The Other
The Other - meaning Summary
Marital Betrayal and Rupture
The poem portrays a speaker confronting a partner’s infidelity and the physical, visceral aftermath of marital rupture. Plath blends domestic details with violent, bodily imagery—cords, blood, and a head on the wall—to express jealousy, disgust, and a fracturing of identity. The tone is accusatory and hallucinatory, tracing how betrayal transforms intimate space into a scene of grotesque, psychological disintegration tied to the poet’s recurring themes of personal turmoil.
Read Complete AnalysesYou come in late, wiping your lips. What did I leave untouched on the doorstep--- White Nike, Streaming between my walls? Smilingly, blue lightning Assumes, like a meathook, the burden of his parts. The police love you, you confess everything. Bright hair, shoe-black, old plastic, Is my life so intriguing? Is it for this you widen your eye-rings? Is it for this the air motes depart? They rae not air motes, they are corpuscles. Open your handbag. What is that bad smell? It is your knitting, busily Hooking itself to itself, It is your sticky candies. I have your head on my wall. Navel cords, blue-red and lucent, Shriek from my belly like arrows, and these I ride. O moon-glow, o sick one, The stolen horses, the fornications Circle a womb of marble. Where are you going That you suck breath like mileage? Sulfurous adulteries grieve in a dream. Cold glass, how you insert yourself Between myself and myself. I scratch like a cat. The blood that runs is dark fruit--- An effect, a cosmetic. You smile. No, it is not fatal.
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