Ted Hughes
February 1963
The carbon she left
on her desk of Ariel
will leave a fossil record.
She read me only
a few of these poems.
I hold the papers, astonished.
She did not tell me
what she wanted to do
with these last words,
publish them, perish with them,
or both.
Her poetry cuts me to the spine,
beautiful and brutal.
Her words startle my eyes.
She has etched down parts of me,
of us, of her.
Her voice records its final,
triumphant symphony.
And I know, slumped
over her desk, my head
so heavy in my hands
I can barely read her lines,
that it was either her or me,
one of us had to go.
Ariel was published in 1965 at Ted’s behest, first in Britain by Faber and Faber and then in 1966 in America by Harper & Row. Ted did not use Sylvia’s previous publishers because he secured a better deal with his own British publisher, Faber and Faber, and negotiated a more profitable contract with Harper & Row as well. Ted removed some poems and rearranged the order of the poems included in the first editions of Ariel, but subsequent printings of the collection are truer in their arrangement to Sylvia’s intentions.
Ted and Assia remained together for nearly seven years. On March 25, 1969, As-sia killed herself and the daughter, Shura, whom she had with Ted. After taking sleeping pills and dissolving some in water for Shura, she gassed herself and the child in their kitchen. Assia was forty-one and Shura was four at the time of their deaths. Ted and Assia never married, and by some accounts he was planning at this time to marry Carol Orchard, who became his second wife and stepmother to Nick and Frieda.