Sylvia Plath's Birthday and a Look at the Intended Arrangement of Ariel

"Winter is for women," wrote Sylvia Plath, who would have been 82 years old this week (the 27th to be exact). In honor of the occasion, a piece at The Atlantic revisits Ariel, with a close eye on the posthumous poetry collection's original intent: bees? It's more complicated, actually. "Plath...never could have anticipated that becoming herself would be a condition of her death. That was because the Ariel that was published was not her Ariel," writes Katie Kilkenny. More precisely:

After her death, Plath's husband Ted Hughes rearranged her manuscript to reflect his wife’s biographical arc: Placing her strongest, most outwardly masochistic poems ("Ariel") at the beginning, Hughes filled the middle in with optimistic work, then punched up the end with poems about female death and a writer’s obsession ("Contusion," "Edge," and "Words"). After his editorial contributions, the oven was the logical conclusion to the collection’s tale of downward spiral, the final defeat in its losing battle.

Plath's original arrangement of Ariel and Other Poems, on the other hand, embraced life. Plath chose to end her Ariel with four of the five-poem sequence Hughes buried in the middle, the so-called "bee poems." Including "The Bee Meeting," "The Arrival of the Bees," "Stings," "The Swarm," and "Wintering," the bee poems portray the poet briefly freed from her bell jar, her eye of the tornado. It chronicles a few months in which the poet takes care of a hive, nurturing its residents in spite of their proclivity to sting and swarm her, and collects their honey in winter. It shows Plath at her most grounded, her concerns about the well being of the bees and her unshielded skin a welcome relief from her more existentially preoccupied verse.

This life-nurturing narrator was not merely an excuse to write a characteristic extended metaphor: Bees were personal to Plath. Her father Otto, a professor of German and entomology at Boston University, was an authority on bumblebees (he wrote the ultimate guide in 1934, Bumblebees and Their Ways). Though before his early death, Plath supposedly felt (at eight years old) as if she were existing in his shadow (or his shoe), her interest in his object of study persisted. In 1962, the poet reprised beekeeping to pass the time in Devon, where she and Hughes lived while she wrote poems that would appear in Ariel and attempted to keep her marriage and family life afloat.

Read the rest--including the original "Bee Poem," published in The Atlantic in April 1963--here.