To be a dwelling on madhouses, nature; meanings of tools, greenhouses, florists' shops, tunnels vivid and disjointed.
On November 5, Plath exalted: "Miraculously, I wrote seven poems in my 'Poems for a Birthday' sequence.
"[6] Here the maternal figure is indifferent to her offspring: The mother of mouths didn’t love me.
[9][10] Ted Hughes, reflecting on Plath’s literary output, commented on the significance of "The Stones": The immediate source of it was a series of poems she began as a deliberate exercise in experimental improvisation on set themes.
[11][12]Hughes adds that "The Stones", in particular, represents "the first eruption" that produced the poems that appear posthumously in Plath's Ariel (1965).