‘Metaphors’ by Sylvia Plath
:
A Review of A Riddle
I'm a riddle in nine syllables,
An elephant, a ponderous house,
A melon strolling on two tendrils.
O red fruit, ivory, fine timbers!
This loaf's big with its yeasty rising.
Money's new-minted in this fat purse.
I'm a means, a stage, a cow in calf.
I've eaten a bag of green apples,
Boarded the train there's no getting off.
Before trying to analyze the poem ‘Metaphors’, a little knowledge of its poet Sylvia Plath’s background will help placing it in its proper perspective. Plath, an American poet, novelist and short story writer was known best for her poetry. Born on October 27, 1932, she committed suicide on February 11, 1963, having first attempted it on August 24, 1953. She was diagnosed as a severe case of Bipolar Disorder- mania and depression- and had been incarcerated in a mental institution for treatment, which in those days meant electro-shock therapy.
Plath has been credited with advancing the genre of confessional poetry initiated by Robert Lowell and W. D. Snodgrass, as well as her contemporary Anne Sexton, who, in an unusual coincidence, was also a case of Bipolar Disorder. On that hypothesis, I perceive a sense of depression in her works, which she then disguises by swinging to the positive, a finite bipolar trend She wrote Metaphors in 1959, three years after her marriage in 1956. Her biographer was emphatic when he said that wedlock was not a happy experience for her, exacerbated by her husband’s extramarital affair. At the time of writing this poem, she was pregnant with her first child, a girl and would have gone through the numerous physical and mental rigors mothers-to-be have to unfortunately undergo. I believe her sense of desertion comes across stronger than her joy of motherhood, expressed in this poem as ‘I'm a means, a stage’, the resignation quite clear.
What is fascinating about this poem is that it is one extended metaphor. It relates in its totality to her pregnancy and the period that gestation takes. There are many unusual aspects to the poem. It starts with the title, a nine-letter word. In my opinion, the first line, ‘I’m a riddle in nine syllables’, sets the context of the poem, the key word being ‘riddle’, with its connotation of the co-existence of the ambiguous within one ambit, as also the antithetic or the ambivalent. Every individual who has reviewed the poem states that it is an obvious reference to her difficult nine months of child carrying, setting the scene for a conundrum of sorts. Apart from its proclivity to the allegory, it is nine sentences long and every single sentence has nine syllables. As Steinberg says in his recent book on her, Great Writers Series- Sylvia Plath, ” Each sentence has its own metaphor(s), some simple like ‘a cow in calf,’ some mixed like ‘O red fruit, ivory, fine timbers!” Moreover, the confessional trend is also clearly evident.
The tone is mixed, between ecstasy as expressed in the earlier metaphor and dejection, ‘Boarded the train there's no getting off’. It is a clear indication of the state of mind of the poet-Bipolar. Her disambiguity at her unfashionable bloated shape is reflected in an ‘elephant’, diluted next sentence as ‘a melon on two tendrils’, the womb above the ovaries and Fallopian tubes. Here is where I disagree with Wood, author of ‘Reflections on "Mirror" and "Metaphors" by Sylvia Plath’ who likens the metaphor to her reflection in a mirror, her belly the melon and her spindly legs the two tendrils, because it is the next sentence- O red fruit, ivory, fine timbers!- that is the central point of her rarely quoted happiness at becoming a mother. The red fruit is the embryo, which would first appear in this world as a pink baby. ‘Ivory and fine timbers’ symbolize both the color and value of her first-born.
‘This loaf’s big with its yeasty rising’, hardly requires explanation as it refers to her bulging as her pregnancy progresses, a simple statement of fact and among the few uncomplicated metaphors. I see a distant yet plausible comparison between yeast and an impregnated ovum, although I have yet not come across this link anywhere. Her high starts to droop after the comparison to newly minted coins, as she dissociates herself from the joyous pain of delivery calling herself a point of transit, onboard a vehicle she has no control over, a line that exemplifies the riddle, which allows a fair degree of poetic license.
Riddles are simple puzzles in the normal context. But, in the poetic sense, I would like to quote Hamnett, who, in ‘Ambiguity, Classification And Change: The Function Of Riddles’ avers that “Riddles are one form of ambiguity or ambivalence that can be understood in the light of the social and cognitive function of ambiguous or ambivalent utterances, concepts and actions. These can mediate between sets that are not only different, but in many aspects opposed, and in this way, form the basis for a differing system of classification, or allow contrasting classifications and conceptual frameworks to co-exist at the same time.” Classic examples are the works of Lewis Carroll in the Alice series and Enigma in Dante’s Eden.