The Happiest Sylvia Plath Poem

"You're" is a joyful ode to motherhood.

Sylvia Plath’s poetry has been difficult to separate from the low points of her life—her depression, her institutionalization, her abusive marriage to poet Ted Hughes, and finally, and overarchingly, her suicide. Her most famous poems—“Daddy,” “Lady Lazarus”—channel feminine rage and despair, and that has been the lens through which her work is most often discussed.

Many of Plath’s poems do in fact deal with her depression, her anger at Hughes and at her father, and her ambivalence about a life of motherhood, marriage, and childcare. But “many” isn’t “all,” and Plath’s death and the more difficult aspects of her life can eclipse some of her more joyous efforts.

One of these is the poem, “You’re,” written in early 1960 while she was pregnant with her first child, Frieda Hughes.

You’re

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.

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The poem is addressed to the fetus, and it’s a marvel of giddy stream-of-consciousness creation. Plath sets the tone with the first word—“Clownlike”, and then starts to somersault through her own performance, riffing on the fetus’ upside-down posture in the womb (“happiest on your hands,/feet to the stars,”) picking up alliterations and assonances as she tumbles about in the baby’s developmental process (“moon-skulled/Gilled like a fish”) and launching off on almost random leaps of association (“A common-sense/Thumbs-down on the dodo’s mode” is again playing with the baby being upside down, and with the process of gestation functioning as a kind of anti-extinction.) The baby is a spool, a turnip, a little loaf (the “bun in the oven” cliché deployed with insouciant glee), mail, farther off than Australia (picked for the rhyme as much as the distance), an Atlas holding up the world and snug as a bud—since it’s growing into life rather than crawling like an insect.

The poem doesn’t try to fix the baby into any one metaphor or form or meaning. Instead, the poem’s power is in its cheerful wiggles (“A creel of eels”) and jumps (“like a Mexican bean.”) The baby bops through time (“Fourth/of July to All Fool’s Day”) and space (“Farther off than Australia” to right at “home”) as Plath contemplates pickles (that infamous pregnancy craving) and turnips and prawns. Her body may be getting heavier, but her mind is a jittery slalom of trawling owls and ripples, jiggling and flipping and swooping, like a parent dancing with their child.

In poems by men, motherhood and poetry are often presented as in conflict or as opposed modes of creation. Here for example is a poem about motherhood by James Wright:

Mary Bly

I sit here, doing nothing, alone, worn out by long winter.
I feel the light breath of the newborn child.
Her face is smooth as the side of an apricot,
Eyes quick as her blond mother’s hands.
She has full, soft, red hair, and as she lies quiet
In her tall mother’s arms, her delicate hands
Weave back and forth.
I feel the seasons changing beneath me,
Under the floor.
She is braiding the waters of air into the plaited manes
Of happy colts.
They canter, without making a sound, along the shores
Of melting snow.

Wright is lying watching his wife and child. He says he’s “doing nothing,” but in fact he’s creating, turning the daughter into metaphor—apricots, horses cantering across the shores of melting snow. The mother gave birth to the child, but her role is to hold the daughter as Wright weaves the poem; the mother is “tall” she is “blond”, but we learn nothing about her personality or imagination or life. She does not speak; instead, creation (of the fetus) gives way to creation (of the imagination). The mother’s job of bringing the child to term becomes the poet’s job of making meaning.

Wright’s not uniquely sexist or anything; the silent earth mother is a common poetic trope. Wright, as a male poet, was content to rehash it. Plath, on the other hand, struggled with it—as in the poem “Barren Woman”.

Barren Woman

Empty, I echo to the least footfall,
Museum without statues, grand with pillars, porticoes, rotundas.
In my courtyard a fountain leaps and sinks back into itself,
Nun-hearted and blind to the world. Marble lilies
Exhale their pallor like scent.

I imagine myself with a great public,
Mother of a white Nike and several bald-eyed Apollos.
Instead, the dead injure me with attentions, and nothing can happen.
Blank-faced and mum as a nurse.

This poem was written in 1961 after Plath had had a miscarriage. She imagines herself as a “Museum without statues,” and as the mother of classical gods—Nike and Apollo. Her sense of her own sterility is intertwined with her vision of herself as a creator engaged with high culture. She is perhaps saying in part that her (self-perceived) unfitness as a mother has also silenced her as a poet; she is barren both physically and imaginatively. But I think you could also read the poem as suggesting that her calling as a poet, her desire to mother all those Nikes and Apollos, has frozen her as a mother, and vice-versa. If she is “mum as a nurse”, that suggests that nursing mothers are not supposed to speak. After her miscarriage she wonders whether being a professional woman and a poet makes her a barren umother.

Part of what’s so wonderful about “You’re” is that it completely bypasses these kinds of tropes and anxieties about poetry and mothering. Plath, in this poem at least, isn’t worried that mothers can’t be poets. On the contrary, the poem is a celebration of motherhood as poetry, and of poetry as motherhood; the two are intertwined and inextricable. Plath’s poem is about the joy of growing a baby and the joy of making words and about how mothers create a place for children in part through words, which express love and play and connect the child to come to human community, from home to Australia.

In taking back language and poetry for mothers, Plath is careful not to erase language and poetry for children. The last two lines say that the baby is, “Right, like a well-done sum./ A clean slate, with your own face on.” After the dizzying rush of metaphorical transformation, Plath’s final word is that her child (who she thought at the time was a boy, but was not) adds up correctly, whoever she is. The baby is a “clean slate” on which she will draw her own face, and her own words. Claiming a language for mothers is also claiming a language for children. When you recognize that men aren’t the only ones using metaphors, then opportunities open up for a lot of people, upside-down, right-side up, owls, prawns, and all.

I wouldn’t say that the Plath of “You’re”—happy, playful, comfortable with motherhood and with herself—is the real Plath. “The Barren Woman” and “Lady Lazarus” are as much Plath’s poems as “You’re” is; like most people, Plath did, in fact, experience rage and despair, and (unlike most people) she was able to express those in moving and sometimes harrowing poems. “You’re” is just one side of her. But that side is her face, and her voice, too.