Ariel's Gift by Erica Wagner

Author:Erica Wagner
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Published: 2015-08-14T16:00:00+00:00

Here, if not completely explicated but at least indicated, is the burden of the last line of his earlier poem, “The Bear,” which made its first appearance in Wodwo in 1967. This earlier bear is a mysterious totem,

digging

In his sleep

Through the wall of the Universe

With a man’s femur.

“He is the ferryman / To dead land,” the poem closes. “His price is everything.”

The younger Hughes, author of “The Bear,” did not see the “self-salvation” that Plath sought in creating her painful tale; but this is the key to the work. “. . . The death hurtling to and fro / Inside your head, had to alight somewhere,” he writes now. Its resting place then was on his own shoulders, himself transmuted into her fiction: but it was a resting place that was merely temporary.

Yet there was life, too, in Plath. Just before they left for the trip she had had a scare, when she had been told by a doctor that she was temporarily infertile. Since she was a woman who believed that part of her destiny was to bear children, this had thrown her into despair. In a later poem, “A Childless Woman,” she wrote in the persona of barrenness: “This body / This ivory / Ungodly as a child’s shriek.” While in Boston she had written in her journal: “I would bear children until my change of life if that were possible. I want a house of our children, little animals, flowers, vegetables, fruits. I want to be an Earth Mother in the deepest sense.” On this trip across America, Plath became pregnant, and “Grand Canyon” gives the first inkling of this, her plenitude suffusing all his language and imagery:

Not a brimming glass of orange juice—

But you were suddenly more than careful

Not to spill a drop.

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