Graveyards and the Afterlife

Barren Woman - Sylvia Plath

Empty, I echo to the least footfall,

Museum without statues, grand with pillars, porticoes, rotundas.

In my courtyard a fountain leaps and sinks back into itself,

Nun-hearted and blind to the world. Marble lilies

Exhale their pallor like scent.

I imagine myself with a great public,

Mother of a white Nike and several bald-eyed Apollos.

Instead, the dead injure me with attentions, and nothing can happen.

The moon lays her hand on my forehead,

Blank-faced and mum as a nurse.

As the title suggests, Plath’s poem tells the story of a woman unable to bear children. The poem is not autobiographical--Plath had two children over the course of her life--but the story can easily be imagined and related to by any woman living in a society that puts so much importance on being able to have children. Plath criticizes this societal importance by comparing her own body to an ancient, abandoned empire, as well as comparing the dream of having children with holding court at Mount Olympus.

The poem’s first word is “empty”, which tells one everything one needs to know from the start. Besides that, the action of the “echo” also conveys a large, cavernous emptiness. “Grand with pillars, porticoes, rotundas” shows the complexity and beauty of the narrator’s body, but the fact that it comes after “museum without statues” shows that it does not matter when it cannot produce another body. “Nun-hearted and blind to the world” is another, very descriptive phrase: nuns, of course, cannot marry or bear children as a part of the vow they take, and are blind to the world as a result of the surroundings they live in, and to say this of her body shows a bitter, unwilling chastity. The most descriptive imagery in the first stanza, however, is the fountain that “leaps and sinks back into itself”. As a healthy woman, the narrator has all of the requirements needed to bear a child, but the requirements do not work in the way that they do most of the time. Thus, no water comes out of the fountain, and no child comes from the woman. Furthermore, the fountain exists only for aesthetic purposes, and some may think the same of the narrator.

Then, in the second stanza, the narrator imagines herself in the company of gods and goddesses. Nike is the Greek goddess of victory, and Apollo is the Greek god of (among other things) the sun. If able to bear children, a woman is victorious and basking in sunlight. Instead, she is alone, with the dead and the moon, things often associated with Hades and Artemis, respectively. It is worth noting that Artemis, the sister of Apollo, lives a life of chastity and loneliness in the woods, among deer and other animals. The narrator suggests that being unable to bear children resigns a woman to the same fate: alone, animalistic, and “blank-faced and mum as a nurse”.

By using a combination of strong imagery and mythological references, Plath has conveyed just how much women are shunned from society when they cannot bear children. Although she has not experienced this personally, she is likely somehow familiar with how it feels, and she is clearly angry that other women are treated so poorly just because they are unable to do something that she can and has done. By using metaphors involved with graveyards and the afterlife, she certainly makes a strong point and her stronger feelings known.