Heavy Woman
Sylvia Plath
Irrefutable, beautifully smug
As Venus, pedestalled on a half-shell
Shawled in blond hair and the salt
Scrim of a sea breeze, the women
Settle in their belling dresses.
Over each weighty stomach a face
Floats calm as a moon or a cloud.
Smiling to themselves, they meditate
Devoutly as the Dutch bulb
Forming its twenty petals.
The dark still nurses its secret.
On the green hill, under the thorn trees,
They listen for the millennium,
The knock of the small, new heart.
Pink-buttoned infants attend them.
Looping wool, doing nothing in particular,
They step among the archetypes.
Dusk hoods them in Mary-blue
While far off, the axle of winter
Grinds round, bearing down the straw,
The star, the wise grey men.
. . .
Sylvia Plath examines or asks questions about the feminine “condition”—as indicated by both of the poems which we are looking at today. “The Disquieting Muses”—which I am not journaling—is about mothers and daughters (I think . . . ) and “Heavy Women” is about pregnancy and birth. By the way, Plath’s poems seem to me to be entirely autobiographical—as if her poetry is a kind of journal for her.
“Heavy Women” is one of Plath’s attempt to figure out which birth matters most. Is the important birth the mythical Venus, who is “Irrefutable, beautifully smug/As Venus, pedestaled on a half-shell/Shawled in blond hair and the salt/Scrim of a sea breeze” (1-4)? ( I looked up the allusion to Venus and the half shell to learn that it is a reference to, among other things, about an Italian Renaissance fesco by Sandro Botticelli, The Birth of Venus, which depicts the goddess rising from the sea on a clam shell—as her birth.) Or is it the “heavy women”—heavy because carrying a baby during the period of gestation. Or, is the important pregnancy that of Mary, the mother of Jesus? Plath examines in this short poem all three pregnancies and leaves the reader to sort out which weight, if any, she gives to the three.
The “heavy women” are “beautifully smug” (1) as is Venus. Pregnant women are sometimes ascribed a Mona Lisa smile because they are so pleased with themselves and the soon-to-arrive small package. Plath conveys that well. These heavy women are like Venus, who is “pedastaled on a half-shell/Shawled in blond hair and the salt/Scrim of a sea breeze” (2-3). Plath invents the word “pedastaled” to describe the status of both Venus and the heavy women and the image of “placing someone on a pedastal” is evoked, where an individual is held up in he esteem, deservedly or not. Certainly pregnant women are usually protected somewhat by families and society. The image of the blond hair as “shawl” or scarf, along with another “veil”—that of “salt scrim of a sea breeze” (like the scrim on a stage that the audience can see through but which is definitely across the stage) suggests a covering, a protection from the glare of full view. The pregnant women, heavy with their carriage of the baby inside, are also somewhat protected from view.
Their “belling dresses./Over each weighty stomach” is a description of the voluminous dresses each wears for this period of gestation. But then this floating face over the protruding stomach. What does it mean? She says, “a face/Floats calm as a moon or a cloud” (6-7) over each stomach. This is the face of the baby? The ethereal nature of moon and cloud is evoked and the baby is ethereal, too. What he or she (or they) look like is somewhat otherworldly much like a moon or cloud—perhaps the cloud reflecting the light of the moon, making it both light and luminous—like the expectant mothers and their babies.
The mothers “smil[e] to themselves, they meditate/Devoutly as the Dutch bulb/Forming its twenty petals” (10-11). Here the expectant mothers are associated with the perfection of the tulip, with its waxy, almost untouchable perfection. Here also the women are associated with religious practice for the “meditate devoutly” as does the monk or nun or other religious believer. The baby grows away from the glare of the world and perhaps this is the reference to “The dark still nurses its secret” (13). Then a metaphor for new life appears by the speaker as he says, “On the green hill, under the thorn trees,/They [the heavy women] listen for the millennium,/The knock of the small, new heart” (14-16). Why the “thorn trees” though? The “green hill” and the “millennium” convey a tone of growth, newness, expectancy. The “thorn trees,” though, imply a jarring and unpleasant sense. Is this the realism of life being introduced after Venus rising, the Dutch bulbs growing to stunning presentation, the “knock of a small, new heart” coming to full babyhood yet against a backdrop of what must be faced and overcome in life—thorns?
But back to the ideal, says Plath.
“Pink-buttocked infants attend them” (15) . . . cherubs.. The pink bottomed infants could be classical and mythical—Cupid figures, for instance—but since they are many, the plural suggests these pudgy, angelic beings who are idealized babies, basically. Sometimes people call these beings “cherubs”—fat faced, pink, adorable and angelic baby figures although the actual definition of “cherub” in various on-line sources is a lot more stern and weird (with four heads, for instance!). And Plath here introduces another religious and biblical allusion since the “pink-buttocked infants attend” the heavy women as, perhaps, angelic visitants. Then, the puzzle to me: “looping wool” (16). (Nice assonance in the double “oo” sound of “looping wool,” by the way—and later “hoods” (18) which connects the lines again.) Assonance is used in several places in the poem, including “smug” (1) and “cloud” (7) and “devoutly” (9) “dusk” (18)—which helps hold the poem together in a unified way through its sound.) This is what the infants are doing, which is also “doing nothing in particular” (16) except lending their presence to the scene of the heavy women, suggesting the importance of what the heavy women themselves are doing, as they prepare for birth. Then, there’s this shift in the poem, which takes it in a decidedly philosophical or religious direction. In the middle of winter, as winter’s solstice, “the axle of winter/Grinds round” (19-20), the image of Mary coming to Bethlehem to deliver her baby in the manger—“bearing down with the straw” (20) shows up, as do “The star, the wise gray men” (21). So here then, Plath has taken the reader from the birth of Venus appearing in a half shell, through the pregnancies of unnamed women who are “archetypes”* of the birth process, right into the image of the most famous birth of all as signified by the birth of Jesus.
“Heavy Women” is a meditation, so to speak, on the pregnancy and birth, on the period of gestation. It asks a question, it seems to me, about the whole process—as in—what is significant in it? Which birth is important? And the mothers—are they to be idealized? The heavy mothers are, but Venus has no mother while Mary is pictured in her “Mary-blue” (18) as she stands for the hush and beauty of dusk which is this exact shade, a color well-known to children from seeing “the Christmas pagent” at church or the mall during the holidays, with Mary’s blue scarf over her head while she cradles the new baby. So are women heavy, and ideal, or merely heavy and burdened? Plath leaves the reader to understand this independent of the poem.
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