You’re

     The poem “You’re”, written by Slyvia Plath, is seemingly titled to address an unborn child, the embryo. The poem depicts the pregnancy and anticipation of the child’s birth.  The poem is rather short. With two stanzas and nine lines, it is as though each line represents different months in the pregnancy. Sylvia Plath’s writing style in this poem is in the form of a continuous simile, a series of metaphors telling the story through vivid images. I felt that this poem is intensely personal, mainly cause it was written about her first pregnancy, based on her own experience. Perhaps this helped her to tell it in great detail and depth, allowing the reader to visualize and understand the experience.

     Throughout the poem, certain use of language reflects on typical pregnancies. The line “of July to All Fool’s Day” in stanza one for example signifies the course of nine months, an ordinary pregnancy period.  All Fool’s Day is in April. Also, certain use of language indicates that it is about a baby still in the womb. “Feet to the stars” for example, represents the embryo’s position, curled up with its feet upwards. “Moon-skulled” is presumably a way to describe the shape of the foetus ‘s head. “Wrapped up in yourself like a spool” refers to the curling position. The baby is “mute” inside her womb and “trawls” in her darkness – is dragged along following her every move without a choice because it is inside of her.

Join now!

      The poet makes use literary devices such as assonance, the repetition in vowel sounds when mentioning “a creel of eels” in line six of stanza two. Upon closer observation, it is noticeable that the poet uses “snug as a bud” instead of the original “snug as a bug”. This could be due to the word “jug” at the end of the sentence in the line below. If the word “bug” had not been altered, there would have been internal rhyming.

     In this poem, it is notable that the poet often uses food. This might ...

This is a preview of the whole essay