You Re By Sylvia Plath

Sylvia Plath’s “You’re”, is a poem about an expectant mother and her experiences with being pregnant with her child. This poem employs lots of simile and metaphorical comparisons between things of nature that are not usually thought of in regards to pregnancy and babies. Plath’s use of similes and metaphors follows her throughout all her poetry but her use of metaphors in “You’re” shows a raw depiction of how she sees pregnancy. Sylvia Plath uses imagery and metaphors of nature to show a mother’s different emotions towards an unborn child.

Sylvia Plath uses many animal comparisons to show the woman’s perspective of her unborn child. The animal comparisons allude to the belief that children are innocent, as are the animals that are mentioned within
The first instance that Plath introduces an animal metaphor is “Gilled like a fish. A common sense” (Plath line 3). Plath is making the comparison of the unborn child to fish that have gills. Unborn fetuses are encased in their mother’s amniotic fluids and are still able to breath, much like a fish with gills. The allusion to amniotic fluid is also seen in line 14 “Like a sprat in a pickle jug” (Plath 14). Where the unborn baby is like a sprat, a fish that is in a jar to be preserved for an amount of time in water or pickling juice. Plath gets into the biology aspect of pregnancy with this comparison. Most people are in awe when it is found out that unborn babies can breathe within a womb filled with fluid, and this awe seems to carry on to this mother also. Plath is exemplifying the wonder and awe that a woman feels when she becomes pregnant and learns these biological wonders. The way a baby is laying in the womb can vary throughout the pregnancy, and this woman’s unborn fetus seems to be laying upside down “Thumbs-down on the dodo’s mode.” (Plath line 4). The Dodo bird and its extinction alludes to evolutionary biology and in comparison to an unborn baby, it creates the contrast between extinct and