The Disquieting Muses (poem)

Well, in history - Sappho, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Christina Rossetti, Amy Lowell, Emily Dickinson, Edna St. Vincent Millay - all dead.

[7] The theme and title for the poem is derived from the painting by Italian artist Giorgio de Chirico entitled The Disquieting Muses (1918).

[8] Reading the poem on a BBC radio programme, Plath explained the significance of the title: All through the poem, I have in mind the enigmatic figures in this painting—the three terrible faceless dressmaker’s dummies in classical gowns…the dummies suggest a twentieth-century version of other sinister trios of women - the Three Fates, the witches of Macbeth, Thomas De Quincey’s sisters of madness.

[9]Biographer Caroline King Barnard locates the poem's theme in the familiar realm of a daughter's discontents with her upbringing - emphatically directed at her mother.

Barnard offers the first of the stanzas in which the disquieting muses appear at “the left side” of the infant daughter's crib: Mother, mother, what illbred aunt Or what disfigured and unsightlyCousin did you so unwisely keepUnasked to my christening, that sheSent these ladies in her steadWith heads like darning-eggs to nodAnd nod and nod at foot and headAnd at the left side of my crib?