Sunday Pages: "Metaphors"

A poem by Sylvia Plath

Dear Reader,

Today is Mother’s Day, the second Sunday in May, a day devoted to brunches and flowers and homage paid to the women who gave us life. It wasn’t always thus. Hallmark has, as Hallmark will, corporatized, monetized, and sanitized a holiday born in blood.

In last night’s “Letters to an American,” the historian Heather Cox Richardson explains how “Mothers’ Day,” in the plural and not the singular form, began in the wake of war. For the writer and reformer Julia Ward Howe, Richardson explains,

the Civil War had been traumatic, but that it led to emancipation might justify its terrible bloodshed. The outbreak of the Franco-Prussian War in 1870 was another story. She remembered:

“I was visited by a sudden feeling of the cruel and unnecessary character of the contest. It seemed to me a return to barbarism, the issue having been one which might easily have been settled without bloodshed. The question forced itself upon me, ‘Why do not the mothers of mankind interfere in these matters, to prevent the waste of that human life of which they alone know and bear the cost?’”

Howe had a new vision, she said, of “the august dignity of motherhood and its terrible responsibilities.” She sat down immediately and wrote an “Appeal to Womanhood Throughout the World.” Men always had and always would decide questions by resorting to “mutual murder,” she wrote, but women did not have to accept “proceedings which fill the globe with grief and horror.” Mothers could command their sons, “who owe their life to her suffering,” to stop the madness.

"Arise, women!” Howe commanded. “Say firmly: ‘We will not have great questions decided by irrelevant agencies. Our husbands shall not come to us, reeking with carnage, for caresses and applause. Our sons shall not be taken from us to unlearn all that we have been able to teach them of charity, mercy and patience. We, women of one country, will be too tender of those of another country, to allow our sons to be trained to injure theirs.’”

The conflict between France and Germany, which ended in 1871, served no discernible purpose. When it was over, the former nation had to pay vast sums of gold to the latter, crippling its economy, and also turn over its province of Alsace-Lorraine to the victors; absent these draconian peace terms, perhaps France would not have insisted on similarly onerous German reparations after the First World War, and the Second might have been averted. It was a vicious cycle of violence, plunder, carnage, and mass death that Western Europe only escaped after 1945 because of the strength of NATO and the Pax Americana that Trump and his traitorous allies want to blow up.

I have thought a lot about motherhood since the Dobbs decision made it a requirement rather than a decision in too many states. Its “terrible responsibilities” are not something the government should foist on unwilling women—but that’s the future the GOP, led by misogynist men on the outside (the adjudicated rapist at the top of the ticket) and on the inside (Leonard Leo and his cabal of weirdos), will birth in a second Trump term. These are men—and also women, such as Alabama Senator Katie Britt—who hate women. To wit: What will Don Junior, Eric, and Ivanka do today? Visit their mom’s final resting place on the front nine of that ugly golf course?

Abbyism left a comment on my “Blastocysts Are People, Too!” piece that has stuck with me: “Pregnancy, childbirth, and parenting,” she wrote, “are unimaginably (for those who haven’t experienced it, including ALL MEN) life-changing, painful, and if chosen, glorious. Men cannot begin to imagine what it is like to be pregnant and give birth.”

That glory is what we honor on Mother’s Day—that and the hope, the “august dignity,” the pride, the pleasure. But I cannot begin to imagine what other, less sunshiny feelings are contained in the emotional cocktail of pregnancy and childbirth: vulnerability, loneliness, physical agony, and what has to be no small amount of terror. For starters, death in childbirth is a rare but real possibility. Until the late 1930s, the maternal mortality rate hovered between four and five percent. For another, any number of physical problems might occur during childbirth, ranging from inconvenient to horrifying. There’s constant worry over the health and wellbeing of the baby—a worry that does not go away, but merely changes form, for the rest of the newborn’s life. And if that wasn’t enough, there is the post-partum depression that is so common in the sleepless months after. (This doesn’t take into account the potential loss of career opportunity that often comes with maternity leave.)

Sylvia Plath’s first child, her daughter Frieda, was born in 1960—the same year her collection The Colossus and Other Poems was published, two years before her son Nicholas was born, and three years before her death. Richard Ellmann and Robert O’Clair had this to say about her, in the Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry (1973):

Sylvia Plath’s first years were years of solid bourgeois success: she did all the things and won all the prizes that a young American woman was meant to. Yet ticking within her was the inevitability, as it seems to us now, of her great tragic poems and her self-inflicted death. Sylvia Plath’s poetry is a document of extremity. Her sensibility is inordinate, but so is her ability to express it. The result is a holy scream, a splendid agony—beyond sex, beyond delicacy, beyond all but art.

In the years since, she has become the poster child for suicidal poetical genius, the feminist avatar of what her estranged husband Ted Hughes derisively called “the Plath Fantasia.” Sylvia Plath is the suffering artist. Which is what happens when you write lines like this:

Dying
Is an art, like everything else.
I do it exceptionally well.

Strip away the glamorized despair and the “solid bourgeois success,” and what remains is mental illness: clinical depression so severe as to be unendurable.

The collection published in 1960 contains a short poem called “Metaphors.” It always struck me as playful, fun—most un-Plath-like. The title of the poem has nine letters. The poem itself has nine lines. Each of the lines contains, as she tells us right up front, nine beats:

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.

Plath packs the seven lines in the middle of the poem with metaphors for pregnancy, all of them visual: elephant, melon, loaf, cow. By the seventh line—“I’m a means…”—which is the start of the third trimester, there begins a shift from how she looks to how she feels. The last line indicates a sudden awareness of loss of control. She is no longer strolling on tendrils. She’s riding a locomotive now, a runaway freight train. There’s nothing she can do but hold on for dear life. It’s almost like she’s saying, “Oh, shit, here we go.”

Plath famously suffered from severe depression. In 1953, when she was 20, she swallowed a handful of her mother’s sleeping pills and crawled under the porch, like a dying cat—the first known attempt to take her life. (“And like the cat,” she wrote in “Lady Lazarus,” “I have nine times to die.”) There is some controversy about the role Hughes played in her 1963 death; certainly it isn’t a good look when both of the loves of your life commit suicide in the same way. He blamed her death on her new doctor, for prescribing meds that she’d previously reacted badly to. But it’s fair to wonder what role, if any, post-partum depression played in her despairing mental state.

This was the situation: Hughes had left her for his friend’s wife Assia Wevill; Plath was in England, an ocean away from her native Massachusetts, alone with two small children; it was the coldest winter in decades; the kids were sick all the time, which meant she wasn’t sleeping; the pipes froze; there was no telephone. It was objectively miserable, even to someone not clinically depressed.

I mention all this not to bring everyone down before brunch, but to convey how hard being a mother can be: how lonely, how exhausting, how thankless. I’m well acquainted with the challenges of parenthood, but as a father, even one much more present and active in the raising of my kids than dads of yore, I cannot, as Abbyism correctly points out, even begin to imagine what it is like being a mother: the act of giving birth as well as the “terrible responsibilities” that come with the territory. My role in pregnancy and childbirth was quick and incidental. I could only stand idly by and marvel at motherly power and strength.

As Ward reminds me, I owe my life to my mother’s suffering, just as my kids owe theirs to my wife’s. There is no greater gift. Brunch and flowers seem insufficient compensation. But for today, they will have to suffice.

Whatever role Hughes might have played in Plath’s death, he picked a beautiful and apt quote to put on her tombstone—one that seems appropriate to today’s occasion: “Even amidst fierce flames, the golden lotus can be planted.”

Happy Mother’s Day!

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Our guest on The Five 8 was Shireen Mitchell:

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Photo credit: Wikipedia, JPRW. Plath’s grave.