A Summary of Sylvia Plath's Ariel

The following is a Guest Blog post by Angel DeMonica, who attended the reading of Sylvia Plath's Ariel yesterday (26 May) at the Royal Festival Hall. I would like to thank Angel on behalf of myself and all of this blogs' readers sincerely for her write-up.

I hope to have other reviews of the reading from other attendees soon.

The evening was introduced by Plath's daughter, Frieda Hughes, who was dressed in a black cocktail dress and gold belt. She repeated much of the introduction to the Restored Ariel and was particularly keen to emphasize that Hughes took a "painstaking" approach to the 1965 edition. Frieda stressed that she sees Plath's ordering of the Ariel poems as the "historical version" and is convinced that Plath would have changed, adapted & extracted if she had lived longer, i.e. we shouldn't see it - in Frieda's view - as an incontrovertible original version. She said her mother "treated every emotional experience as a jewel, ring or a necklace" and that in the Ariel collection "she was caught in an act of revenge" in which her father later became a victim. She didn't mention the fact that Plath killed herself, but spoke of her death. Frieda complained that her mother has sometimes been "completely fabricated" and ended by saying the evening was an opportunity to hear her mother "presented exactly as she would want to be - through her poetry".

The forty readings followed, which lasted about an hour and a half. The poems of the Restored edition were read by a mixture of poets (Jo Shalcott, Gillian Clarke, Lavinia Greenlaw) and well-known actresses (Miranda Richardson, Juliet Stevenson, Anna Chancellor). It was a mixed bag I felt: ''Poppies in October" (one of my favourite poems) was terrible, read almost in monotone, "Medusa" was read breathily & quietly & with too little animation. But what was extraordinary was to hear the bee cycle and follow the narrative in its tense movement towards spring - this was a fantastic experience. The highlight for me was hearing Ruth Fainlight (on stage, with a walking stick) reading "Elm" - the poem Plath dedicated to her; and when the lights of the Royal Festival Hall were dimmed, Plath's image was beamed onto the screen and her voice came booming out of the speakers, reading "Daddy". Ultimately, I think, Plath herself is the best speaker of her poetry. But this was still a great opportunity to hear her poems as she said she wrote them - for the ear.