Point of View

This poem is written in first-person present-tense. That means that it is written as though it is happening in the same moment of time when it is being read, rather than reporting something that has happened in the past or will happen in the future. Furthermore, it is first-person because it is told from the perspective of one character, whose thoughts, feelings, and inner life we have almost complete access to.

Despite the closeness of the perspective, we do not learn much about the protagonist. She is not so much a character as a representation of the ideas that Plath wants to express in the poem. However, it is important that we do not take this ambiguous speaker as a direct stand-in for Plath. It is a common urge in reading poetry to mistake the speaker for the poet. This is particularly the case in...