Sylvia Plath’s tightly constructed poem of nine lines, “Metaphors,” begins

I'm a riddle in nine syllables.
An elephant, a ponderous house,
A melon strolling on two tendrils...

This poem uses a series of increasingly fraught metaphors to describe the speaker’s advancing pregnancy and growing worries about the changes being wrought through her and upon her. The poem was written in March of 1959, when Plath was pregnant with her first child, and was included in her first book-length collection, The Colossus and Other Poems, published in 1960. The last two lines are:

I've eaten a bag of green apples,
Boarded the train there's no getting off.

(Thanks to Shenandoah Library for posting this poem in its entirety.)

Nine is the traditional number signifying completeness, and is, of course, closely associated with the nine months of a full-term pregnancy. Plath’s poem not only uses nine lines but each line is composed of nine syllables, is end-stopped with skillful slant rhymes (my favorites are “syllables/apples/tendrils” and “house/purse”), and is replete with a roller-coaster of emotions.

Context for My Poem “Like This?”:

One of the clues from today’s New York Times Crossword Puzzle is “Colorful analogy, perhaps?” This nudged me early this morning toward considering similes, which for me is never only visual but also filled with music if successful, and that resulted in today’s slender poem. Later, I thought of another poem by Sylvia Plath that I have long admired, about Simile’s more emphatic sister, Metaphor, and so I thought today would be a good time to share it.

Until tomorrow,

LESLIE