Stitches to show something's missing? No, no? Then
How can we give you a thing?
Here, the speaker quizzes the applicant to discover whether he has any visible flaws, injuries, or other instances of something "missing" from his body. The speaker is evidently prepared to turn the applicant away unless he can prove that something is missing from his body. This suggests that, at least in the world of this poem, marriage essentially exists as a means to address and compensate for various male pathologies or problems, ranging from emotional dissatisfaction to practical haplessness. Plath critiques this model of marriage, hinting that it fails to truly address the root causes of these pathologies, unduly burdens women by expecting them to act as cure-alls, and even discourages men from becoming happier or more complete outside of marriage.
To thumb shut your eyes at the end
And dissolve of sorrow.
We make new stock from the salt.
Here, the speaker describes the process by which the wife will apparently grieve following her husband's death, becoming so distressed that she seems to drown or disappear in her own tears. The contrast between the husband and the wife is stark here. While the husband's death is treated as a tragic event, to such a degree that his own wife dies of sorrow, the wife's own death is barely noticed—after all, she is not seen as an individual. Rather, the speaker explains that new wives are created as byproducts of the now-dissolved wives' tears.
You have a hole, it's a poultice.
You have an eye, it's an image.
My boy, it's your last resort.
The speaker decides, in these closing lines of the poem, to stress the versatility of the applicant's potential match. He does so by comparing her to a variety of inanimate objects, suggesting that he sees her value, not in her personhood, but in her ability to perform a wide variety of tasks. In this poem, figurative language is almost always linked to the dehumanization of people, especially women, serving to reduce them to objects. However, the applicant is evidently not tempted by the speaker's methods, perhaps sensing that his conception of marriage offers little to husbands and wives alike. Thus, the speaker changes tack, deciding instead to use fear by telling the applicant that marriage is his "last resort." This, Plath suggests, is what leads people into unequal and unsatisfying marriage: the sense, when all else fails, that they simply have no other options.
