Coming to This

Sylvia Plath, page 382

The thing you notice right away is that the speaker is speaking in first person plural. It almost seems like a direct address but it may be that she is just speaking about her relationship with the other person, meaning that she is addressing the reader not the other person. But it is unclear to me which; maybe it is both. I think this poem is about a relationship that is in trouble. They have certainly lost something ("discarded dreams"). In the second stanza, "The dinner is ready and we cannot eat" indicates that there is some kind of paralysis in their relationship. She personifies the food: "The meat sits" and "the wine waits." I like the way she does this. When a glass of wine is doing more than the humans, that is significant. In the last stanza she talks about "rewards." It is an odd way to talk about this type of relationship, but I think it is a recognition that something that is not working, and that they have paid a high price for, still has a reward for them. It is giving them something that they wanted or needed even if it was not something very positive or life-affirming-- it was what they "preferred." I also think this is a fairly simple form of a poem. There are no complicated metaphors or language, but the idea of this relationship is very complicated.