Summary
The woman and her former lover continue making small talk, standing by the bench. She tells him her children’s names and birthdays. As he begins to walk away, she informs him that she enjoys listening to her children and watching them grow up. After he leaves, she nurses her youngest child and stares at her feet. She remarks out loud that her children have “eaten [her] alive."
Analysis
While the first two stanzas establish the woman’s emotional pain and dissatisfaction, the third demonstrates how the woman feels she must hide this pain in order to conform to gender roles and societal expectations. Harwood uses language that emphasizes the disconnect between the woman’s thoughts and words. In line 9, she stands “rehearsing” the names and birthdays of her children. As used in the line, “rehearsing” has a double meaning. It literally refers to the woman recounting or listing her children’s names. At the same time, she is also metaphorically “rehearsing” as if she is an actor in a play; like an actor, she is creating a false image for an audience. In this case, she is pretending to be satisfied with her life as a mother to create the impression to her former lover that she fulfills the role of a happy mother. The “flickering lights” in the park further establish this metaphor; they are like lights illuminating a stage where the woman feigns her satisfaction with motherhood. As the unsuspecting audience of this performance, the lover symbolizes the broader expectations society has of women. He departs with a “smile,” seemingly having accepted the woman’s claims that she is happy watching her children thrive. He sees no reason to question the woman’s statements, since they conform to the prevailing stereotypes of women’s attitudes toward motherhood in 1961, when the poem was published.
Unlike the lover, the reader sees the falsity of the mother’s dialogue. The lines “It’s so sweet / to hear [the children's] chatter” contrast starkly with the “whine and bicker” of the children in the first stanza. Harwood also emphasizes the difference in tone between the woman’s actions—she is exhausted and dejected, hoping to “feign indifference” in order to avoid interaction, and dully “rehearsing” the names of her children—and the false cheeriness of her claim that it is “sweet” to raise her children. By revealing this contrast between information that is conveyed directly to the reader through the narrator, and the woman’s dialogue with her former lover, the poem positions the reader as voyeur gaining secret insights into the realities of motherhood, which the woman keeps hidden from other audiences within the poem.
The final line further solidifies this dark insight into the woman’s reality: alone, she states that her children have “eaten [her] alive.” This image creates a contrast and a dark sense of irony, as the woman is literally breastfeeding her child while she states that the children are symbolically eating her alive. The disturbing metaphor imbues the previous lines with a new, dark tone: the children must ‘eat her alive’ in order to grow and thrive, placing their needs at odds with those of the mother. As the child literally drinks milk from the mother's breast, it also feeds on her emotional energy and sense of her own identity. The woman can only confess this dark secret to “the wind,” heightening the themes of isolation and estrangement from her identity. She also stares at her own feet while she makes this confession; she is examining her physical body, symbolizing her process of questioning her identity and who she is. The poem ends on this unsettling note, clarifying its critical attitude toward motherhood and women's gender roles.
