Classic and Contemporary Poetry: Explained

Sylvia Plath's "Sow" delves into the realms of both the literal and the metaphorical as it contemplates the nature of an enormous pig raised by the speaker's neighbor. Through the poem, Plath reveals the dual nature of this sow-an animal that is at once tangible and mythical, corporeal and legendary. The poem unspools its narrative in a tone that hovers between admiration and a kind of humorous disbelief, embodying the complex feelings that can arise when confronting the enormity of life in all its grotesque and magnificent forms.

The poem opens with an element of mystery: "God knows how our neighbor managed to breed / His great sow." Immediately, Plath positions the sow as a kind of enigmatic spectacle that provokes both curiosity and awe. She emphasizes the sow's seclusion, "impounded from public stare, / Prize ribbon and pig show," suggesting a uniqueness that removes it from ordinary pigs and even from exhibition-a unique species of wonder.

As the narrative progresses, the sow is subjected to numerous comparisons that serve to magnify its unusualness. It's not a "china suckling" in a child's piggy bank, nor a "dolt pig" to be cooked and glorified as food. It's not even like "one of the common barnyard sows," whose existence is defined by its routine consumption and motherhood. Instead, Plath describes the pig as an extraordinary creature that lies "belly-bedded on that black compost," its eyes "Dream-filmed." In these lines, Plath imbues the sow with a sense of ancient wisdom and dreamlike contemplation, as if it were engaged in an eternal musing on its own existence.

The poem reaches its metaphorical peak when the speaker imagines the sow as an embodiment of "ancient hoghood," a "great grandam" engrossed in a vision of mythic combat. Here, Plath employs terms like "knight," "cuirass," and "Brobdingnag" (a reference to Jonathan Swift's "Gulliver's Travels," where Brobdingnag is a land of giants) to elevate the pig to the stature of a legendary figure. The sow becomes a monument of epic proportions, a testament to the universality of appetite and existence.

However, this mythic grandiosity is punctuated by a return to reality. The farmer whistles and "thwacked the barrel nape," and the sow rouses "up in the flickering light to shape / A monument / Prodigious in gluttonies." The legend falls away, but what remains is a creature still grand in its own corporeal reality.

"Prodigious in gluttonies," the sow becomes a symbol of unconstrained appetite. It is as if this pig has devoured not just "kitchen slops," but the world itself-"the seven troughed seas and every earthquaking / continent." In embodying such an expansive, insatiable hunger, the sow becomes a dark mirror to human gluttony, ambition, and perhaps even to the eternal craving for understanding that drives both art and science.

In "Sow," Plath offers a narrative that is at once a vivid portrait of a remarkable animal and an exploration of the complexities of life, myth, and the human psyche. The poem navigates through multiple planes of existence, presenting us with a creature that is both less and more than what it seems, challenging us to grapple with the multitudes that life, in its most unassuming forms, can contain.

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