19 pages • 38 minutes read
In The Park
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Themes
The Harsh Realities of Motherhood
“In the Park” exposes the dark side of motherhood, which was rarely if ever explored in the popular culture of the time. The woman is trapped in the park with three children, expected to handle their different demands on her own: Two are fighting with each other, complaining, and yanking at her; the third is spaced out, drawing meaninglessly. Rather than a place to enjoy nature, the park becomes a holding cell whose possible beauty or aesthetic appeal is erased by the demands of the children. The woman has also lost many aspects of her identity—her "out of date" (Line 1) clothing speaks to the fact that she no longer has the time, energy, or money to participate in the kind of self-expression that marks individuality.
The woman’s biggest fear and excitement for the day is seeing a former lover. Because that relationship no longer has a level of intimacy, she is unable to speak truthfully to him. Instead, they are found by convention to keep to conversational clichés and useless repetitions of maternal positivity. The woman cannot find solace or comfort by sharing her woes with this old friend; rather, the man and the woman put up barriers to mask their feelings, as she imagines him silently judging her and feeling relief at no longer being associated with her. After he leaves, the encounter is revealed to have been meaningless: No romance was rekindled, no memories recollected, no human exchange of any kind has actually taken place.
The woman retreats into the small, insular world she now occupies—that of her children, who do not provide companionship, but require work, responsibility, and time-consuming attention. Her only confidant is the wind—a safe inanimate object into which she can speak her true thoughts. While she quietly nurses her youngest, dirt-covered child, she assumes the pose of the Madonna—the quintessential image of motherhood in Western art. But what she really feels is that her children have cannibalized her—literally, as each has nursed, and figuratively, by destroying any personhood she has outside of being their mother.
Superficial Social Conventions
In the poem, the woman has a need to keep up with appearances when she encounters a former love interest. Because she is unable to do so with her physical attire, which is “out of date” (Line 1), it is all the more important that she focus on the appearance of her words. The woman's conversation with her former romantic interest is grounded in clichés and overused banalities. At one point, the poem—or the woman—is so sick of the repeated phrases that they are simply elided into the dismissing "et cetera" (Line 6). Similarly, the poem describes the woman's speech as “rehearsing” (Line 9) to suggest that she is enacting a pre-prepared role she has at the ready when someone asks about her life. She can easily recite important dates and milestones of her children and recasts the visual disarray of her three children drawing in the dirt, whining, and tugging at her skirt as a positive indicator of maternal bliss and fulfillment: “It’s so sweet / to hear their chatter, watch them grow and thrive” (Lines 10-11).
The woman's words are superficial and false, hiding how she really feels, partly to cover the family's messy display in a public setting. As she sits, she feels the disapproving external gaze of judgment; eventually, this gaze is localized to the critical eye of the man. When they speak, the woman can tell what the man must really be thinking, imagining a thought bubble rise from him, with the relief that he too would be trapped with her but “for the grace of God” (Line 8).
The polite veneer of the encounter ensures that it will mean nothing in the grand scheme of either life. The man and woman part as distant acquaintances, rather than friends—the socially mandated script their conversation has followed precludes any real connection.
The Past Meets The Present
The poem explores the jarring juxtaposition of different phases of people's lives. We see three distinct phases of the woman's life in “In the Park.” She begins the poem in the present: She is a mother whose children demand her full attention, no longer allowing her to perceive the natural beauty of the park or to imagine herself as anything other than their caretaker and object of total consumption.
The first glimpse of the past the poem shows is the description of her clothing as "out of date" (Line 1). While the woman can no longer be at the forefront of fashion, the phrase confirms that her clothing was actually once in style. It isn't that she is slovenly or dressed in rags; rather, the forward momentum that has taken her from the past to her present has stripped her of the capacity for self-expression. Her clothes once conveyed the desire to be attractive to onlookers, but now they are dowdy because no one sees her except the children.
The last line of the first stanza provides a more obvious intrusion from a previous time of the woman's life: "Someone she loved once" (Line 4). She is “too late” (Line 4) to bring this past back to life. Instead of reliving it as a pleasant memory, the woman is trapped into an encounter: Her past here meets her present, a present she does not want the past to see. She is forced to allow the past into the present, which now only serves as a reminder of everything she has given up in motherhood. She sticks to safe topics in the second stanza, such as “How nice” (Line 6). After expanding a bit more on her present life in stanza three without revealing too much emotion, she says goodbye to the past, which leaves with a “departing smile” (Line 12)—the man is no longer even a full person, but just a wistful glimpse into an alternate present that never happened. This brief exchange is not enough to keep her stuck in the past, as the reality of the present, i.e., her child needs to nurse, stares her in the face. Upon confronting the past, the woman is able to fully reflect on how challenging the present really is.
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