The poem Metaphors written by Sylvia Path, has a lot of visual imagery involving pregnancy. This would suggest that the poem has themes about how women perceive their role in the world and how the world perceives a woman role, in other words the theme of identity. Sylvia Path grew up in the 20th century so her writing is talking about not just the role of the women in the world but the role of women in modern society. The tone of the poem starts mysterious, then rolls into constant visual imagery no tone just listing different symbols, and then ends with a shaky, nervous tone. From her ideas of imagery, and tone, Path is inferring that even in a modern society, the role of women is not how it should be and needs to be improved.

Sylvia Plath is known as a "post-world war II American Confessional poet" (Carolina Reader 56) meaning that she was writing during the late 1940s and throughout the 1950s. This is important because during the 1950s America was very traditional. The stereotypes of the 1950s are a dad coming to his suburban home from work and walking through his white picket fence with the mom cooking dinner, and the kids playing outside with the dog. Families would go to church every week and that life style was very simple and traditional. Sylvia Plath did not like the role of women during that time period and that is what her poem Metaphors is about: how bad it is to have your life already predetermined for you as a woman. She became so sick of that lifestyle that in 1963 at the age of thirty she committed suicide. This is very tragic because right around the mid to late 1960s America was changing from the traditional era to more revolutionary era and all Path wanted was change.

The first line of the poem is, "I'm a riddle in nine syllables" (Plath 57) and right there, Path is already making readers think about what the riddle. The first pregnancy imagery is used in that line with the number nine referring to the length of time a woman is pregnant and it is the number of lines the poem is in length. No one knows who or what the riddle is at least not after reading the first line. The next line talks about an elephant in a house. Seeing an elephant in a house would seem difficult for it to move around. This is a metaphor for a pregnant and Path is saying that being pregnant is uncomfortable for women because of how they look. She makes that line sound awkward as if to use the phrase, "there's an elephant in the room." 

The third line talks about "a melon strolling on two tendrils" (plath 57). Again, Path uses a metaphor to represent a pregnant woman only this time she personifies the melon saying that it is strolling making pregnancy a little more fun, but still very cautious and uncomfortable. Another metaphor she uses in a later line is a loaf of bread described with a yeasty rising. Much like the elephant line she uses this line to represent the phrase, "a bun in the oven" which is another phrase describing pregnancy. She says the loaf is big which supports her previous notions that pregnancy is very difficult and hard to handle. 

When she says, "money new minted in a fat purse" (Plath 57) the fat purse represents a mother's womb and the new minted money represents new life. She is also inferring how expensive it is to raise a child. The following line the narrator calls herself, "a means, a stage, a cow in calf." The stage is used to symbolize her being paraded around like a trophy wife and the cow in calf, (which is yet another metaphor for pregnancy) represents her being used. Much like a cow is used for milk, meat, and to reproduce, Silva connects that with a woman being used just to bear children because that is her 'role' and how society has labeled her as an asset and not a human being.

After all those lines of representing metaphors of pregnancy, the poem takes a different turn in the last two lines. Silva says she is, "eating a bag of green apples" (Plath 57). Green apples are very tart and eating a whole bag of green apples would cause an upset stomach. The green apples represent how anxious and nervous the author feels about being pregnant. That theme was used earlier in the poem with all of those other metaphors, but the difference between this line and the previous lines is that this is the first line where she is clearly nervous about being pregnant and becoming a mother to the point where she is nearly sick. In all of the previous lines most readers would have to keep rereading to understand how the author was feeling but the first time the audience looked at this line, it became clear that she was uncertain about her pregnancy. Her tone in that line gives readers a clear sense of what she is truly feeling at that point in the poem.

The last line talks about her boarding a train with no getting off. Her tone in this last line is despair because she has realized that once you get pregnant there's no turning back. She realizes now that her role in life is set as a mother and there's nothing she can do to change that. She feels despair because she knows that now her freedom to do what she wants is gone and she is trapped in the life that is expected of her rather than the life she wants. 

 In conclusion, Path is reaching out to readers in this poem and trying to tell them to do what you want to do, not what others want you to do. Her use of a despairing tone and a repetition of different images is a warning to say that if you don't live your life the way you want to then you won't be happy. She is saying that this happened to her and to not let it happen to you. Establish your own identity. She wants us all to keep in mind, especially to women, to not be defined by the role society puts on you but by the role you put on yourself. 

