Not all of Sylvia Plath's poems are this light-hearted—but then, perhaps even "Metaphors," after examination, has its darker side.

The controlling idea here, though, is playful.  The poem is a riddle, like a child's game—perhaps an appropriate premise given the solution to this particular riddle.  Poetry is often clever, creative and playful in its use of language—but don't assume that all poems are riddles waiting to be solved.  They generally don't work that way—although the idea is tantalizing to students who feel a bit out of touch with poetry, or find the concept of poetry mysterious and arcane.

Part of the difficulty of poetry is that it is a literature that is heavily compressed.  That means that the language, the forms, the words themselves, even something as small and seemingly insignificant as a comma, or the spaces between words, might be working much more intensely than the reader is used to in prose.

Poetry is also a kind of literature that is often very stylized.  Sometimes poetry is organized by rhyme, like the following ABCB sequence:

Roses are red,

Violets are blue

This poetry rhymes

Which is more than you do.

or a pattern of alliterative (repeated consonants) beats like Old English verse of poetry like Beowulf:

In the darkest dawn    The blundering butcher

Fell in a frenzy       on the shy sheep

(That's not actually Beowulf, sheep out there will be glad to note, but it works on the same principles)

Sometimes poems have particular metric patterns (a rhythm of stressed and unstressed syllables) that build a kind of musical quality that varies according to the kinds of meters used.  This, for example is a limerick built predominantly in anapests (unstressed, unstressed, stressed units—uu/).  According to the tradition, this one is a little coarse (apologies) and tries to be humorous—if politically incorrect.    Limericks also sometimes torture language a little—which is what I've done in the creative mispronunciation of my name:

There once was a teacher named Murly

Whose students were awfully surly

He failed all their asses

When they came to classes

Except for the cleverest girly

Plath's poem has its own organizational principle—and reveals it in the first line which is also a clue to the riddle, "I'm a riddle in nine syllables."  The riddle element is important in interpreting this poem, and  the "nine syllables" tells us how the poet has decided to constrain her language (by making all of the lines of the poem conform to the nine-syllable pattern).  Since this is compressed literature it also offers the first clue in what the poet is describing—why is the number nine important?

That becomes evident as the metaphors begin to pile up in line after line (nine, of course, in all).  It turns out that the poem is literally pregnant with meaning—for Plath is writing about pregnancy after all.

Let's talk about figures of speech for a second.  There are a variety of different rhetorical strategies that are common in poetry.  Some of those strategies, or figures of speech come under the broad heading of metonymy—which is a family or group of language tropes describing the substitutions of one thing for another.  My love is like a red, red rose, is an example of metonymy, this particular substitution is a simile: a comparison of unlike objects using "like" or "as." Synecdoche is another kind of metonymy, a figure of speech this time substituting a part of a thing to define the whole of the thing.  The "crown of England" describes the Queen or the royal family, but identifies them only by the crown—the symbol of royal status.  Metaphor is a similar mechanism to simile, but it doesn't use "like" or "as" to build its comparison.  So, when Shakespeare says "all the world's a stage" he's substituting some of the qualities of the theatre to describe some of the qualities of life.  Some poetry is built almost entirely around the association/ substitution of disparate things (Haiku, for example normally describes one thing/state/experience in one line, and a related thing/state/experience in the remaining two.  The unexpectedness of the comparison or substitution is what creates the intellectual and creative spark of the poem.  The frisson of discovery/vision is what makes the experience pleasurable and intense for the reader/poet.

From Plath's title we are pretty clear that "Metaphors" are going to be important in her poem, and she doesn't disappoint.  The early metaphors focus on the ungainly weight gain.  The narrator is "an elephant" ponderously walking, supporting its awkward bulk like the ripening fruit of the melon on "fine tendrils" or slender stalks.  Along with the ungainly size of the narrator there is the sense that she is now a dwelling-place—a "ponderous house" supported certainly by "fine timbers," but now fraught with the knowledge that someone or something has take up residence within her.

While the next line takes up the theme of swelling growth using the image of bread rising with the action of yeast, it's not long before the poem's images, its metaphors of pregnancy begin to take a potentially sinister turn.   Whether it's the discomfort of eating green apples or the loss of control of the boarded train, the pregnancy metaphors seem to overwhelm the experience of the individual in this poem, who discovers too late that she is something of a bit-player in the drama of her own pregnancy.  Beyond the general cleverness of the poem, what do you think is the underlying purpose or reason for writing it?