Aftermath
Aftermath - fact Summary
Included in Ariel Collection
The poem depicts a crowd gawking at a recent domestic disaster while a subdued, maternal figure—evoked as Mother Medea—moves through the ruined home. Plath critiques public appetite for spectacle and the extraction of private grief as entertainment. The speaker frames spectators as predatory and the bereaved as commodified, compressing personal tragedy into a social performance; the image links private suffering to cultural voyeurism.
Read Complete AnalysesCompelled by calamity's magnet They loiter and stare as if the house Burnt-out were theirs, or as if they thought Some scandal might any minute ooze From a smoke-choked closet into light; No deaths, no prodigious injuries Glut these hunters after an old meat, Blood-spoor of the austere tragedies. Mother Medea in a green smock Moves humbly as any housewife through Her ruined apartments, taking stock Of charred shoes, the sodden upholstery: Cheated of the pyre and the rack, The crowd sucks her last tear and turns away.
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