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Sylvia Plath: The Evolution of 'Sheep in Fog' Ted Hughes Written for Roy Davids, of Sotheby's Manuscripts Department, to be given as an illustrated lecture to the Wordsworth Trust, Grasmere, 25 February 1988. Because we have all the manuscripts, all dated, of all her late poems, we can trace the course of the two amazing surges of inspiration that produced them—two waves of excitement like two successive waves on a graph. The first of these surges produced three poems in July of 1962, one in August, then twenty-seven between the end of September and the end of October, ten in November, two on the first day of December, ending abruptly with a final poem, 'Sheep in Fog', on 2 December.

She collected most of these, with a few others from just before, and called the volume Ariel. Without going into detailed analysis it is possible to point out that the Ariel poems document Plath's struggle to deal with a double situation—when her sudden separation from her husband coincided with a crisis in her traumatic feelings about her father's death which had occurred when she was eight years old (and which had been complicated by her all but successful attempt to follow him in a suicidal act in 1953). Against these very strong, negative feelings, and others associated with them, her battle to create a new life, with her children and with what she regarded as her new, reborn self, supplies the extraordinary positive resolution of the poems that she wrote up to 2 December 1962.

After that, (2 December), she wrote nothing at all for two months. On only one occasion, on 31 December, did she take up a poem to revise during this period. That was 'The Eavesdropper', first written on 15 October. She shortened this piece, corrected it quite heavily, but left it without any final draft (it is the only poem that to my knowledge she never finished). The dated manuscripts tell us this, and enable us to be sure that she did not start writing again until 28 January 1963. On that day she revised the very last poem of the earlier outburst, 'Sheep in Fog', and went on, the same day, to write three new ones. This was the beginning of the second wave. By the time she died, two weeks later, she had written twelve poems towards a new collection, and the revised 'Sheep in Fog' lay among them. The final group of poems is very different in mood from the earlier group. And yet this poem, 'Sheep in Fog', belongs to both groups: the last poem of the first group, in its first version, and the first poem of the last group, in its final version.

[see page a] Here is the poem leading its double life. The typed lines, dated at the top, belong to 2 December 1962. The revision in pen, which as you can see involves only the last three-line verse, is dated at the bottom, 28 January 1963.

She then typed out the revised version [see page b] and gave it those two dates at the top, as if she recognized some particular significance in the different character of the two versions. As I recall, she did this with no other poem. However, if we look at these three lines closely we see that the change she made in them, on 28 January, reveals just what that peculiar significance was. The new version amounts to a full, perfect realization of the calamitous change of mood, the sinister change of inspiration, between the two groups of poems.

Looking first at the first version of 2 December, we see in those last three lines her main Ariel themes tangled in a strange fashion. They are nothing like so ominous as the three she replaced them with, two months later on 28 January 1963. They are ambiguous—but leaning strongly towards the positive. 'Patriarchs'

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give a sense of something fatherly in a benign, protective even biblically protective, way. And though these Patriarchs move away from her—as stones or clouds—yet they have babies' faces. In Plath's mythology babies are always intensely positive creatures, of new life, fresh beginnings, vital and innocent force etc., so this too presses towards a positive emphasis, and 'babies' as the last word ends the poem forcefully upbeat. These Patriarchs which are protective fathers which are the babies of life which (in their 'heavenly wools') are also perhaps cherubic angels—though they move off a little, are still close and have not entirely withdrawn their good and familiar magic. In fact, the title seems to tell us that the whole point of the poem is to invoke their protective benediction.

In other words, this final three-line image is still trying to stay in the Ariel world of hope and a triumphant outcome. And we remember that this was 2 December and had been preceded by weeks of fierce inspiration and confidence.

Yet the three lines don't quite work. They don't ring true, somehow. They can't finally reverse the mood of the 'hooves, dolorous bells' or the 'Morning. . . blackening like a flower left out'—the whole heavy, grieving momentum of the preceding four verses. And we begin to feel an eerie, afterlife feeling—a uniquely Plath sensation—about the Patriarchs and their baby faces. A little like figures in Dante's Purgatorio—the babies are perhaps too much like cherubs, as if a soul just after death were seeing these figures, and not quite understanding. In spite of this, she seems as I say to cling to the hopeful possibility, that these baby faces promise and might even ensure life.

Even so, we can't help seeing, I think, how with this poem, quite suddenly, the Ariel inspiration has changed. The astonishing, sustained, soaring defiance of the previous eight weeks has suddenly failed. Or rather has reversed. Or rather, maybe, has revealed what was always there. It is still inspiration. Those first four verses still supply four fifths of one of her most beautiful poems. But the rage, which was also a kind of joy, has evaporated. What remains is mourning.

So now we see why those last three lines don't work. In them, she makes a convulsive effort to switch this poem onto the Ariel tracks, with magical images of divine help and rebirth. But the new kind of inspiration refuses to be coerced. This last image remains mechanical and unconvincing. It was still too early, evidently, for her to face the real conclusion—the foregone conclusion on which the poem was insisting. And so she denied and suppressed it with these three artificial lines.

All this can be said simply from that 2 December version of the poem, which on that date she had thought was final. To see what was really happening, however, we have to look not only at that final 28 January version, but at all drafts of the poem, from the beginning. And they do tell everything.

One of Plath's most famous poems is the title poem—'Ariel' itself. This poem describes and almost apotheosizes a dawn ride, on Dartmoor, on her horse which was called Ariel. It is the quintessential Plath Ariel poem in that the speaker, the I, hurls herself free from all earthly confinement and aims herself and her horse—as the poem says, 'suicidal' directly into the red, rising sun. The overt sense here is that the liberation from earthly restraints (earthly life) is a rebirth into something greater and more glorious but which is still some kind of life—a spiritual rebirth perhaps. She wrote it on her thirtieth birthday.

The only other poem about her morning ride, in the same place and on the same horse, Ariel, is the poem we have been looking at, 'Sheep in Fog'. First written about a month later.

As we see, 'Sheep in Fog' has the same theme—a dawn ride towards a kind of death. But here all the values of the earlier poem are inverted. Instead of hurtling towards the rising, patriarchal sun, in triumph, as a spiritual hero, she is

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now the failed one, the one who disappoints, trudging towards a mournful dissolution in bottomless, starless, fatherless darkness.

In other words, the connection between these two horse-riding poems reveals the crucial, dangerous extreme polarity, the precarious dynamics, of Plath's inspiration, and achievement, and fate.

To see even more vividly just how she experienced this we only have to turn right back to the beginning of her working drafts of 'Sheep in Fog' and then go through them in order. (After what I've said, you'll be able to make very good sense of the main points.)

See her very first draft [page c]. The first three lines come out limpid and clear—exactly as she wanted

them and as they would always be. But then, immediately, she reaches out towards those Patriarchs. However,

she realizes it's too soon, and sends them off. In that next moment of hovering uncertainty, the train line emerges,

perfect and unalterable. Then we see her trying to unite with her horse. Thighs clamping my

animal'. This is almost a direct memory of the Ariel lines: God's lioness How one we grow Pivot of heels and knees! and also recalls another line, later in the same poem, 'At one with the drive'. But though she has now made the inner connection with the earlier poem, she realizes that the connotations of striving ecstatic energy no longer apply. And she has already seen a more appropriate and expressive way of blending with her beast. So she rejects the old, used-up Ariel muscular connection and finds their new identity in their common colour.

It is as though she is aware of something very undesirable coming up at this point, something she is not ready for. The phrases of cancellation and revision wrestle on the page. Then we see it is not so much their common colour, hers, her horse's or her hair's or even the world's—it isn't this that confuses her so much as the idea of 'rust'.

'Rust'. Why should this word disturb her? But now we are told immediately what the rust is. And in two lines she shows us the full complexity of the relationship between this poem and the poem 'Ariel'. The rust belongs to the wreckage of a chariot. Her horse, herself, and the world, just for a glimpse, are the rusty iron wreckage of a chariot.

We know where this chariot comes from. Not Ariel, but Phaeton, son of a mortal woman and Apollo (the god of the Sun and of Poetry), took his father's Sun-chariot for a run, and the solar horses, under his half-mortal hands, ran out of control through the heavens. The chariot, it might be supposed, was wrecked and he was killed. As an image of her Ariel flight in the chariot of the God of Poetry, which was also her attempt to soar (plunge) into the inspirational form of her inaccessible father, to convert her former physical suicide into a psychic rebirth, that myth is the parable of the book Ariel and of her life and death. In the poem 'Ariel', though it is so very present in the situation and drama of the poem, the myth shows no sign of having broken into her consciousness. And here, in 'Sheep in Fog', when it makes the attempt, she shoves it out.

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Nevertheless, from somewhere behind that earlier poem 'Ariel' it insists on pushing through: The world rusts around us Ribs, spokes, a scrapped chariot. And yet this image is somehow out of place. It is too indefinite. It brings up a whole world of meanings that are too large and mythic (and raw) for this particular poem—the cool realism of this delicate lament.

We then see how much of it she is willing to accept, as she condenses it into an image where the line: O slow fuses the train and its line of breath, with her horse, as if the essence of the fallen chariot, instead of lying around the countryside as a gigantic, lumpish ruin, had now secreted itself within the iron train and the rust-coloured horse as two aspects of the vehicle's stricken condition.

But the chariot still tries to make a come-back, and suddenly she has identified its technology with her own body—no longer the 'arrow, at one with the drive', but: I am a scrapped chariot As before it is too much to handle. She pushes it out again and for a while it has to be content with the word 'rust' and the ghostly afterimage of a train.

And now a totally new idea, and another perfect three line verse, as if it had slipped through her temporary exhaustion—after her struggle to get rid of her chariot. In the finished poem we might well ask: What are these dolorous bells? But knowing as we now do about the disastrously fallen sun-chariot which is the catastrophe behind this poem, we know they are bells for a dead Phaeton—mourning bells. Just to drive this home, the word 'morning' is twice and mournfully repeated as if the morning—which in the poem 'Ariel' was the rising red eye of the new day, the 'cauldron' of rebirth—were now a funeral, no longer red but black.

And then with a real shock we come to the actual body of the fallen charioteer, lying there on the moors: the day itself — Like a dead man left out. With this dead man, the truth is out, too. A reader of Plath immediately thinks of the shattered, landscape Colossus, the great dead man who appears here and there in her earlier poems, the unburiable body, as she interpreted it, of her father. But the voice of the Ariel poems was the voice that had been buried with him, identified with him, and that had struggled into rebirth, in those Ariel poems, to tell its story. The re-emergence of that body, in one of the last of the Colossus poems, had been like the re-emergence of that voice in Ariel—as if the body of her father were also the Chrysalis of the voice. But where the rider in the poem 'Ariel' drove straight into God's eye, here in 'Sheep in Fog' God's eye, the day itself, the light of the sun, is blackened with mourning, and the rider, the charioteer of the sun, the spirit that was also her resurrected father, is dead on the earth.

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But immediately she tries to escape the implications: in so far as that dead charioteer is the spirit of Ariel it is also herself. She reaches out for her old comforters, the sheep, mysteriously beautiful. But they have already metamorphosed (as if in fright, at sight of that revealing corpse) into 'the souls of worms'. At once she tries to reconvert them into something more reassuring—as one tries to force an image in a dream to become something more propitious—whereupon the 'Patriarchs' re-enter. Yet still she feels she needs something more reliable. Cancelling the Patriarchs she wards off those souls of worms with her often tried and tested crucifix magic—the faces of babies. But the old Ariel reflex is obsolete. The babies turn in her hands into terrible cherubs — Old as the tors, and furious. ('Tors' are the granite piles or 'buttes' that stick up from the top of the granite hills on Dartmoor, the cores of ancient mountains.) She knew she needed the help of fiery angels, but again these are too much to handle, her attempt to rescue herself disintegrates and she starts afresh [see page d].

In this second page, the first three verses have emerged, in their own strong, inevitable music. The scene of disaster has been set. And the corpse of the charioteer, still too savagely mythical, has been naturalized to the poem as 'A flower left out'. But (like the flower which replaces the body of Adonis, in Shakespeare's Venus and Adonis) this metamorphosed flower now has a lively, coded meaning for us. Because of these manuscript drafts we know (and without them we could not possibly know) what a frightful psychological event, and for the poet what a truly fateful event, lies behind it and is enclosed within it. This dead flower, or rather not yet expressly dead but 'blackening' because it has been 'left out', is nothing less than the spirit that rode Ariel in the earlier poem, and that composed the Ariel poems. It is all that remains of that heroic effort. It is the seal of the wild endeavour of the Ariel inspiration.

But still she tries to use what she had learned in those Ariel poems to rescue the situation. She now reaches back into the Ariel world for more of the kind of imagery that once helped her. Taking up the first verse's idea of Mankind's and Heaven's disappointment with her, and now finding a similar attitude in the sheep, she explores first of all a possibility that 'they are expecting', intensifies it to 'they are wanting', as if she hoped to find something positive there—but fails to see that they want, in truth, anything but stones, clouds and transformations, which lead straight back to desolation. Scrapping this, she looks through the sheep's faces and seizes on the faces of Aunts in photographs—heirlooms that were formerly, in Ariel, vibrant with intimate life. But these now collapse back, remorselessly, into that insuppressible rusted chariot, which suddenly re-emerges yet again, now loaded with photographs, rings, diaries, mysterious beaked faces under glass and even, it seems, kisses. Everything in her life and marriage had been with her in that chariot—and the rust now corrodes it all. Again it drags her towards something she cannot manage, and again she separates herself forcibly from it, returning to her baby-faced sheep, which are now: saner, they are blessed. And 'Like saints, they inhabit an absence'. We now see why these sheep were important enough to give the poem its title. At this point they represent her desperate effort to bring the poem to a close in a positive, sacred, talismanic image that can float on the darkening current of the poem and protect her from it. She

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makes a single bid, a magical gesture, to reinforce this image, and give it a barbed, defended permanence, with the sudden appearance, out of nowhere, of: The holly is indestructible On 2 December, maybe, those Saints were approaching Christmas like the Magi, and this Holy Holly probably came with them—for the rebirth of the soul, the baby-faced Sheep, the Lamb. All this would be stirring behind there. Magi, Holly and Lamb had all featured in the victorious drama of Ariel. But though the line about the Saints and the line about the Holly are thoroughbred Ariel phrases, beautiful in themselves, even as she writes them she realizes they won't do, as we can see. And she goes back to the beginning, on a third sheet, to take another run at the mysterious barrier [see page e].

Copying out the first three perfected verses gives her focus and tuning to slip between the clashing rocks and press on through a perfect verse four—which introduces two decisive new ideas. The Chariot and Charioteer were as we saw first separated and secreted, the one into the rust-coloured horse and the train that leaves, a breath, the other into the 'flower left out'; she then made another attempt to identify herself, rider and vehicle, with the 'scrapped chariot'. Now, in her first new idea, both dead rider and ruined chariot dissolve into an image less defined but more potent than either:

My bones hold a stillness . . . Dead man, flower, and scrapped chariot, are all in this stillness. Following immediately, comes the second new idea:

the far Fields melt My heart.

This opens directly towards what will be, two months later, when she gives the poem its final shape, the inevitable ending. The decisive word here will turn out to be 'melt'. 'Melt' reaches through to another myth. It 'dissolves' one here who flew too recklessly into the sun with another who did the same, as will be clear in a minute, or rather in two months.

But now, on 2 December, she tries to save the situation and give herself a hopeful outcome, rather than obey the inexorable inner laws of the poem. She does this by acting ruthlessly. Instead of wading deeper into the tangle of the rusty chariot, and perhaps unearthing a whole, other, different poem—the poem that has been so persistently trying to force its way through this one—she abandons her baffled struggle with that doom-laden vehicle and ties the four verses that she has into a neat parcel, making a formal and perfunctory though decorative knot out of her sacred images of sheep that are both Patriarchs and cherub-faced babies (the beatific disguises of her Father and his Daughter, her Husband and her Children). And there she leaves it, on 2 December, under this Ariel seal which, as now seems clear, is makeshift and inadequate.

Realizing perhaps that this ending is not quite right, and also, no doubt, that the mood and 'story' of the body of the poem contradicts the generally masterful programme of Ariel, she keeps the poem out of that collection. It is not until two months later, as we have seen, that she is able to accept the poem's inevitable true conclusion. This acceptance then releases the inspiration of the

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final eleven poems that chart her final breakthrough—into the real meaning of 'dark water'.

So on 28 January taking up the poem again she removes the false ending. She then looks through that word 'melt' and sees, now, in perfect focus, the myth behind it. Brueghel's painting of Icarus falling out of the sky and into the sea was a favourite of hers: a print of it hung on her wall at university, and she referred to him as a figure frequently. Auden's poem about the same painting, 'Musee des Beaux Arts', was, I think her favourite Auden poem. From the northern edge of Dartmoor, where she was riding, the whole panorama of North Devon seems to lie below like a different land—a sea undulating softly away to the Northern skyline, behind which lies the true sea. As the rider looks out over this landscape in its dawn mists, those far fields both 'melt' their undulations and 'melt' her heart into themselves. In the poem 'Ariel' she had fused her heart—her whole being—into the sun's red eye, as a triumphant Phaeton reaching her Father. Here that word 'melt' has metamorphosed the sun's chariot and horses into the wax of the wings of Icarus—who also flew (against his father's warning) too near the sun. Instead of climbing, as Phaeton, into the 'cauldron of morning' (having fallen, secretly, earlier in this poem's scrapped drafts, as Phaeton) she now falls as Icarus into 'a heaven' that is the opposite of the sun's paternal 'cauldron of morning.' This other 'heaven' is that 'dark water', 'starless' and 'fatherless'.

The 'melting' of the 'Phaeton myth' behind Ariel into the 'Icarus myth' behind this (and the last eleven poems) is done with beautiful, extremely powerful effect, yet without overt mention of either. And one can see how any mention of either would have killed the suggestive power of the mythic ideas.

What these drafts reveal, then, is more than the working out of a famous poem. They reveal what is essentially a parallel body of poetry. They are a transparent exposure of the poetic operations to which the finished work is—well, what is it? In one sense, that final version conceals all these operations. It exploits them, plunders them, appropriates only what it can use, and then, finally for the most part, hides them. But having seen these drafts, we do not respect the poem less. We understand it far better, because we have learned the peculiar meanings of its hieroglyphs. These drafts are not an incidental adjunct to the poem, they are a complementary revelation, and a log-book of its real meanings.

They have revealed the nature and scope of the psychological crisis that gives the poem its weird life, sonority, its power to affect us. In other words, they are, as the final poem is not, an open window into the poet's motivation and struggle at a moment of decisive psychological change.

We now know the precise significance of that single word 'rust', of that simple noun 'flower', of the mysteriously affecting adjectives 'starless' and 'fatherless'. Behind these bald glyphs, we now understand, there lies a submerged, struggling and certainly terrible large-scale psycho-mythological drama.

If it were not for the surviving manuscripts, we would never guess that the 'dark water', those last words of the final version, is in fact swallowing up the fallen chariot of the sun and the reckless charioteer who fell with it, or that this small cool poem is the epitaph and funeral cortege of the whole extraordinary adventure dramatized in the poems of Ariel—the endeavour that, as far as she was concerned, failed.

* Finally, this full sequence of drafts reveals, in a highly interesting form, the beginning, middle and end of a phenomenon to which no poem's final printed

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version can give any clue. It is common to the experience of all poets, at various times, and works as follows:

The first 'inspiration' of a poem can be, and often is, without words, without images, without any clear 'idea' of any sort. It need be no more than a dimly sensed mood or tone. Many poets confirm this.

At the moment of writing, one of four things can happen. First, the 'inspiration' can suddenly rise to the surface, somehow in the

process (and as if instantaneously, or even as if pre-formed) finding its own perfect words, images, rhythms and shape. The poem seems to write itself, and takes the poet completely by surprise, as if he had no idea where it came from. Once on the page, it cannot be altered. A famous example would be 'Kubla Khan'. This sort of poem is for most poets quite rare.

Or, secondly, the poem can half rise. The poet then struggles to help it, offering it words, images, anything from his bag of tricks, trying to anticipate and coax it, taking every slightest suggestion from the bits that have appeared. He has actually little idea whether he is really helping or not, in most of this busy midwifery. This is where many promising poems are ruined. It could be that while he hopes he is helping his inspiration, he is actually suppressing it—suppressing a perfect and preformed but not yet fully emerged poem of that first kind, and supplanting it with one of another kind, concocted out of officious interference from other parts of his brain that want to get in on the act. But if he is receptive and submissive enough (suspending his routine ego), and if his technique and imagination and mind generally are flexible enough, he may find himself gradually unearthing something unlike anything he or anybody else has ever written before—something that surprises him just as much, and seems just as strange to him, as the poem that arrives complete and ready made from nowhere. A famous example of this sort of poem would be The Waste Land. Most poets' best pieces are of this sort.

But a third process accounts for most of the poems that most poets write. Here, the inspiration offers only the odd phrase, or line, and the poet goes after it with a technique that is maybe very resourceful but is essentially fixed and predetermined by his own earlier writings and by his regular practice, by his aesthetic prejudices, by his conscious desire to write a certain kind of poetry. In this case, a scrap of inspiration is really no more than the occasion for a routine display of the poet's prosody. The finished versions of this type of poem can often enough carry a strong poetic charge, striking phrases, lines and felicities, and at the very least can be admirable pieces of verbal dressage and pleasing craftsmanship. But they nevertheless stand as monuments to the unique originals that died in the womb—and were reabsorbed. When you sense that this happened—and it is sometimes possible to sense a unique, beautiful poem behind the patented finish—you naturally ask whether there was a special reason for it to be suppressed, some reason for the nerve to fail, other than that the poet has somehow, through mere force of habit, perhaps, gone into partnership with the substitute.

There is a fourth kind of poem, a more interesting variant of the third. Here the final poem is not so much a display of the poet's accomplished style, and a suppression of the unorthodox event behind it, but a sort of hard-fought treaty—some kind of provisional reconciliation between the inspiration and other parts of the poet's character, a precarious, jagged, touchy kind of agreement. These can be exciting pieces of writing even when they are anything but what you would call a perfect poem.

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The successive drafts of 'Sheep in Fog' demonstrate something of all these procedures.

To begin with, the first verse is very pure inspiration. This suggests that the whole poem was prepared and ready to glide out without a pang. But something alerted the writer—a premonition. So straightaway, for that special reason, she interferes. Her nerve flinches, and she grabs for the protective Patriarchal sheep—a proven sort of Ariel staple. This means that she breaks the thread of her inspiration, which, as we eventually see, has nothing at all to say about sheep. (They remain only in the title.)

She realizes her mistake, corrects her tack, and manages to find the broken thread end—with that next perfect line. But again anxiety spoils her concentration, and again she tries to lift everything into the successful mode of her earlier poem 'Ariel', in that line 'Thighs clamping my animal'.

So she goes on, trying to tune in on that first inspiration of the poem that is pressing to be written but that for some reason frightens her, and at the same time trying to write the old Ariel type of poem that will save her from what this frightening inspiration is about to say. It is as if she were trying to force this poem's horse, with its hooves like 'dolorous bells', to be the horse that in her earlier poem flew with her into the sun.

Then when she reaches 'rust' she is taken by surprise. She is thrown off balance, as we saw, by another poem altogether. Suddenly we—and she—are stumbling among the wreckage of that chariot.

This is a difficult moment and it takes her quite a while to get past it. She is now trying to write three different poems simultaneously. The first is the poem of the original inspiration—lucid, realistic, and perfectible, perhaps already perfected and only waiting to be found, though it will take her two months to find it. The second is the poem she wants to write—the poem about the biblical Patriarchal sheep, the Ariel style of poem that knows how to deal with terrible news about her father and her fateful bond with him (such as she feels stirring again here more frighteningly than ever), a style that will hoist her as before into defiant transcendence. The third is this other inchoate poem about the rusted chariot, the poem out of the depths of her 'suicidal' ride into the sun's eye. This third poem has somehow risen—'like a terrible fish'—into the occasion of this poem, probably invoked by the simple fact that she is once again in the saddle of Ariel, her real horse on which last time she flew to the sun.

From this point while taking down, from inner dictation, her inspired lament, she never relaxes her attempt to write the self-protective poem she consciously wants to write, using the techniques and apparatus that had worked in the Ariel poems. At the same time, she cannot disengage herself from the deeper, much bigger, mythical poem that in fact tells the true story, and foretells the end of the story, behind those Ariel poems. At no point does she show any awareness that this material of the chariot might be an altogether different poem, and a different kind of poem, trying to emerge. But at last her defensive tactics win. She does manage to disengage herself from the chariot and its freight. In this way, the two other poems combine to suppress and do away with the third poem—the great story from behind the scenes.

If, at this point, the poet had had more energy, or more time, it could be she would have turned wholly towards this deeper more difficult mythic poem, and tried to excavate it. When she did this once before, with some bigger suggestions pushing through a constricted, suppressive group of lines about an elm tree, she made one of her biggest breakthroughs, transformed her whole technique, and located her true subject matter.

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But here, finally, she suppresses the intruder, and banishes it into the depths—where it remains, peering out obliquely from 'rust', through the train's breath, the blackening flower, and the 'stillness' held in her bones.

The situation is still quite complicated: two poems are still fighting for the single final draft. Her plans for the sheep are still trying to suppress the other—the inspired poem with the bad news. The drafts show what a struggle she put up, with her tried and tested technique. Finally, when the unwanted newcomer had almost taken over, she allowed the Ariel squad to go in as a police force, imposing the three final lines—like martial law.

So here four kinds of poem show their paces. As I say, the first kind of poem—the effortless inspiration, was probably there from the start. Even though she keeps disrupting the flow, all the final Wording of the poem does arrive, wherever it arrives, fully-formed—the phrases do not have to be hammered visibly out of some cruder ore. Maybe the only hesitation is a slight mishearing in the last two lines. At the same time, you could say the perfect poem was delivered with difficulty, and obvious struggle—as with the second kind of poem. And at every point, what is obvious is the obstinate interference of that other, suppressive routine, trying to hijack the occasion for a display of the already established style, as in the third kind of poem. Finally, it could be said that the poem she was left with, on 2 December, was a Treaty—a formal truce maintained under tension between opposed and mutually hostile interests: the fourth kind of poem. Meanwhile, of course, we have glimpsed another kind of poem altogether, a fifth kind, a massive complex of images, of the kind that rises into the 'total statements' of epic and drama—the mythic poem of the chariot, the full subjective drama of her fate, that was pushed under, and sank away, and never did get written. Although, in a sense, the effort of this fifth poem to come into existence determined every word of the poem we have, and provided the final three lines by metamorphosing the myth of Phaeton into that of Icarus, it remains unknown. Just as those last three lines, and the final complete perfect form, of 'Sheep in Fog' would have remained unknown if she had died two weeks earlier.

All this, which that final copy conceals, is revealed only because the full sequence of drafts was saved.