She sits in the park. Her clothes are out of date.
Two children whine and bicker, tug her skirt.
The two opening lines establish the predominant theme, tone, and subject matter of the entire poem. Building on the title, “In the Park,” Harwood introduces a seemingly neutral, calm setting. The female protagonist, who remains unnamed throughout the poem, is introduced only as “she,” signaling her universality as a symbol of the under-explored female experience. (This is not to suggest that the woman is meant to represent the experiences of all women, but her perspective is widespread enough to be anonymous, contrary to the view in the 1960s that virtually all women aspired to and enjoyed motherhood.) Next, Harwood informs the reader in the first line that the woman’s “clothes are out of date.” This small detail carries a negative connotation, but only for those who are invested in fashion. As such, given the limited third-person voice of the poem (which allows the reader to see into the main character's head), the line suggests the woman’s own dissatisfaction with her current fashion.
In the second half of the line, following the caesura created by the period, the very clothes that are out of date are being tugged on by her children. Harwood chooses to end-stop these lines—ending the lines with periods rather than using enjambment, in which the sentences continue across a line break—to feed the reader these key pieces of information one by one. The woman is both grammatically and thematically distant from the “two children” that are her own. They physically “tug” on her, continuously demanding her implicitly reluctant attention. Taken together, the two lines establish a dark, exhausted tone that is explored throughout the poem as Harwood exposes the woman’s ambivalence toward motherhood and her own identity.
Someone she loved once passed by – too late
The fourth line concludes the first stanza with the words “too late,” separated from the first clause of the sentence by an em-dash and from the rest of the sentence (“to feign indifference to that casual nod”) by a line and stanza break. Here, Harwood uses the form of the sonnet to introduce the theme of regret. Harwood deliberately makes it unclear, as the reader progresses linearly through the poem, what is “too late”; she withholds the answer until the second line. By doing so, she introduces a more general sense of time passing. This is heightened by the sole usage of the past tense in the poem—"Someone she loved once passed by.” This use of the past tense establishes that the woman and the lover are no longer together, creating both temporal and emotional distance between them and contributing to the sense of the woman’s isolation. It is notable that the second part of this clause is also in the past tense—the lover “passed by”—using grammar to place the lover in the past, even though the rest of the scene is described in the present tense.
To the wind she says, “They have eaten me alive.”
In this quotation, the wind is personified as the listener to the woman’s truth, juxtaposing with the former lover, to whom she lies. The wind symbolizes the woman’s sense that she cannot tell people in society about her true feelings, because of their expectations; the wind is natural and silent, whereas society is artificial and judgmental. Additionally, wind is constantly moving and can carry sounds, scents, and objects away with it. This symbolizes that the woman hopes her confession will also be carried away with the wind. The final line of dialogue, “They have eaten me alive,” was “much discussed” by the Australian literary community (Sheridan 146). Because Harwood originally published the poem under a male pseudonym, the line was initially celebrated as an incisive view of women’s experience. In fact, Harwood told an interviewer that one person had told her “[o]nly a man” could have written the line, because it showed “detachment” from the plight of women’s experience (Sheridan 148). The fact that the poem was indeed written by a woman, who herself was a writer that pushed against gender stereotypes in poetry, only adds to its vivid insight. The line also ends the poem with a tone of violence and despair, contrasting with the innocuous title “In the Park” and the romantic form of the sonnet. This last line is ultimately crucial to understanding the poem’s unflinching view of the challenges of motherhood; without it, the poem would not be as critical or visceral.
