Men And Motherhood In Sylvia Plath's "Sow"

Men and Motherhood in

Sylvia Plath's "Sow"

Sylvia Plath lived from 1933 through 1963. She is classified as a confessional poet, meaning she resolves some sort of guilt and uses extreme personality to explain life experiences in dramatic ways.

Joyce Carol Oates comments, "[Her poems] have that exquisite, heart-breaking quality about them that has made Syliva Plath our acknowledged Queen of Sorrows, the spokeswoman for our most private, most helpless nightmares. .. Her poetry is as deathly as it is impeccable; it enchants us almost as powerfully as it must have enchanted her." Sadly, at the age of thirty the writer killed herself with cooking gas.

Plath's poem "Sow" paints a picture of an enormously fat pig. She is caged into a pen where onlookers are able to stare at her. She is not free. She is personified through her act of dreaming of, "The great grandam! -our marvel blazoned a knight, / Helmed, in cuirass, / Unhorsed and shredded in the grove of combat / By a grisly - bristled / Boar, fabulous enough to straddle that sow's heat" (lines 32 - 36). She craves a strong male who can handle her sexual desires. Perhaps the sow's desire for a male figure comes from the author's lack of one as a child. Although she was raised by a very dominant mother, Plath still missed out on the presence of a male role model.

She also speaks of another pig, a mother. She says "Bloat tun of milk / On the move, hedged by a litter of feat-foot ninnies / Shrilling her hulk / To halt for a swig at the pink teats" (lines 21 - 24). Plath makes obvious references to motherhood. She seems to portray it as burdensome. The sow does not show love to her piglets, but allows them to drink her milk out of obligation or instinct.

In this poem, she shows different views of the opposite sex. One male, the farmer, keeps the show pig pent up and hidden away. "God knows how our neighbor managed to breed / His great sow; / Whatever his shrewd secret, he kept it hid" (lines 1 - 3). This person is a dominate male who has control over the sow.

To analyze the presentation of the sow, one must consider how the language of the poem reflects both the neighbor's and the narrator's views without overlooking the effective use of imagery. The children have never before seen the great sow and consider it a mysterious legendary creature. "But one dusk our questions commended us to a tour / Through his lantern-lit / Maze of barns to the lintel of the sunk sty door / To gape at it" (lines 7 - 10). The children feel like they are on an adventure, as they creep through the night to view the great sow.

Plath uses