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6 Nine Syllables Label Sylvia r eading plath’s “Metaphors” Met ap Ho rs i’m a riddle in nine syllables, a n elephant, a ponderous house, a melon strolling on two tendrils. o red fruit, ivory, fine timbers! This loaf’s big with its yeasty rising. Money’s new-minted in this fat purse. i’m a means, a stage, a cow in calf. i’ve eaten a bag of green apples, Boarded a train there’s no getting oἀ. sylvia plath, Crossing the Water plath’s poem “Metaphors” is packed with metaphors: a diἀerent one for each line, sometimes two or three. yet all are poetically equivalent, referring to the same unstated condition of pregnancy. The poet has compressed similes into metaphors so that conventional comparisons—“i’m as heavy as an elephant. i’m as big as a house. My belly looks like i’ve swallowed a watermelon ”—are converted into metaphors representing an enormity that is both weighty and ridiculous—“i’m . . . an elephant . . . a ponderous house . . . a melon.” These metaphors then generate the synecdoches of ivory, timbers, red fruit, which indicate the dismantling, destruction, or commodification of the metaphorical elephant, house, and melon. subsequent metaphors communicate contradictory feelings of pride, self-worth, domesticity, radical transformation , illness, anticipation, anxiety, commitment, and resignation. The poem’s title might also connect to pregnancy by functioning as a subliminal pun based on the etymological origins of the word metaphor (carry across; transfer): meta, meaning “involved with change,” and pherein, meaning “to bear.” This pun on metaphor/pregnancy, as well as on traditional tropes of the artist as creator and the poet as maker, might suggest that the first line derives from the word-guessing game charades, which relies on its players’ alphabetical and cultural literacy. “Metaphors” technically is not a charade, although it incorporates the kind of opening challenge that signals a language game: “i’m a riddle in nine syl- 30 Chapter 6 lables.” Charades requires players to solve a kind of riddle in which each syllable of the word to be guessed, and sometimes the word itself, is enigmatically described or dramatically represented. Usually one player oἀers hints based on breaking down words or phrases into smaller units of words, syllables , or letters: “My first [syllable] wears my second”; or “i am a word of twelve letters.” The charade, in its association of words, syllables, and letters with numbers, has a cryptographic aspect, linking it to codes, ciphers, and puzzles that substitute numerals for alphabets as well as to the ancient riddling tradition. plath’s poem shares certain features common to other types of cryptographic puzzles. it evokes language games from the ancient ritual incantations , charms, and spells of all cultures. in many traditional narratives, solving a riddle is a crucial test of the hero’s ingenuity, often with life or death consequences. such traditional heroes have been mostly male. a good example is o edipus, whose solution to the sphinx’s riddle was “man,” meaning humanity. in plath’s poem, however, it is the female poet who, by posing and embodying her own riddle, is both protagonist and sphinx. Her subliminal pun on bearing or carrying suggests magical correspondences between poetry and pregnancy. plath’s title, “Metaphors,” and “pregnancy,” the unstated word that names the poet’s condition and is the answer to the poem ’s riddle, both contain nine letters. The poem is shaped formally and conceptually around the “magic” number nine (months, letters, syllables, lines), just as the poem’s metaphors are figurative references to pregnancy. The poet ’s riddling metaphors follow the polite convention of discussing pregnancy indirectly through periphrasis and euphemism. plath’s metaphors might apply to her poem as well as to herself as a pregnant poet, a poet with a head full of creative ideas. However playful in form, the content of the poem expresses conflicted emotions concerning the literal , figurative, or anticipated state of pregnancy. The anxiety extends to the conflicting roles of both vessel and creator, both riddle and riddler, inhabited by a pregnant woman or by an inspired artist. Here the conventional beginning statement of the charade provides a key that suggests an analogical relationship in which the poet is the tenor and her poem (with its riddling metaphors) the vehicle. The number nine—referring to letters in the title, lines in the poem, syllables per line, and months required for a fullterm pregnancy—establishes a link between formal and linguistic elements of the poem...

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