In Sylvia Plath's stark poem, "Childless Woman," she describes the feelings that assail her with respect to her infertility. While infertility is regarded by many affected women as a loss and a focus of grief, in Plath's case the inability to have children makes her feel useless, as though she were not fulfilling her real life's purpose, and the lack of children obliterates her future, making her life merely a push toward death.
From the very first lines of the poem, Plath depicts her childlessness as a dysfunction that leaves her useless and unable to fulfill her true purpose in life. "The womb rattles its pod" suggests the image of a dead plant pod full of dried-up seeds-Plath's eggs that will never become children (Plath 259). The rattling places an emphasis on the fact that the womb's deadness and emptiness is creating psychic "noise" in her being, a jangling sound that reminds her that the seeds are dead. "The moon discharges itself from the tree with nowhere to go" signifies ovulation, with the egg landing in a no-man's land where it cannot grow or develop (Plath 259).
When Plath talks about her "landscape," she is referring to her future-the landscape between her present and the end of her life. She describes it as "a hand with no lines," which suggests the phenomenon of a palm reader's ability to tell the future by reading the lines in a person's palm (Plath 259). In Plath's case, her palm has no lines, indicating that there is nothing in her future-there is no future, in fact. Instead of lines, she states that "The roads bunched to a knot, the knot myself, myself the rose you achieve" (Plath 259). A line would be akin to a path, which leads somewhere. The knot is a locus where all the paths dead-end and come to a place where they meet and become entwined about each other so that they no longer provide a way to go anywhere. The knot is a bundle of untrodden roads, a destiny that can n
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