Ariel: The Restored Edition Read Free

man who insisted the plaque was in the wrong place. ‘The plaque should be on Fitzroy Road!’ he cried, and the newspapers echoed him. I asked one of the journalists why. ‘Because,’ they replied, ‘that was where your mother wrote all her best work.’ I explained she’d only been there eight weeks. ‘Well, then,’ they said, ‘… it’s where she was a single mother.’ I told them I was unaware that English Heritage gave out blue plaques for single motherhood. Finally they confessed. ‘It’s because that’s where she died.’
    ‘We already have a gravestone,’ I replied. ‘We don’t need another.’
    I did not want my mother’s death to be commemorated as if it had won an award. I wanted her life to be celebrated, the fact that she had existed, lived to the fullness of her ability, been happy and sad, tormented and ecstatic, and given birth to my brother and me. I think my mother was extraordinary in her work, and valiant in her efforts to fight the depression that dogged her throughout her life. She used every emotional experience as if it were a scrap of material that could be pieced together to make a wonderful dress; she wasted nothing of what she felt, and when in control of those tumultuous feelings she was able to focus and direct her incredible poetic energy to great effect. And here was Ariel , her extraordinary achievement, poised as she was between her volatile emotional state and the edge of the precipice. The art was not to fall.
    Representing my mother’s vision and experience at a particular time in her life during great emotional turmoil, these Ariel poems—this harnessing of her own inner forces by my mother herself—speak for themselves.
    My mother’s poems cannot be crammed into the mouths of actors in any filmic reinvention of her story in the expectation that they can breathe life into her again, any more than literary fictionalization of my mother’s life—as if writing straight fiction would not get the writer enough notice (or any notice at all)—achieves any purpose other than to parody the life she actually lived. Since she died my mother has been dissected, analyzed, reinterpreted, reinvented, fictionalized, and in some cases completely fabricated. It comes down to this: her own words describe her best, her ever-changing moods defining the way she viewed her world and the manner in which she pinned down her subjects with a merciless eye.
    Each poem is put into perspective by the knowledge that in time, the life and observations the poems were written about would have changed, evolved, and moved on as my mother would have done. They build upon all the other writings over the years in my mother’s life, and best demonstrate the many complex layers of her inner being.
    When she died leaving Ariel as her last book, she was caught in the act of revenge, in a voice that had been honed and practised for years, latterly with the help of my father. Though he became a victim of it, ultimately he did not shy away from its mastery.
    This new, restored edition is my mother in that moment. It is the basis for the published Ariel , edited by my father. Each version has its own significance though the two histories are one.
       
     
    Frieda Hughes

Ariel and other poems
     
     

 
     
    For
Frieda and Nicholas

Morning Song
     
     
    Love set you going like a fat gold watch.
    The midwife slapped your footsoles, and your bald cry
    Took its place among the elements. 
     
    Our voices echo, magnifying your arrival. New statue
    In a drafty museum, your nakedness
    Shadows our safety. We stand round blankly as walls.
     
    I’m no more your mother
    Than the cloud that distils a mirror to reflect its own slow
    Effacement at the wind’s hand.
     
    All night your moth-breath
    Flickers among the flat pink roses. I wake to listen:
    A far sea moves in my ear.
     
    One cry, and I stumble from bed, cow-heavy and floral
    In my Victorian nightgown.
    Your mouth opens clean as a cat’s. The window