, because it is the child’s own rhyme that breaks it. “The Applicant” takes the same savage comedy to marriage, which it shows as the purchase of a functioning object.
Both poems take the figures of the camps and the war for the speaker’s own wound, and the use has long been charged as appropriation. The charge is contested and is weighed here: it is part of why The Unconcealment stands at 8.7 and not above. What the poems disclose is a mind that figures its oppressor in the largest terms it has to hand, and says so in a child’s chant; they disclose that mind, not a claim of equivalence. The quarrel has been long and serious, and it has kept the poems read.
Movement IV
“Ariel” begins at a standstill, “Stasis in darkness”, and becomes a ride. The tercets, enjambed across the stanza breaks, are the gallop, and the short lines are its speed. The rider is carried out of herself into a run and becomes “the arrow, / The dew that flies / Suicidal”, and the ride ends in “the red / Eye, the cauldron of morning”. Godiva is behind it, and the sun it rides into is also death. It is one of the great transports in the century’s verse, and the book’s emblem.
The bee poems, “The Bee Meeting”, “The Arrival of the Bee Box”, “Stings” and “Wintering”, build a myth of their own. The self becomes the queen of a hive, and in “Stings” the queen rises like a red comet. The hive is the body and the household at once. In “Wintering” the women winter without men. The sequence has been read as a poem of marriage, of art, of a politics of gender and of rebirth, and it holds every reading. In Plath’s own order “Wintering” closed the book on spring; in the book of 1965 it does not.
Between the rides and the rites stands the shelter of “Nick and the Candlestick”, a mother’s address to her child: “You are the one / Solid the spaces lean on, envious”. The tenderness is fierce and the metaphor lands exactly. It is the same voice that speaks in “Daddy”, in one system of images, and the book’s law holds across that distance: the body as an object, the mother and the child as figures, the moon as witness, white against red.
Movement V
“Edge” is one of the last poems, in ten short couplets, each a still pair. Its first statement is “The woman is perfected”. She is perfected in death, her children folded back like petals, a tragic figure with Medea behind her, and the moon is witness, “Staring from her hood of bone”. The diction is cold and nothing can be removed. The form is the stillness it describes. Of all the poems in the book it is the most final.
The book closes on “Words”, with its axes, “Axes / After whose stroke the wood rings”, and its last lines on the fixed stars that govern a life. That is the editor’s ending. Plath’s own closed on spring, and what the book knows as a whole changed when its arc was turned from love and spring toward death. The desk charges that change to the book: a tenth or two on The Inevitable, two tenths on The Living Form, and some weight on The Inner Law. The poems themselves are not charged for it. Read in either order, they hold.
The reach was wide and is partly the legend’s. The book fixed the figure of the confessional poet, became the most read book of verse of its generation in English, and was answered by Sexton’s later books, by Hughes’s Birthday Letters (1998) and by Glück’s early books. On this desk it stands level with Rilke’s Sonnets to Orpheus (8.7) and Lorca’s Gypsy Ballads (8.7), with which it ties on The Sublime and The Encompassed while both lead it on The Made; a tenth below Keats’s Odes of 1819 (8.8), which lead it on The Sublime and The Made, and Akhmatova’s Requiem (8.8), which leads on The Inevitable, The Unconcealment and The Inner Law; and a tenth above Prufrock and Other Observations (8.6), which leads it on Pressure on Tradition. Every summit condition holds; what keeps the book below the summit is the sum of the twelve.
Act III · The Twelve
Taken poem by poem, the subtractive test finds almost nothing to take. “Edge” in ten couplets has no idle line. “Lady Lazarus” moves from the joke of “I have done it again. / One year in every ten / I manage it” through the crowd to the closing threat, and every turn is load-bearing. “Morning Song” makes the birth, the estrangement and the waking to the cry in eighteen lines. Compression is the book’s strongest claim. What lowers the axis is the book as a book: assembled by another hand after the author’s death, its shape is partly an editor’s, and no whole can be said to require each part. Some pieces are slighter, “Years”, “Totem”, “The Munich Mannequins”, and the late poems return to the moon, the hook, red and white with lessening force.
Score: 8.4 / 10
The book states things that hold. Motherhood without sentiment: “Love set you going like a fat gold watch”, and the fierce shelter of “Nick and the Candlestick”. The patient’s wish to be erased, in “Tulips”, set against the claim of the living: “The tulips are too excitable, it is winter here”. Marriage as the purchase of a functioning object, in “The Applicant”. Suicide as a spectacle sold to a crowd: “Dying / Is an art, like everything else”. The self that must kill the made father-god in order to speak. These are meanings, not moods. Held below 9.0 by the narrowness of the condition disclosed, and by the camps and the war taken as figures for a private wound, a use long charged as appropriation and still contested.
Score: 8.7 / 10
Height is reached often, and in several kinds. The ride of “Ariel” goes from “Stasis in darkness” into a run in which the speaker becomes “the arrow, / The dew that flies / Suicidal”, and on into “the red / Eye, the cauldron of morning”: one of the great transports in the century’s verse. “The Moon and the Yew Tree” gives the cold, planetary sublime: “This is the light of the mind, cold and planetary”. “Edge” gives a dreadful stillness, its moon “Staring from her hood of bone”. “Lady Lazarus” rises at its close: “Out of the ash / I rise with my red hair / And I eat men like air”. The charge: a register of extremity held this constantly flattens in places, and some poems strain for the shock image.
Score: 9.0 / 10
In the major poems the archetype carries the structure. “Lady Lazarus” is built as a resurrection rite crossed with a fairground striptease: death and return are its form, three times, ending in a phoenix that is also a threat. “Daddy” makes the father god, Nazi, devil and vampire, and the poem is the exorcism, the stake through the heart its last act. The bee poems make the self queen of a hive, the hive both body and household. “Ariel” is a Godiva ride into a sun that is also death, and “Edge” sets the woman as a tragic figure, with Medea behind her. The particular stays particular. Held at 8.7 because myth is built in perhaps half the book, and elsewhere evoked: allusion put to private use.
Score: 8.7 / 10
The departure from her own inheritance is sharp. The Colossus (1960) is a careful, mannered, formal book in the manner of its period; Ariel throws that manner off for short driven lines, nursery-rhyme chant, black comedy and a voice that performs to an audience. Beyond Lowell the turn is in tone: rage, glee and incantation where his voice is ruefully discursive, and a woman’s voice of violence and triumph that the lyric in English had not carried. The stake was total: the subject was her own marriage, children and death, written at the edge of breakdown. Held below 9.0 because the path was already broken: Lowell’s Life Studies (1959), which she admired, and Anne Sexton, her classmate in Lowell’s seminar, had carried the private life into verse.
Score: 8.7 / 10
Within the poems, form is the knowledge. The one rhyme of “Daddy” is the child’s chant the poem uses to break the father’s spell: set it in blank verse and the exorcism is lost. The tercets of “Ariel”, enjambed across the stanza breaks, are the gallop, and the short lines are its speed. The couplets of “Edge”, each a still pair, are the perfected stillness. “Lady Lazarus” takes the timing of a stand-up routine as its form of resurrection. The charge falls on the form of the book, which is not Plath’s. The arc she built, from love to spring, was replaced by an arc that ends in death, and what the book knows as a whole changed with it. Poem by poem the axis would stand at 9.0; the assembly costs two tenths.
Score: 8.8 / 10
Sixty years of reading have not used up the major poems. “Ariel” and “Elm” keep yielding at the level of image and sound. The bee sequence has been read as marriage, as art, as a politics of gender and as a myth of rebirth, and it holds all of them. The quarrel over “Daddy” and the camps has been long and serious, which is itself a kind of yield. Ariel: The Restored Edition (2004) reopened the book: the same poems in two orders say two different things, which is evidence of depth rather than a cost. Held at 8.6 because much of the return has been to the life rather than the poems, to the marriage, the death and the quarrel over the editing, and because the surface of “Daddy” is now familiar enough to exhaust.
Score: 8.6 / 10
The intrinsic force is high: the book made a new lyric voice possible, a woman speaking violence, triumph, black comedy and ritual at once, in short lines driven by sound. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the book fixed the figure of the confessional poet in the public mind, became the most read book of verse of its generation in English, and was present across the women’s movement of the 1970s. Anne Sexton’s later books answered it; Ted Hughes’s Birthday Letters (1998) is a book of answers addressed to Plath; Louise Glück’s early books absorbed it and refused it; Carol Ann Duffy’s monologues in women’s voices and later spoken verse take up its address to an audience. Held at 8.8 because part of the reach is the legend’s, and imitation of the manner has been common and weak.
Score: 8.8 / 10
Sixty-one years have passed since publication, and survival across them is demonstrated. Presence is among the widest for any book of poems of its century: continuously in print, taught in schools and universities, widely translated, its poems among the most anthologised in English. The upper part of the range is earned on that presence, and it is presence among readers of the poems, taken poem by poem in classrooms and anthologies, not only among readers of the life. Two charges keep the axis from 9.0. The text is in some measure contested: there are two orders, the author’s and the editor’s, and each is read. And part of the presence is carried by the life rather than the poems, which is fame, not proof.
Score: 8.9 / 10
Judged on Plath’s English. The command of sound and line is of the first order: the assonance and single rhyme of “Daddy”; the turns of “Lady Lazarus”, timed like a routine; the enjambed acceleration of “Ariel”; metaphor that lands exactly, “Love set you going like a fat gold watch”, “You are the one / Solid the spaces lean on, envious”; the cold diction of “Edge”; the echoing axes of “Words”, “Axes / After whose stroke the wood rings”. Tone is held between comedy and horror without slipping, which is the hardest thing the book does. The charges: the manner can harden into mannerism, a stock of images (red and white, the moon, hooks, blood, the faceless) returning; some poems are shrill, and a few late pieces are less finished than the October poems.
Score: 9.0 / 10
Take the two most distant poems: “Morning Song”, tender, comic and waking, and “Edge”, cold and final. One physics governs both: the body seen as an object, mother and child as figures, the moon as witness, white against red. The tenderness of “Nick and the Candlestick” and the savagery of “Daddy” are one voice in one system of images, and the law holds from the first poem to the last. Held at 8.6 because the range it governs is moderate: one voice, one life, a few registers, and narrowness is not coherence. The assembly by another hand also bends the law at the close, where an editor’s ending stands in place of the poet’s.
Score: 8.6 / 10
Judged on what a slim book of lyrics holds. Consciousness at its extreme. The family entire: father, mother, husband, children. Marriage as an economy, in “The Applicant”. The body and the hospital, in “Tulips”, “Cut” and “Fever 103°”. The natural order: bees, elm, yew, poppies, the moon. The sacred, Christian and pagan, in “The Moon and the Yew Tree” and “Lady Lazarus”. History, in the figures of the camps and the war. All of it is held through one private self, which is the book’s strength and its bound. What holds the axis at 7.6, the lowest of the twelve, is what is absent or only figured: labour, the state and the social world beyond the household are not held, and history appears as a figure for the self rather than as itself.
Score: 7.6 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
8.7 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier IV · Canonical
Strongest Dimensions
The Sublime at 9.0 and The Made at 9.0, then The Imperishable at 8.9. Height reached often and in several kinds, from the ride of “Ariel” into the cauldron of morning to the cold stillness of “Edge”; a command of sound and line that holds tone between comedy and horror without slipping; and a presence, sixty-one years on, among the widest for any book of poems of its century.
Limiting Dimension
The Encompassed at 7.6: consciousness, the family, marriage, the body, the natural order, the sacred and history in figure are held through one private self, while labour, the state and the social world beyond the household are absent. Among the gated axes The Inevitable is lowest, at 8.4, charged for a book assembled by another hand after the author’s death and for a few slighter pieces.
The Necessity Cap clears at 8.4 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears with room: The Made at 9.0, The Living Form at 8.8, The Inner Law at 8.6, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is met on all five: The Imperishable at 8.9, Pressure on Tradition at 8.8, The Unconcealment at 8.7, The Archetypal Deep at 8.7 and The Swerve at 8.7 clear the bar of 8.5, the last three by two tenths. The Universal Minimum is met (no axis it governs falls below 8.4, against 7.5) and The Encompassed, which is exempted, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 7.6. Every summit condition is met; the book is held below the summit by its aggregate alone. The twelve sum to 103.8, 3.6 short of the least sum the upper tier admits, and the book stands at 8.7.
Basis · a reading from knowledge of Sylvia Plath’s Ariel as first published by Faber and Faber, London, in March 1965, two years after her death, in the selection and order of Ted Hughes. The book as published is the unit, and its assembly by another hand is weighed where it costs, on The Inevitable, The Living Form and The Inner Law. Plath’s own order, from the manuscript Ariel and Other Poems, published as Ariel: The Restored Edition (2004), is named as context and not scored; the American edition (Harper and Row, 1966) is not the object. The poems weighed most are “Ariel”, “Lady Lazarus”, “Daddy”, “Tulips”, “Elm”, “The Moon and the Yew Tree”, “Morning Song”, “Nick and the Candlestick”, “Fever 103°”, the four bee poems, “The Applicant”, “Cut”, “Poppies in July”, “Edge” and “Words”. Every axis is judged on Plath’s English; no translation stands between. No text was in hand, since the book is in copyright: nothing was measured on a text, no line counts or rates are given beyond the forms of particular poems, and no quotation was checked against a file. Quotations are short, given only where their words are certain, and cited by poem; everything else is paraphrased. Matters that could not be verified are not given, among them the number of poems in the book and its length in pages, the number of poems written in October 1962 and which they were, the date of particular poems beyond those given, the differences in contents between the English and American editions, the full list of the poems Hughes removed, and the debts of particular later books.