Miss Drake Proceeds to Supper
Miss Drake Proceeds to Supper - meaning Summary
Careful Navigation of Fragility
The poem follows a new woman, Miss Drake, moving through a hospital ward toward supper. It presents domestic rituals and decorative surroundings as threatening obstacles—crooked chairs, needles, broken glass—emphasizing vulnerability and the need for cautious, performative movement. Plath contrasts fragile feminine imagery with wary, deliberate steps; the speaker shows resilience in small, practiced gestures that negotiate institutional confinement and social expectation, making survival a quiet, exacting craft.
Read Complete AnalysesNo novice In those elaborate rituals Which allay the malice Of knotted table and crooked chair, The new woman in the ward Wears purple, steps carefully Among her secret combinations of eggshells And breakable hummingbirds, Footing sallow as a mouse Between the cabbage-roses Which are slowly opening their furred petals To devour and drag her down Into the carpet's design. With bid-quick eyed cocked askew She can see in the nick of time How perilous needles grain the floorboards And outwit their brambled plan; Now through her ambushed air, Adazzle with bright shards Of broken glass, She edges with wary breath, Fending off jag and tooth, Until, turning sideways, She lifts one webbed foot after the other Into the still, sultry weather Of the patients' dining room.
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