There were a couple of shout-outs to JRRT, and they both made my eyebrows crinkle (not to mention what was spewed out in the afterword, and the spelling thereof). Ariel by Sylvia Plath is a book of poems dominated by the idea of death, suicide and sadness, which, unfortunately, seems to be what you would imagine was on Plath's mind at the time, as she soon ended her time on this earth (hopefully an ending she did not regret). In Maria Tatar's The Annotated Classic Fairy Tales, the transformation of the little mermaid from sea creature to mermaid in human form, and then to a creature of the air, is believed to reflect Andersen's constant engagement with mutability and changes in identity.

He said that his mother worked a few hours away by car; why not leave some kind of message at the house - just in case his brother wasn't the one who killed the girl, and hasn't been killed himself - and set off toward where she would have been, even if it was a few hours' walk, or a day's, or more? As a DJ he has played clubs, conventions, parties, Burning Man, and sporting events, and produces two of the world’s most popular music podcasts: Podrunner and Groovelectric. On the way to New York, they meet a small boy sent on a quest to kill a dragon by his foolish father, and that part of the story is fine; the boy is charming and the working out of the physics of how dragons can both fly and breathe fire is well done. Some of the other pomes have been printed here and there, some have been recorded, some exist only in manuscript. Crossing the Water' was first published in 1971; fellow poet Peter Porter wrote Crossing the Water is full of perfectly realised works.That purpose is quixotic, perhaps--it's no accident that the book he's reading to Ariel while on the road is Cervantes' Don Quixote--but it's of a piece with the rest of the post-Change world. Rictor Norton, in My Dear Boy: Gay Love Letters through the Centuries, theorizes that The Little Mermaid was written as a love letter by Hans Christian Andersen to Edvard Collin. and sanitation doesn't seem to have cost lives; the moment the Change hit the air and water cleared of all pollution, with an improbable immediacy - although Boyett never says if it's a self-cleaning system, as in whether it would matter if a clutch of survivors used a river as their latrine. Set in current times after "the change" (when virtually all but the most primitive technology stops working and magical creatures start showing up), Ariel features a dull and wimpy main character who teams up with a talking unicorn to battle an evil necromancer.

They have traveled alone together for going on two years, and when a girl joins them - because she is irresistibly drawn to the unicorn, though not a virgin - Ariel puts two and two together: 20-year-old male, 20-something girl, alone. Poppies are associated with violence and with the malignant blood cells of hemophilia, the Medusa head with the reality of death, bees with the life of the soul after death. Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. a couple of light marks to the front cover of 'selected poems') The posthumous publication of 'Ariel' in 1965 precipitated Plath's rise to fame.

L. Travers, author of Mary Poppins and noted folklore commentator, wrote, "a year taken off when a child behaves; a tear shed and a day added whenever a child is naughty? Because Pete and Ariel can walk for days, on or off roads, and never meet anyone, and when they do it's nearly always just a handful of people.