It's Poetry Week!

During Sylvia Plath’s first pregnancy, she described the child in her uterus to have “feet to the stars, and moon-skulled […] Snug as a bud and at home like a sprat in a pickle jug.” With that beautifully-handled language, it’s impossible not to visualise her unborn child floating upside down in the dark. It’s also impossible to miss the affection of her mother.

The poem, called “You’re,” is probably the most superb list of similes and metaphors that has ever existed.

You’re

By Sylvia Plath

Clownlike, happiest on your hands,
Feet to the stars, and moon-skulled,
Gilled like a fish. A common-sense
Thumbs-down on the dodo’s mode.
Wrapped up in yourself like a spool,
Trawling your dark as owls do.
Mute as a turnip from the Fourth
Of July to All Fools’ Day,
O high-riser, my little loaf.

Vague as fog and looked for like mail.
Farther off than Australia.
Bent-backed Atlas, our traveled prawn.
Snug as a bud and at home
Like a sprat in a pickle jug.
A creel of eels, all ripples.
Jumpy as a Mexican bean.
Right, like a well-done sum.
A clean slate, with your own face on.

Most women experience childbirth—86% of us, actually—but Plath managed to make us experience it as though for the first time. We have anxiety. We have fear. We have love. We have a sense of distance, and all those emotions are perfectly captured in their own little image. She speaks about new life by contrasting it against something deader than dead: The dodo. When she does use a cliché (bun in the oven) she reinvents it to turn it into something wholly original (my little loaf). The poem is powerful for its originality and precision.

These metaphors and similes are bigger than they seem on the page. If you examine each one in more depth, they’ll tell you things about motherhood you didn’t see on your first read. You might think of the spool as a wrapped-up fetus, but it has a double meaning. Babies are wrapped up in themselves in a less literal way. Babies do not wait for a convenient time to cry.

“A clean slate with your own face on” speaks of a mother’s influence on the child after birth. The mention of Mexican beans might speak of babies' jumpy tendencies, but it also injects a sense of joy into the poem. Every simile is working hard for its place. It’s doing double or triple the work it needs to, and that’s how poems become immortal—by giving us something new to think about every time we read them.

This week, we’re talking about poetry. What is a poem? Well, “You’re” gives you one important element of poetry: Imagery. Tomorrow we’re going to use this poem to inspire our own, but for now, I want you to start thinking of similes for your writing. Choose a theme you have personal experience with. Hopefully, you’ll be close enough to the topic to observe your own feelings. And if you can observe them, you can write them with precision.