Of Jesse’s lineage coming, as those of old have sung.

It came, a floweret bright, amid the cold of winter,

When half spent was the night …

This Flower, whose fragrance tender with sweetness fills the air,

Dispels with glorious splendor the darkness everywhere …

Bring us at length we pray, to the bright courts of heaven,

And to the endless day.

Bring us we pray, Sylvia thinks, to spring, rolling the typed sheet off the platen, rescuing it from Nicky’s quick hands. She aligns another sheet of paper in her Olivetti and types a new title page for the manuscript. The inscription she types reads “For Frieda and Nicholas,” but the title is for herself only: Ariel. Her new book will not be The Rabbit Catcher, not Daddy, not The Rival. It is not for him, not for them—it is solely for herself, her words true in a slipstream of memory, desire, and flaw. True to herself. To keep faithful to that understanding, pure as this accreting sanction of snow: Ariel.

She reads her new pages over, held up and away from clutching Nicholas, struggling to focus beyond him as he bounces in her lap. She reads through the titles of her forty-one poems, their order as familiar and automatic as her every breath, until she gets to “The Swarm.” What is it about this poem that alerts her disease? She has caught the allegorical cycles of fruition and decay, has limned her satiric resistance to a single truth, a violent will to control. Yet something about it gnaws at her. She marks it with parentheses and leaves it, feeling queer, where it is.

And Ted is driving with his plunder, his progress tectonic in the lumbering van, the snow catching up to him early, blowing him back as he crawls up the arduous A30, the A303, the A30 again. He will drive day into night through snow, arriving, bone weary and cramped and cold, to dump his pirated goods in the chill corners of his eremitic room, to fall into bed at Montagu Square, not noticing the contents of the parcel brought to the empty flat in his absence, left unwrapped, squared in the center of the borrowed table he uses as a desk so that it would be the first thing he would see.