The Woman
The unnamed woman is the central protagonist and focus of the poem. The poem begins by describing this woman externally, stating that she is wearing “out of date” clothing. As the poem progresses, it moves from this external description to reveal the woman’s internal emotions of exhaustion, regret, and frustration. Her unfashionable clothing outwardly represents her internal dialogue, which shows that she is too preoccupied to worry about clothing. In addition to giving this brief but revealing detail about the woman's appearance, the first stanza also indicates that she is a mother: her children “tug her skirt,” relentlessly demanding her attention.
The poem both builds on and challenges this depiction of the woman as defined by her motherhood when it introduces her former lover. The woman attempts to make upbeat small talk with the former lover, but as he speaks she thinks to herself that he must be pitying her and that he is thankful he is no longer with her. She then attempts to profess her love for motherhood and her appreciation for watching her children grow up. The poem contrasts this external dialogue with the woman’s internal monologue, as we are given full insight into her emotional state with the poem’s vivid last line: “They have eaten me alive.”
Through these sparse details, the poem depicts this woman as ambivalent about her role in society and, in the last line, outright exhausted and despairing. The woman thus presented is as an anomalous figure in the literature of the mid-twentieth century: depictions of women that not only show their rich internal life, but also demonstrate that not all women are suited for or enjoy motherhood, were both rare and controversial in the male-dominated Western literary canon. The only figure in the poem to whom the woman can express her true pain is the personified “wind,” demonstrating how women feel confined by social expectations to hide their true frustrations with motherhood.
The Children
The children in the poem are described only in brief detail, but the details selected emphasize the demands that they place upon their mother’s energy and attention. In the first stanza, two of the children “whine and bicker,” foreshadowing their status as a source of conflict in the poem. While the children enact an external conflict between each other in these lines—they bicker, demonstrating their irritation—the true conflict they represent is an internal one for the mother. Their bickering symbolizes her frustration and regrets due to the demands of motherhood. Meanwhile, the third child “draws aimless patterns in the dirt,” which also presents a symbol. The "aimless" patterns represent the mother’s own sense of aimlessness.
In her conversation with her lover, the mother describes her children as growing and thriving. This suggests that the children, despite their bickering in the first stanza, are normal children growing up together. Despite the normalcy of their behavior, they still place a burden upon the mother. In other words, the poem uses the children to argue that women can be unhappy with motherhood even if their children are not unusually demanding.
This suggestion is further established in the final stanza, when the mother breastfeeds the youngest child. While again this is simply normal behavior for a baby, the mother’s comment—“They have eaten me alive”—recasts this action as a symbolic representation of both the literal and metaphorical demands that children make on their caretakers. The child is literally consuming milk from its mother’s breast, but it is symbolically eating away at her own independence and the life she had before motherhood. In sum, while at a surface level the children simply behave normally, symbolically they represent the emotional burdens placed upon their mother.
The Former Lover
The woman’s former lover passes through the park, notices her, and strikes up a conversation about the changes that have occurred in their lives since their relationship. The man is a cipher: there is no description of what he looks like and his conversation offers little insight into his character. Instead, the woman projects her own dissatisfaction with her life onto him, imagining that he pities her and that he thanks God that he is not her. The lover represents both the greater independence men have in twentieth-century society when compared to women, and the societal expectations that are placed upon women. Unlike the mother, who is exhausted and wearing “out of date clothes,” the man is depicted as “neat” or well-groomed. This suggests that, even if he himself is now a father, he is not as burdened as the mother and is able to spend time looking after his appearance. Secondly, the woman feigns satisfaction with motherhood during her conversation with the lover, demonstrating how she feels she must maintain a façade of satisfaction with her place in society while conversing with him. The lover does not see through this façade at all, instead walking away from their conversation with a “smile” and presumably no idea of the woman’s emotional pain.
