Poetry and Life

A year later Plath returns to the theme in Three Women, a poem for three voices written originally for radio. Three women in a maternity ward offer a distillation of their different experiences – one gives birth to a boy, one miscarries, one abandons her baby girl. The voices overlap and counterpoint one another: in experience they are crucially distinct (there is no doubt that the second woman miscarries); but in voice they are uncannily and progressively alike. This time, Plath does name what has happened to each of them, but only as a starting point. As the poem continues, the voices blur. In doing this, Plath raises a question, central to biography, but troublesome if the aim is to get back from the words to the poet’s life, to what happened to her and to her alone. Is any experience, even the most terrible and/ or life-defining, especially if you are a woman, simply your own? /

LRB | Vol. 24 No. 16 dated 22 August 2002 | Jacqueline Rose