On Sylvia Plath’s “Metaphors” and the people who throw them
Metaphors Sylvia Plath I’m a riddle in nine syllables,
An elephant, a ponderous house,
A melon strolling on two tendrils.
O red fruit, ivory, fine timbers!
This loaf’s big with its yeasty rising.
Money’s new-minted in this fat purse.
I’m a means, a stage, a cow in calf.
I’ve eaten a bag of green apples,
Boarded the train there’s no getting off.
Sylvia Plath’s “Metaphors” has nine lines, and each line has nine syllables. The poem announces itself as a riddle in nine syllables, and then it keeps its promise to the letter. A reader who counts finds the answer built into the architecture. Nine lines, nine syllables, nine months. The speaker is a pregnant woman who refuses to say so. She tells us she is an elephant, a house, a melon on two tendrils, a loaf rising, a purse full of new money, a cow in calf, someone who has swallowed green apples and boarded a train with no exit. Not once does she use the plain word for what is happening to her. She lets the figures pile up until the reader supplies it, and when the reader does, something odd happens. All that borrowed language collapses back into a single fact about a single body.
I want to borrow the poem the way it borrows the world, and use it as a metaphor for metaphor-makers: all of us, who reach for one thing in order to say another. Almost everyone does this most of the day without noticing. We run late, we fall in love, we catch colds, we spend time, we hit walls, we see the light. Language is a graveyard of dead figures that still walk around in daylight. But some people throw metaphors with intent, and listening to them is like listening to the speaker in Plath’s poem, each one circling something they will not, or cannot, say directly. The more I think about the different kinds of throwers, the more I think the poem is a portrait gallery. Every figure in it is a type of person, and every type of person is a way of dodging the same plain thing.
Begin with the elephant and the house, the ponderous ones. These are the figures of the self-mocker, the person who gets there first with the joke about their own size, their own age, their own failures, before anyone else can. Plath’s speaker is not being cruel to herself so much as armoured. If I am the one who calls myself a house, you cannot wound me by noticing the walls. Many of us know someone like this, and many of us are someone like this: the colleague who narrates their own incompetence in advance, the elder who jokes about being ancient, the friend whose every sentence about their body arrives wrapped in a gag. The metaphor works as a shield held up in the shape of a laugh. What it protects is tenderness. Nobody builds that much armour around something that does not matter.
Then there is the melon strolling on two tendrils, which is the whimsy of the comic and the child. This is metaphor as play, the pleasure of seeing one thing wearing another thing’s clothes. Children are the best metaphor-makers alive, because nobody has yet told them what belongs with what. A child will say the moon is a fingernail, that the wind is angry, that soup is a hot swimming pool for carrots, and the child is not mistaken, merely early. The comic does the same thing as an adult trade: finds the ridiculous resemblance, names it, and lets the room recognise itself. There is a generosity in this kind of figure. It says that the world is stranger and more connected than the dull version we were handed, and it asks nothing except that you laugh and look again.
The red fruit, the ivory, the fine timbers form a different gallery, the collector’s and the connoisseur’s. These are the figures of appraisal, of someone who prices what they see. Here the metaphor becomes a catalogue: rich, specific, sensuous, a little vain. This is the voice of the wine writer, the art critic, the antique dealer, and also of the lover making an inventory of the beloved, who has hair like this and eyes like that and skin the colour of some expensive material. Appraisal can be a form of attention, and sometimes the highest one. To describe someone as fine timber is to say that you have looked at the grain. But appraisal has a shadow. The same impulse that admires ivory also prices it, and the history of ivory is a history of what happens when something living is seen only as material. The speaker of the poem knows this, I think. She lets the appraiser’s voice speak for one line, and then moves on, as though she has noticed how easily admiration turns into ownership.
The loaf with its yeasty rising and the purse full of new-minted money belong to the economist and the baker, the people who find their metaphors in making and in markets. These are the figures of growth, of increase, of something small becoming larger by processes nobody fully controls. The whole of modern public life is conducted in this register. We speak of economies as bodies that grow, overheat, and recover, of markets that are bullish, of budgets that are healthy, of investments that bear fruit. Notice how often the language of commerce borrows from the language of the body and the field, and how often the language of the body borrows back from commerce. The politician who says the nation is a household balancing its books is doing precisely what the poem’s speaker does, and doing it for a different end. Where Plath’s purse is a joke the speaker plays on her own condition, the politician’s household is an argument smuggled in as a picture. Nobody can vote against a picture, and that is exactly why it is used.
This is the point at which the gallery darkens, because metaphor is not only a toy. It is also a tool, and the people who use it as a tool are among the most consequential speakers we have. The lawyer reaches for the veil of incorporation, the chain of title, the burden of proof, the weight of evidence. The bureaucrat reaches for the pipeline, the silo, the stakeholder, the bandwidth. The preacher reaches for the shepherd and the flock, the vine and the branches, the light and the dark. Each of these is a lens that makes certain things visible and others vanish. A flock has no individual faces. A pipeline has no people in it, only throughput. An institution that describes its failures as isolated incidents, or as a few bad apples, has chosen an orchard over a ledger. Anyone who has spent years watching how large organisations speak about their own conduct will recognise the move. The metaphor arrives before the argument does, and by the time the argument is made the conclusion has already been installed.
The darkest relatives of the green apples and the unstoppable train are the metaphors that strip people of their humanity. Plath’s speaker turns herself into an elephant, a melon, a cow in calf, and the transformation is hers: she chooses the figure, she controls the joke, and she can step out of the costume the moment the poem ends. That is the whole difference. When the same animal and object comparisons are applied to people by someone else, with power behind them and no invitation, the comparison stops being play and becomes a verdict. The speaker of the poem is a woman describing herself as livestock for the length of nine lines. History is full of people described as livestock by others, for the length of whole centuries, and the grammar of the two situations is identical. Only the consent and the consequences differ.
Consider the figure of the empty land. To describe a continent as unpeopled, as though the human beings on it were weather or wildlife, is a metaphor with a legal afterlife. The doctrine of terra nullius, the idea that the land belonged to no one, did not merely describe a situation; it manufactured one. It allowed a place that was densely known, named, farmed in its own fashion, sung and governed for tens of thousands of years, to be spoken of as a blank page awaiting its first sentence. Statutes were written on that page. Treaties that might otherwise have been required were never drafted, because one does not make a treaty with a landscape. In Australia it took until 1992 for the High Court in Mabo to say that the fiction had never been sound, and the long delay is itself a measure of how deeply a figure of speech can lodge in the foundations of a nation. A metaphor repeated for two centuries becomes load-bearing, and tearing it out brings down more than anyone expected.
A second family of figures does not erase people but shrinks them. The language of the dying race, which governments and learned men used in Australia in the early twentieth century, cast a living people as a tide going out. The phrase about smoothing the dying pillow, a policy image of ease and tenderness, described the deliberate expectation that a population would simply cease, and it recast neglect and removal as a bedside kindness. This is metaphor at its most treacherous: it does not shout, it soothes. The pillow, the sunset, the fading, the passing, all of it is soft language laid over hard decisions, and it works because we associate such pictures with nature rather than with policy. Nobody is blamed for a sunset. Once a thing has been described as natural, the people who made it happen disappear from the sentence, and with them any duty to have done otherwise.
A third family, the most notorious, reaches for the animal and the contagion. People described as a flood, a swarm, an infestation, a plague, a burden, are being moved by figure of speech out of the category of neighbour and into the category of problem. The figure tells us what to feel before we have been told anything about the people: that they are many, that they are indistinct, that they arrive without invitation, that they cannot be reasoned with and must be managed, contained, repelled. Water metaphors are especially persistent, because a flood is something no one blames or bargains with; one simply builds higher walls. Disease metaphors go further, since they license the language of cleansing and quarantine, and the vocabulary of public health, which exists to protect people, is turned against people. In the radio broadcasts that preceded the Rwandan genocide, Tutsi neighbours were called cockroaches. In Nazi Germany, Jews were called vermin. In both cases the metaphor was not a decoration added to the violence afterwards. It was the preparation, the softening of the ground, the permission slip handed to ordinary people so that what they were about to do would feel like pest control rather than murder.
What makes these figures so durable is that they are quiet in their early stages. Nobody begins with the extermination broadcast. The path begins with the joke, the cartoon, the offhand phrase in the editorial, the policy paper that speaks of numbers and pressures, the politician who says out loud what others have been thinking in private. Each step is small enough to be deniable, and the people taking it can always say it was only a figure of speech. But the habit of mind being built is a habit of not seeing faces. By the time the language is hardened, a whole population has been trained to hear a human cry as noise, a human face as a symptom, a human child as a statistic. The history of atrocity is also a history of vocabulary, and the vocabulary is nearly always in place first.
There is a gentler cousin of all this, which is the language of administration, and it deserves mention because it is so common and so seldom noticed. People become cases, caseloads, clients, units, heads, human resources, human capital, throughput, the vulnerable, the cohort, the demographic. Each of these terms can be defended in its own setting, and many are useful shorthand for people doing hard work with limited time. But the effect of living inside such language is cumulative. A woman is not a case; she is a woman who has a case. A young man is not an outcome; he is a young man to whom something has happened. When institutions talk about those they are supposed to serve in the vocabulary of inventory, they gradually lose the habit of being answerable to them. Cruelty seldom needs malice when it can be built out of process, and process is mostly made of words.
This is why those who have been described rather than heard tend to be so careful, and so impatient, about the words used for them. It is not oversensitivity. It is a hard-won understanding of what a word can do, taught by the experience of having had words do it. A people who have been called empty, dying, dangerous, a problem, a gap, a burden know that the choice of noun is never neutral and that the first battle of any injustice is fought in the dictionary. They also know the reverse: that a name restored, a language spoken, a story told in the first person, is a form of repair. The counter to a dehumanising metaphor is rarely a cleverer metaphor. It is usually the plain noun said with care. A name. A family. A place. This woman, this country, this child.
Which is where Plath’s final image earns its place. She boarded a train with no getting off. In the poem it is the nine-month fact of pregnancy, the irreversibility of the thing, the way a body once given over to a process cannot simply decline. But the train is also the figure of every person who has ever been carried by something larger than their consent: history, illness, empire, marriage, grief, a diagnosis, a verdict, a law. Of all the poem’s images, it is the one that speaks most plainly, and strangely it is the one least dressed up as a joke. After the elephant and the melon and the cow in calf, the tone changes. The comedy drains away. The speaker is no longer performing her condition for us; she is simply in it.
The poem is a riddle, and the cruelty and the kindness of riddles are the same: they hold back the answer. Every metaphor-maker we have walked past is doing a version of this. The self-mocker holds back the hurt, the comic holds back the fear behind the laughter, the connoisseur holds back the hunger, the economist holds back the people inside the numbers, the preacher holds back the doubt, the bureaucrat holds back the responsibility, and the person who dehumanises holds back the one fact that would make the cruelty impossible. In each case the figure stands between the speaker and the plain statement. The metaphor is a way of saying something while not quite having said it, which makes it, by turns, a gift, a game, a lie, and a refuge.
Yet the poem insists on its answer. A reader who has counted syllables knows what the riddle is about, and the beauty of the thing is that the answer is neither a trick nor an anticlimax. It is not a clever solution that makes the images pointless. It is the opposite: the answer is what gives the images their pressure. Knowing that the speaker is pregnant makes the elephant sadder and funnier, the loaf warmer, the purse more precarious, the train more frightening. The plain fact does not cancel the figures. It lights them from inside.
That, I think, is the secret that all the metaphor-throwers share, whatever their purposes. Behind every figure there is a human being, and the figure only matters because the human being does. The child’s moon-as-fingernail matters because a small person is trying to make the sky intimate. The lawyer’s chain of title matters because somewhere there is a family, a country, a grave. The politician’s household budget matters because real kitchens exist, real rent comes due. Even the worst metaphors, the ones that make people into pests, only function because they exploit our knowledge of what it is to be a creature who can be hurt, hungry, displaced, afraid. They borrow the force of the human and aim it at the human, which is why they are so effective and so unforgivable.
There is a version of this essay that ends by urging us to abandon metaphor and speak only in plain terms, but that would be both impossible and a loss. We cannot think about time, love, death, justice, or the self without figures. The abstract goes dark without them. What we can do is something humbler and more difficult: we can learn to ask, of any metaphor, what is being said and what is being held back, who is speaking and who is being spoken about, what the figure makes visible and what it hides. We can try to hear the riddle behind the image. When someone calls themselves a house, we can notice that they are asking whether anyone is willing to knock. When someone calls a group of people a flood, we can ask which faces have been drowned out of the picture. When an institution speaks of a pipeline, a pathway, a process, we can ask who is in it.
And we can do the thing the poem does, which is to remember the nine syllables and the nine months and the one answer under all the images. We are all, in the end, bodies in time, carried along by things we did not choose, trying to say what it is like. The elephant and the melon and the green apples are all attempts to tell somebody, anybody, what it is to be a person at a particular hour of a particular life. Nobody throws a metaphor into an empty room. We throw them toward one another, hoping to be caught, and the catching, when it comes, is the least figurative thing there is. Somebody understands. Somebody says, yes, I know that train.
The riddle in nine syllables has a heartbeat, in the end, or two of them, and the answer to the riddle of all our figures is that same quiet fact, offered in a hundred disguises: that we are human, that we are here, that we are trying to be understood. Strip away the loaf, the purse, the timber, the house, and what is left is someone speaking to someone, which is the oldest metaphor of all, and the only one that has never needed explaining.
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Bakchos is the founder of Blak and Black, an Australian media and advocacy platform established in 2010. Bakchos writes from the intersecting perspectives of Wiradjuri heritage, Jewish identity, and humanism.
© Bakchos, November 2026
