Zest and love
drain out with soapy water
This quote captures the draining effect that the mother’s daily duties have on her creativity. The burned pot literally interrupts her piano practice—she feels that she must clean the burned dish, disrupting her focus on the fugue. This distraction symbolizes how the demands of motherhood more broadly interrupt the woman’s creative passions. Harwood utilizes dual meanings to convey this theme in the quote. “Zest” refers to both the literal flavoring in the pot (it can signify a lemon flavor) and the woman’s creative energy, since another definition of “zest” is “great enthusiasm and energy.” She is watching her own zest for music drain away along with the flavoring in the pot. This symbolic meaning is heightened by the fact that the narrator expressly says that both zest “and love” are draining down the sink—the woman’s passion and love for music are both being eroded by the constant routine of motherhood and domestic life. Similarly, “drain” literally refers to the water draining down the sink, but figuratively refers to the woman’s sense that she is being drained by the persistent demands of motherhood.
Once she played
for Rubinstein, who yawned.
This quote complicates the poem’s themes and further establishes the mother’s frustration. The mother’s dedicated practicing and the constant demands of her children suggest that without the children dragging her down, she could become a successful artist. Yet this simple dichotomy between the mother’s artistic passions and her household demands is called into question by her performance for Rubinstein. Rubinstein was seemingly disappointed by or indifferent to her performance, given that he “yawned” while listening to it. This reaction heightens the sense of regret and pain that permeates the poem. She is left reflecting on his disappointing performance while tending to the demands of her household that largely prevent her from improving and rising to new musical heights.
She comforts them; and wraps it in a paper
featuring: Tasty dishes from stale bread
The concluding lines of the poem represent the woman’s efforts to shield her children from her own dissatisfaction and from the broader pain and regret inherent to life. The children are frightened by the dead mouse, which represents the woman’s own dead dream. She is placed in the ironic position of having to comfort her children and protect them from the dead mouse, while she herself must confront it. The woman then wraps the dead mouse in a magazine paper displaying housekeeping advice. This symbolizes the woman’s dream as a musician becoming smothered or concealed by the veneer of domestic bliss in suburbia. This was a common refrain in the 1960s, a period when women were often forced into domestic roles as mothers or housewives with fewer options to explore. By ending the poem on this note, Harwood creates the bleak image that not only is the woman’s dream dead, but she now must cover it up and avoid the external world discovering the depths of her disappointment.
