Summary
The woman scrapes crusted milk out of the burned pot and drains the ruined dish down the sink. She feels her veins ache with exhaustion. She once played her music for the famous pianist Arthur Rubinstein, yet her yawned at her performance. The children discover a dead mouse in a mousetrap and become afraid. She comforts them and wraps the dead mouse in a magazine paper with the headline “Tasty dishes from stale bread.”
Analysis
The latter half of the poem uses literary devices to develop the internal conflict between the woman’s artistic ambitions and her suburban lifestyle. The woman is forced to interrupt her practicing in order to tend to her household duties. This choice of subject matter symbolizes the woman’s broader struggle in balancing her artistic pursuits with her role as a mother and housewife. Accordingly, the tone of the poem reflects the woman’s fatigue at the tedium of her daily life. Harwood repeats diction that invokes this sense of exhaustion—drain, ache, yawned, stale—in order to place emphasis on the woman's misery.
In order to juxtapose this dullness with the woman’s passion for music, Harwood interposes the woman’s descriptions of her tasks (cleaning a pot, disposing of a dead mouse) with reflections on the woman’s musical past (“Once she played / for Rubinstein, who yawned.”). However, the fact that Rubinstein “yawn[ed]” at the woman’s performance heightens the sense of disappointment that the poem creates. Not only is the woman exhausted and disappointed with the role of motherhood, she is also disappointed by her musical pursuits, given that Rubinstein was not impressed with her work. This detail creates an overarching sense of regret that extends beyond suburbia to the protagonist’s entire life trajectory. Harwood thus adds complexity to the poem—this is not a simple, direct contrast between the joys of an artistic career and the pains of motherhood. Rather, the woman feels a broader sense of dissatisfaction due to multiple difficulties she has faced in her life. The concluding imagery of the dead mouse further reinforces this sense—the dead mouse represents the death of the woman’s dream, and embodies her overall dissatisfaction.
Harwood also plays with dual meanings to illustrate the woman’s unhappiness. The woman “scours” the pot—scour means to thoroughly clean, which is what the woman is literally doing in the poem. However, “scour” can also mean to conduct a thorough search. She literally scours the pot, while she metaphorically scours her suburban environment for a trace of passion by attempting to continue her musical practice. This dual meaning reflects the woman’s determination to balance her many interests and duties, yet also suggests that this attempt is fruitless. The word “drain” also has at least three implicit meanings. First, it literally refers to the water draining down the sink. Second, it metaphorically refers to the woman’s passion and artistic goals draining away as well. Third, the word “drain” can also refer to emotional or physical exhaustion, such as when a person finds a task "draining." This implicitly reinforces the woman’s sense of exhaustion and being "drained" by her children and chores.
Finally, these lines continue to use symbolism. The symbol of “play” is repeatedly used to ironically comment on the woman’s current lack of fascination or whimsy in her own life. She is first depicted playing music, and once “played for Rubinstein,” but this is replaced by the playing children, who “caper” around her. Thus, the playing of music is converted into a commentary on the play of children, who have taken over the woman’s life. The children’s innocence is also aligned with the woman’s own dreams in her youth. They are “scared” by the dead mouse, while the woman accepts the mouse and calmly cleans it up. These reactions represent the literary device of metonymy: they are symbols or images which stand in for broader themes. The children's fear of the dead mouse is a metonymy for their innocence about the world and the metaphorical death of their mother’s dream. The woman cleaning up the mouse is a metonymy for the death of her ambition and the fact that it is now trapped, like a mouse in a mousetrap, within the strict gender roles of suburbia.
