"Metaphors" is a short poem written by Sylvia Plath in 1956 while she was pregnant with her first child Frieda. Like a lot of Plath's work, this poem too is in an autobiographical form. She describes her state using nine metaphors signifying the nine months of pregnancy. Plath has a sense of humor about her big pregnant belly but also portrays hesitance towards motherhood and relates to it to loss of individuality. The poet is very truthful about the way she feels about her pregnancy and clearly expresses it without caring about what is morally correct or sugar-coating it. A mother is expected to make her family's life comfortable and give them unconditional love without complaining, Plath contemplates that fulfilling those duties might not be her cup of tea. This poem describes in many ways how a woman actually feels when she is expecting but never admits it because it would be socially inappropriate and she would be branded a terrible mother.

In the first line, the poet call herself "a riddle in nine syllables" (Plath 57 line 1)                                                                                                                                                                        which indicates how puzzled she is with all the changes in her body. She uses the phrase "nine syllables" (Plath 57 line 1) to represent the nine months of pregnancy. Also, the title of the poem as well as the term pregnancy are both nine letters long which indicates that the poet was probably in her last month when she wrote this piece. In the following two lines, Plath calls herself "an elephant", "ponderous house" and "a melon walking on two tendrils" (Plath 57 line 2,3) to refer to her huge belly and pokes fun at herself with sarcastic humor. When we read these metaphors we can imagine the poet waddling around trying to carefully move about balancing her belly on her thin legs because she is now two to three times larger than her normal size and hence is having trouble adjusting to her bodily changes. Here it is pretty evident that the poet does not feel good about herself or her body, she feels quite plum unattractive and clumsy. She expresses a sense of displeasure at her physical state and the fact that she has no control over it what so ever. Plath, then describes the fetus by calling it "red fruit" (Plath 57 line 4) as it is the fruit of her and her husband's love and is made up of blood and flesh and hence is red. She also uses the word "ivory" (Plath 57 line 4) to express her fertility that led to her pregnancy as ivory is believed to increase fertility in some cultures. The phrases "fine timbers" (Plath 57 line 4) represents the part by part development of the fetus that would eventually lead to the poet literally expelling a tiny human out of her body, all the timber would come together to complete the building i.e. the child will be born.  

In the fifth line of the poem Plath uses the phrase "This loaf's big with its yeasty rising" (Plath 57 line 5) to indicate that she is as big as she could get and cannot bare any more increase in her size. After the final rising of bread, the yeast is at its full potential and the bread cannot puff up anymore and the only thing left to do is bake it. Similarly, the poet's baby is not going to grow anymore in size and she should soon give birth to it. In the following line she refers to herself as a "fat purse" (Plath 57 line 6) and her unborn baby as newly minted money by using the phrase "Money's new-minted" (Plath 57 line 6) as the baby is of great value to her and is going to be new to this world. She confesses her love for her child although she feels unimportant because she is just the "purse" and probably has lower value than the baby. This feeling becomes more prominent as Plath calls herself "a means" (Plath 57 line 7). She says that her body is no longer her own, she has no control over it, her will is no longer important. Her body has been repurposed too suit the baby's needs. She then calls herself a "stage" (Plath 57 line 7) that is constantly being changed and set for the final performance, or birth. The use of the idiom "in calf" (Plath 57 line 7) is again to tell us that she is pregnant or a far-fetched reference can be the poet's swollen ankles dues to carrying the extra weight for so long. Trying to portray her state even more clearly, the poet say that she has "eaten a bag of green apples" (Plath 57 line 8) to express how pudgy she feels. Also, it could also quite possibly mean that she is trying to say that she is being punished for her desire in reference to the "Adam and Eve" story where they too are punished for their desire to eat the apple because it is specifically mentioned "green apples" which are significantly sour and might not taste that pleasant. Likewise, the sourness of the apples could also attribute to one falling sick if they ate a little too much food, much like the poet's morning sickness. Finally, Plath ends the poet by saying "boarded the train there's no getting off" (Plath 57 line 9) which basically means that she had made a decision she is now stuck with or somewhat regrets because she has realized with time that this decision she has made would interfere with her individuality and ambitions.

 Even though the poem starts in a seemingly funny manner with quite a few the witty comparisons to convey the hardships of pregnancy, it actually expresses all the deep rooted regrets and fears of motherhood. Sylvia Plath was a young woman who had high hopes for her career as a writer. She felt that motherhood could vastly affect her literary career and that too not in a good way, which it did. After becoming a mother, Plath found herself taking care of her children and doing all the motherly and housewifely duties that society put onto her shoulders which left her with very little time to give to her writings. This issue of loss of individuality due to alleged duties of a woman was not only experienced by Plath but by a lot women in the 1950s and 1960s as they struggled to gain importance for themselves outside the household responsibilities. Plath's struggle to harness her creative powers during the overwhelming isolation and monotony of motherhood revealed itself in "Metaphors" even before she gave birth, and she continued to explore this theme throughout the rest of her somewhat short but still meaningful life.

