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You're Summary & Analysis
by Sylvia Plath

You're Summary & Analysis
by Sylvia Plath

  • Intro
  • Summary
  • Themes
  • Line-by-Line
    Explanations
  • Symbols
  • Poetic
    Devices
  • Vocabulary &
    References
  • Form, Meter, &
    Rhyme Scheme
  • Speaker
  • Setting
  • Context
  • Resources
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  • “You're” Introduction

    • In Sylvia Plath's "You're," a mother addresses her unborn baby. Describing the child in vivid, playful figurative language, the speaker conveys both eagerness and a touch of anxiety about new motherhood. Even as she tells the baby that "You're" various things at the moment—"Clownlike," "Snug," etc.—she suggests that what the baby will be (i.e., upon birth) remains an exciting mystery. "You're" was written in 1960, during Plath's pregnancy with her first child, Frieda. It was published in Harper's magazine in 1961 and collected in Plath's posthumous volume Ariel in 1965.

  • “You're” Summary

    • You're like a clown, preferring to be upside down with your feet pointing up toward the sky. Your skull is bare and white as the moon, and you breathe through gills, as fish do. You seem to be giving a sensible thumbs-down to the kind of extinction the dodo-bird suffered. You're like a spool for your own umbilical cord, and you comb through the darkness surrounding you, like an owl does. You're as silent as a root vegetable throughout my pregnancy (from July 4th through April Fools' Day), my unborn baby growing like a rising loaf of bread.

      You're as mysterious and formless as mist, and you're awaited like a piece of mail. You seem more distant than the country of Australia. You're hunched like the Greek god Atlas, who carried the world on his back; you're a little shrimp-like creature who seems to have come to us from far away. You're as tightly folded as a flower bud, and you seem as comfortable as a small fish in a pickle jar. You're like a basket of eels, always riggling around. You kick inside me, restless as a Mexican jumping bean. You seem just perfect, like a correctly solved math problem. You're as full of possibility as an empty chalkboard, but you already have your own identity.

  • “You're” Themes

    • Theme The Mystery and Wonder of Pregnancy and New Life

      The Mystery and Wonder of Pregnancy and New Life

      The speaker of "You're" is a pregnant mother talking directly to her unborn child. Through a series of affectionate and often fantastical similes and metaphors, the speaker captures the incredible novelty and strangeness of the new life growing inside her. The baby seems both snugly “at home” in the speaker’s body and impossibly distant and unknowable—a figure ultimately independent of the speaker herself. In the end, this unknowability is what the poem celebrates most: for all the speaker may try to pin down this elusive presence in her belly, her baby represents a “clean slate” who will have to define themselves in the world.

      The speaker compares her unborn baby to a dizzying variety of creatures and objects, suggesting that this new human is both mysterious and full of possibility. For example, she compares the child to everything from a clown, to a fish, to turnip, to the god Atlas, tasked with holding up the world in Greek myth. She even likens the baby to inanimate and abstract things (the moon, mail, math, etc.). The baby seems silly and helpless but also enigmatic and strangely powerful. This wide range of comparisons also underscores the fact that the baby could turn out in all sorts of ways. No one knows its true nature yet—just that it's alive (unlike the "dodo[]"), growing (like a "loaf" of bread), and soon to arrive (like "mail").

      Sprinkled into the affectionate language are a few details that convey unease: for example, the fetus is "Mute" (or unable to speak) and shrouded in "dark," like "owls." Its mysteriousness and inability to communicate seem to make the speaker both anxious and excited; the phrase "Jumpy as a Mexican bean" might even hint at the speaker's own eager nervousness. And though the baby is "Snug" and "at home" within her, it also seems "Farther off than Australia"—a remote, alien presence. The comparison "Vague as fog" drives home the idea that, despite being “[w]rapped up” in the speaker’s body, the baby is unknowable for now.

      Yet, while all this possibility might be a bit unsettling, the speaker ultimately celebrates her baby's life as something radically new. She sees the child's undefined identity as something joyful and worthy of praise. The baby is a "clean slate," still unaffected by the world, but already has its "own face," meaning an individuality no one else can dictate.

      The very structure of "You're" helps convey the anxiety, excitement, and unpredictability of bringing a new life into the world. The poem is framed as a series of possible responses to the prompt "You're," but by the final line, it can only describe the baby as a blank "slate." In other words, it has to admit that only the baby can say who they truly "are"—there are some things a poem can't do!

      Where this theme appears in the poem:
      • Lines 1-18

  • Line-by-Line Explanation & Analysis of “You're”

    • Lines 1-3

      Clownlike, happiest on ...
      ... like a fish.

      The speaker of "You're" is a pregnant mom affectionately describing her unborn baby. The title seems to start a sentence or pose a riddle: "You're"—what? Each of the sentence fragments in the poem provides a possible answer, an attempt to describe this brand-new person through figurative language.

      In these first two and a half lines, the speaker reels off two similes and a metaphor. The first simile compares the baby to an acrobatic "Clown[]" who is "happiest" in a tumbling position: "on your hands, / Feet to the stars." This is an imaginative description of the head-down, feet-up position babies often take in the womb (especially in the later stages of pregnancy). The second simile, "Gilled like a fish," refers to throat structures called gill arches that human embryos acquire during their development in the womb. In fish, similar structures develop into gills; in humans, they develop into parts of the jaw, larynx, and ear. In between these two similes, the metaphor "moon-skulled" compares the baby's pale, bare, still-developing skull to a pale, bare (perhaps not quite full) moon.

      Here and throughout the poem, then, the speaker reaches for vivid, imaginative comparisons to evoke the strange new life growing inside her. These opening lines also establish the poem's lack of a meter, and it has no rhyme scheme, either; it's written in free verse. (However, each stanza consists of nine lines of roughly even length, mirroring the nine months of a typical pregnancy.) Already, readers can hear the ear-pleasing sound effects that will continue throughout this playful poem: alliteration ("happiest"/"hands"), consonance ("moon-skulled"/"Gilled"), and assonance ("Gilled"/"fish").

    • Lines 3-6

      A common-sense ...
      ... as owls do.

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    • Lines 7-9

      Mute as a ...
      ... my little loaf.

    • Lines 10-12

      Vague as fog ...
      ... our traveled prawn.

    • Lines 13-16

      Snug as a ...
      ... a Mexican bean.

    • Lines 17-18

      Right, like a ...
      ... own face on.

  • “You're” Symbols

    • Symbol The Clean slate

      The Clean slate

      At the poem's end, the speaker calls her baby a "clean slate" while also acknowledging that it has its "own face" (its own identity independent of her). This "clean slate" symbolizes the child's endless potential and its individuality—its ability to define itself, rather than being defined by its parents or the world.

      The phrase "clean slate" traces all the way back to ancient Greek philosophers such as Aristotle, who debated whether newborn babies were totally empty of knowledge, like a writing surface that hasn't been written on yet. In other words, they debated whether the human mind is formed by nature (innate qualities) or nurture (learning and experience). Here, the speaker implies that it's a bit of both.

      Because a "slate" is a writing surface, the symbolism here also relates specifically to writing and poetry. The baby in "You're" is based on Plath's daughter, Frieda, whose parents were both poets. Not coincidentally, the phrase "clean slate" imagines this new life in writerly terms: as a fresh start or blank page, unmarked by the experience of the two people who made it. Coming at the end of the poem, the phrase also seems to admit the poet's limits when it comes to describing a brand-new person. A parent can write about their child, but not for their child; the child has to experience life for themselves and discover their own voice.

      Where this symbol appears in the poem:
      • Line 18: “A clean slate, with your own face on.”

  • “You're” Poetic Devices & Figurative Language

    • Alliteration

      "You're" uses frequent alliteration and consonance as part of its generally playful approach to language. Although the poem can't literally be read (yet) by the child it addresses, its comical style and musical sound seem designed to tease, please, and entertain. The poet may well have hoped her child would enjoy reading it once they grew a little older.

      The first stanza, for example, contains alliterative pairs like "happiest" and "hands" (line 1), "stars" and "moon-skulled" (line 2), "Thumbs-down" and "dodo" (line 4), and "Fourth" and "Fools'" (lines 7-8), as well as the endearing, alliterative phrase "little loaf" (line 9). The interwoven /f/ and /l/ sounds in lines 10-11 ("fog"/"for"/"Farther" and "looked"/"like," plus "mail" and "Australia") create a mild tongue-twister in the second stanza, while "Bent-backed" and "bud" fill lines 12-13 with boldly bursting /b/ sounds.

      Combined with the consonance in "dodo's mode," "Trawling [...] owls," and other phrases—as well as the assonance that chimes throughout the poem—all this alliteration makes the poem delightful to read aloud. Though "You're" doesn't follow a meter or rhyme scheme, its lively, repeating sounds are reminiscent of nursery rhymes. This style, of course, fits the poem's subject: an unborn baby already loved by its mother.

      Where alliteration appears in the poem:
      • Line 1: “happiest,” “hands”
      • Line 2: “stars,” “skulled”
      • Line 4: “down,” “dodo’s”
      • Line 7: “Fourth”
      • Line 8: “Fools’”
      • Line 9: “little loaf”
      • Line 10: “fog,” “looked,” “for,” “like”
      • Line 11: “Farther”
      • Line 12: “Bent-backed”
      • Line 13: “bud”

    • Assonance

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      Where assonance appears in the poem:
      • Line 3: “Gilled,” “fish”
      • Line 4: “dodo’s mode”
      • Line 9: “O,” “high-riser, my,” “loaf”
      • Line 12: “Bent-backed Atlas,” “traveled”
      • Line 13: “Snug,” “bud”
      • Line 14: “jug”
      • Line 15: “creel,” “eels”
      • Line 17: “well-done sum”
      • Line 18: “slate,” “face”

    • Parallelism

      Where parallelism appears in the poem:
      • Lines 1-18

    • Metaphor

      Where metaphor appears in the poem:
      • Line 2: “moon-skulled”
      • Lines 3-4: “A common-sense / Thumbs-down on the dodo’s mode.”
      • Line 9: “O high-riser, my little loaf.”
      • Line 12: “Bent-backed Atlas, our traveled prawn.”
      • Line 15: “A creel of eels, all ripples.”
      • Line 18: “A clean slate,”

    • Simile

      Where simile appears in the poem:
      • Lines 1-2
      • Line 3
      • Lines 5-8
      • Lines 10-11
      • Lines 13-14
      • Lines 16-17

    • Apostrophe

      Where apostrophe appears in the poem:
      • Line 9: “O high-riser, my little loaf.”

    • End-Stopped Line

      Where end-stopped line appears in the poem:
      • Line 1: “hands,”
      • Line 2: “moon-skulled,”
      • Line 4: “mode.”
      • Line 5: “spool,”
      • Line 6: “do.”
      • Line 8: “Day,”
      • Line 9: “loaf.”
      • Line 10: “mail.”
      • Line 11: “Australia.”
      • Line 12: “prawn.”
      • Line 14: “jug.”
      • Line 15: “ripples.”
      • Line 16: “bean.”
      • Line 17: “sum.”
      • Line 18: “on.”

    • Allusion

      Where allusion appears in the poem:
      • Lines 3-4: “A common-sense / Thumbs-down on the dodo’s mode.”
      • Line 9: “O high-riser, my little loaf.”
      • Line 12: “Bent-backed Atlas,”
      • Line 18: “A clean slate, with your own face on.”

  • “You're” Vocabulary

    Select any word below to get its definition in the context of the poem. The words are listed in the order in which they appear in the poem.

    • Moon-skulled
    • Gilled
    • Dodo's mode
    • Trawling
    • All Fools' Day
    • High-riser
    • Atlas
    • Traveled
    • Prawn
    • Sprat
    • Creel
    • Mexican bean
    • Sum
    • Clean slate
    Moon-skulled
    • (Location in poem: Line 2: “Feet to the stars, and moon-skulled,”)

      Having a skull as bare and white as the moon (a reference to the still-developing skull of a fetus).

  • Form, Meter, & Rhyme Scheme of “You're”

    • Form

      "You're" consists of two stanzas of nine lines each. The lines don't follow a meter or rhyme scheme (the poem is written in free verse), but they're of roughly equal length, ranging from six to eight syllables apiece. Formally, then, each stanza of this poem about pregnancy mimics the duration of an average pregnancy: nine months!

      Although the poem is generally unrhymed, it features a couple of slant or near-exact rhymes toward the end; in particular, "prawn" (line 12) makes a close rhyme with "on" (line 18), the poem's final word. This effect strengthens the sense of closure at the end, perhaps evoking the completion of a pregnancy. (For more, see the Rhyme section of this guide.)

      Overall, the form here is noticeable but not especially rigid, as if the poet is wary of being too strict with the poem. (Similarly, this speaker might hope to set limits for their child but avoid being too strict with them, so as to let them develop their own identity—symbolized by "your own face" in line 18.) One could say that, like a baby in its womb, the poem is contained within its form but never shaped by it in a predictable way.

    • Meter

      As a free verse poem, "You're" has no regular meter. However, all of its lines contain six to eight syllables, and most contain either three or four strong stresses.

      Take lines 1-3, for example:

      Clownlike, happiest on your hands,
      Feet to the stars, and moon-skulled,
      Gilled like a fish. A common-sense

      This consistency helps the poem's language feel playful and controlled but ever overly strict or rigid. The stanzas might even formally mimic the average length of a pregnancy: just as pregnancy is divided into nine months of roughly equal length, these stanzas are divided into nine lines of roughly equal length. At the same time, the freedom of the verse within that form ties in with the poem's themes: the unpredictability of how the baby will turn out, the shapeless ("fog"-like) nature of the baby in its parents' imagination, and so on.

    • Rhyme Scheme

      "You're" is a free verse poem, so it has no rhyme scheme. However, it does include a bit of slant rhyme toward the end: "home" (line 13) rhymes loosely with "sum" (line 17), while "prawn" (line 12) rhymes pretty closely with the poem's final word, "on" (line 18). One could argue for even more distant rhymes in this stanza, too: "mail" (line 10) rhymes imperfectly with "Australia" (line 11), while "bean" shares its final consonant with "prawn" and "on."

      In other words, a touch of rhyme, or traditional poetic form, creeps in as the poem approaches its conclusion—perhaps evoking the baby that's slowly taking form as its mom's pregnancy advances toward completion. (Remember, the nine-line stanzas already evoke the nine months of pregnancy.) The closest thing to a full rhyme occurs in the poem's final word—part of the phrase "with your own face on"—so perhaps this detail, especially, hints at the completion of pregnancy and the independence of baby from mother.

  • “You're” Speaker

    • The poem's speaker is a pregnant mother addressing her unborn child. Her tone is a mix of affection, wonder, and pride, with a trace of anxiety here and there.

      This complex tone comes through in her similes and metaphors: for example, she teasingly compares her child to a "Clown[]," "turnip," "loaf" of bread, "Mexican [jumping] bean," etc. But she also addresses the baby with a lofty "O" and compares them to the Greek god "Atlas," conveying wonder and awe. The phrase "Right, like a well-done sum" conveys maternal pride in the seemingly perfect little human she's making. Meanwhile, the Gothic image "Trawling your dark as owls do" suggests that the mystery surrounding her unborn child (who are they? how will they turn out?) strikes her as slightly eerie, too.

      In general, then, the speaker is a typical "expecting" parent: proud, anxious, and excited to meet the child that's on its way. Plath wrote this poem in 1960, the year she gave birth to her first child, Frieda—who was, in fact, born on April 1 ("All Fools' Day," line 8).

  • “You're” Setting

    • The main setting of the poem is in utero! The poem's speaker is a mother (based on Plath herself) comparing the baby she's pregnant with (based on her first child, Frieda) to a variety of creatures, plants, and objects. These colorful comparisons evoke the physical environment of the womb, with its "dark," "Snug" atmosphere (lines 6 and 13); baby positioned head down ("Feet to the stars," line 2); and umbilical cord (for which the baby serves as the "spool," line 5). The one geographical reference in the poem—"Australia" (line 11)—is part of a simile suggesting that the baby seems remote; in other words, it's just an example of a far-off place, not a clue as to the speaker's whereabouts.

      The poem also has a temporal setting: the nine months "from the Fourth / Of July to All Fools' Day" (lines 7-8). This period matches the nine months of Plath's pregnancy with her daughter, Frieda—who was, in fact, born on "All Fools' Day," or April 1.

  • Literary and Historical Context of “You're”

      Literary Context

      Sylvia Plath wrote "You're" in early 1960, a few months before the birth of her and Ted Hughes's first child, Frieda Hughes. The poem was published in Harper's magazine in 1961 but didn't appear in book form until the publication of Plath's Ariel in 1965. By that time, Plath had been dead for two years, having died by suicide in her home on February 11, 1963. The poem's theme of motherhood appears throughout Ariel, including in the well-known poems "Morning Song" and "Nick and the Candlestick." (Her second child, Nicholas—a.k.a. "Nick"—was born in 1962.) Another early Plath poem, "Metaphors," also describes her first pregnancy an indirect, riddling fashion.

      Like most of the Ariel poems, "You're" can be read as autobiographical. It even accurately predicts the birthdate of Plath's daughter: "All Fools' Day," or April 1. This kind of directly autobiographical material was rare in English-language poetry at the time, as was poetry dealing frankly with pregnancy and childbirth. Critics began to call this revolutionary style of writing, which emerged in the 1950s and '60s, Confessionalism.

      Confessionalist poets wanted to drop the barrier between themselves and "the speaker" of the poem and to examine aspects of life that a conformist post-war society deemed too indelicate to talk about. Robert Lowell's "Skunk Hour," W.D. Snodgrass's "Heart's Needle," and Anne Sexton's "The Double Image" are all good examples of Confessionalist poetry.

      Inspired by these poets, Plath turned more and more to her own experiences of childhood, marriage, and motherhood in her poetry. "You're" is just one of her honest, intimate poems about the joys and anxieties of becoming a mother.

      Historical Context

      Plath had a complicated relationship to motherhood, and her relationship with her own mother was often contentious. All around her, as she grew up, she saw women giving up careers and personal freedoms to become housewives whose lives revolved around their homes and children.

      After World War II, this sacrifice was par for the course in American society: while some women were privileged enough to get an education, their male-dominated culture expected them to give up their careers and settle down to raise a family. Plath had dreamed of being a writer from a young age; she had no intention of giving up her own ambitions just to fulfill society's expectations. But as she got older and fell in love (with fellow poet Ted Hughes), she found herself desiring the very things that represented a lack of freedom to her: marriage and children. Some of her more conflicted poems, including "Morning Song," reflect Plath's ambivalence about traditional motherhood. (And many of her late poems, written after her separation from Hughes, express mocking derision toward traditional marriage.) This emotional complexity caused her work to resonate strongly with second-wave feminists in the 1960s; women during this period saw their own experiences reflected in Plath's honest introspection.

      "You're" is a sunnier, less ambivalent poem, written while Plath's first child was on the way and her marriage remained intact. Its overall tone is hopeful, with its "you[]" (the baby) representing a "clean slate" of possibility. Still, its eerie references to "owls" and "eels" channel some anxiety as well, and its frank, funny descriptions of a fetus mark Plath's willingness to tackle subjects once considered indelicate or taboo.

  • More “You're” Resources

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