Let's start with grammatical and logical relations among the words. The poem is punctuated as six sentences, if we count the exclamatory fragment as a sentence. Three of the sentences have first-person singular pronouns (I), two with copulas (am) plus complements and one with coordinate transitive verbs (eaten and boarded) with their accompanying objects. The exclamatory sentence fragment adds three rather obscure adjectival complements. The poem has ten parallel, mostly coordinate, nouns renaming the speaker, such as "elephant," "house," "melon," "loaf," and so on.
Logically, the poem begins with an assertion by the speaker that she's a riddle. It continues with a series of figurative reifications that the riddling woman applies to herself. The poem ends with a compound assertion, a non sequitur that implies the speaker's pain and helplessness. The last line, half of this compound assertion, expresses the speaker's somewhat angry resignation to her unhappy condition, implying she would like to "get off" this train, whatever that is. Looking at the grammatical and logical structures does not get us very far. Something else is happening in this poem and that “happening” asks the reader to perceive the words differently. Obviously, we’re not reading informational prose or kitsch. It asks the reader to see the similarities among the letters, syllables, metaphors, and connotations in these nine lines.
The first line, "I am a riddle in nine syllables," provides a couple clues. The "I" of the poem, the speaker, IS the riddle's answer. Is that answer Plath herself or a fictional persona or a combination of the two? The first line also tells us that the solution is in nine syllables, so we'll need to somehow relate the poet to the unknown nine syllables, which we’ll also have to unearth. Doesn't sound as if that will lead to interpreting the poem. But it will. If we’re going to make sense out of this poem, we must do it by pattern-seeking, not by grammatical or logical analysis.
The second line offers two images of the speaker and they enliven each other—the elephant and the house are ponderous, but that doesn't help much. Count the syllables in line two. Nine! That helps. Go back to line one; count; it too has nine syllables. Every line in the poem has nine syllables.
Oh Oh, look! The poem has nine lines. The title, "Metaphors," has nine letters. But how do the images in lines two through eight interinanimate each other? The same way the elephant and the house do: the images are all variations on the speaker's body-image. She says it herself: “I am this. I am that.” If we haven't found the relationship among the images by line eight, we are given it explicitly—I am "a cow in calf." Not being a farm boy, I didn’t know how this last image fit the emerging pattern until I looked up “in calf.” Here’s an explanation: "6. in calf, (of a cow or other animal having calves) pregnant," ("calf"). The elephant, the house, the melon, the ripe fruit, the bread rising, the purse bulging with coins—all are metaphors. The images in lines two through eight coalesce to become the speaker’s body-image, her sense of herself as a pregnant woman.
How many letters in "pregnancy"? Nine! Wouldn't you know! Maybe that word's the solution to the riddle. But she told us the answer to the riddle is "in nine syllables," not letters. Let's see . . . "Sylvia is a pregnant woman." Nine syllables. We did it. That’s one of many possible nine-syllable sentences that would solve the riddle. But this one fits the details nicely, and it brings Sylvia into this seemingly impersonal cry of pain.
But.
These images have something else in common and that is their connotations. We will treat connotations further in Chapter 7, but for now it is enough to know that the term refers to the implied attitude of the speaker toward what he or she is talking about. The connotations are the feeling tones of a word that change as the word’s contexts change. Plath’s image-words serve as the context for each other and cumulatively their connotations imply that the speaker is unhappy about being pregnant. The words “I am a cow in calf” express a traditionally pejorative view of women, a view that Plath also expresses in “Morning Song,” calling her pregnant self “cow heavy and floral.” That poem is brilliant but emotionally devastating. In “Metaphors,” the speaker sees herself as grotesque and doomed. She is on a train going where she does not want to go—into motherhood.
The brilliant literary critic and scholar Helen Vendler says of this poem:
Only the last line is grim enough to wake a reader’s response. The rest is pure silliness. Still, in sympathy one wants to say that the aridity of the intellect in dealing with life, and its pure insufficiency to metabolic processes, is enough to send anyone around the bend in this particular fashion, to turn a woman into a talking melon.
(Part of Nature, Part of Us Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1980. 273).
I wouldn’t dismiss the first eight lines as “pure silliness” and I don’t wait till the last line of this poem to “wake up.” Of course, the riddling intellect is impersonal, but for a woman experiencing an unwanted pregnancy I can’t imagine feelings more personal and threatening. Plath’s “Metaphors” is a deep-sea exploration of this dark, pressured world, as if in the bathyscaphe of her intellect. You cannot always identify a poet with the speaker of her poem, but in this case the unfortunate facts are that in 1963, at age 30, Sylvia Plath asphyxiated herself using gas from the kitchen oven while her two toddlers slept in a nearby room. And then sometimes, as we all know, words fail.
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