Summary
The woman practices her music by playing a type of solemn, complicated composition called a fugue. However, she feels that no one cares about the quality of her performance. Her children sit on the floor nearby, chattering with each other before breaking into screams and fighting. She hushes them. A pot boils over. As she rushes to the stove—too late to save the contents of the pot—she becomes nauseous.
Analysis
The first seven lines explore the complex relationship the woman has with both music and motherhood. Line 1 introduces the “fugue” that serves as the poem’s central metaphor. The word “fugue” primarily refers to a form of music that is structured using two main components. The musician first introduces a primary melody (the subject) then juxtaposes this with a separate melody or musical pattern (the countersubject). This musical form symbolizes the juxtaposition between the woman’s artistic ambitions and her household duties. Line seven makes this symbol explicit: the woman’s nausea “overpowers / subject and counter-subject,” removing her from the world of the fugue and her music and placing her firmly in the domestic sphere. The nausea—possibly a sign of morning sickness, pregnancy, and further children—reinforces the woman’s domestic role and ties to everyday tasks rather than her creative, thoughtful side. Additionally, the word “fugue” can refer to a psychological condition in which a person feels detached from their environment and identity, losing their memories and often ending up in a different location with no recollection of what brought them there. This dual meaning symbolizes the woman’s own detachment from her identity and from her past as an accomplished musician who was able to perform for the renowned pianist Arthur Rubinstein. Like a person in a disassociated state, the woman cannot acknowledge or accept her current identity and circumstances.
The motif of music and noise continues throughout the first quatrain. The woman’s carefully-practiced music contrasts with the hectic noises of family life—the chattering and screaming children and the boiling pot give the poem a sense of chaos that contrasts with a fugue, which is a tightly-organized and highly-structured piece of music. Furthermore, like a fugue, these sounds are organized in rapid succession. The children at first are simply “chatter[ing],” but like a musical composition rising to a crescendo, they then “scream and fight”—escalating their noise and chaos until the woman is forced to depart from her music and tend to them. The woman “hushes” the children, attempting to return her focus to the music, but their sound is soon replaced by the alarming noise of a pot bubbling over on the stove. The rapid switch between the screaming children and the bubbling pot is created by stringing together short, choppy sentences: “She hushes them. A pot / boils over” (lines 4-5). By creating the impression of constant, discordant noise, Harwood further builds on the juxtaposition between the woman’s carefully-practiced music and her demanding, hectic family life.
The overarching tone in these lines is characterized by exhaustion and regret. Line 2 expressly captures the woman’s sense of defeat, as the speaker states that “it can matter / to no one now” whether her fugue is performed well. Harwood employs an interesting grammatical choice by switching into future tense and saying it can matter to no one, instead of adopting the present tense and stating that it “matters to no one.” By using the word “can,” Harwood suggests that not only do the woman’s children and prospective audience not care about her music, but it is impossible for anyone to ever do so—they are not capable of caring, since they cannot care. Thus, this diction emphasizes the woman’s sense of defeat by making it seem impossible for her to change her circumstances. The tone of regret is further established by the woman rushing to the stove but being unable to prevent the pot from boiling over – she is “too late.” This symbolically echoes the woman’s sense that she is too late to succeed in her music career.
The first seven lines conclude by strengthening the symbolic connection between the woman’s disappointment in her musical career and the demands of motherhood. While the woman hurries to the stove, she is struck by “a wave of nausea” that “overpowers / subject and counter-subject.” The subject and countersubject are the two contrasting musical elements in a fugue. Here, they symbolically represent the woman’s passion for music and the demands of motherhood, which directly contrast with each other since one takes away energy and time from the other. The woman’s wave of nausea has multiple meanings. First, it represents the pinnacle of her exhaustion and disappointment with motherhood—she is both literally and symbolically nauseated by the many demands on her time. This nausea “overpowers” both the subject and countersubject, demonstrating how motherhood has completely taken the woman away from her musical ambitions. Second, the nausea may suggest that the woman is suffering from morning sickness, an early sign of pregnancy, thus indicating that her maternal workload will only increase.
