In The Park

Harwood’s three-stanza poem tells a specific, linear story, from a third-person perspective, of a woman in the park with her children. The first stanza gives readers a visual description of the scene. The language is immediately judgmental—a tone that continues throughout the poem, implying the disapproving gaze of passers-by and society in general. The poem appraises the woman’s clothes as "out of date" (Line 1)—she is unfashionable, suggesting that she does not have the time or money to keep her style current. The deeper implication, which will be made more explicit in the poem's last line, is that time has stopped for her as an aesthetic being—she wears the fashion of the time when she was still an unattached person interested in maintaining an attractive appearance. Now that she is primarily a mother, her selfhood—here in the form of outward self-expression—has been erased.

The second line describes the misbehavior of two of her children. Again, their—possibly valid or explicable—complaints are described with external judgment. Unlike ideal children, taught be seen and not heard, these "whine and bicker, tug her skirt" (Line 2). They are demanding attention, explaining why the woman no longer has the ability to spend time on herself. These unpleasant children are in direct contrast with a third sibling, whose activity is more ambiguous. The child "draws aimless patterns in the dirt” (Line 3). On the one hand, the child is self-contained and creative, and the dreamily abstract "patterns" foreshadow the wistful speculation of the woman about a different life path that is about to follow. On the other hand, the child is drawing "in the dirt," implying filth that the woman will eventually have to clean as part of her domestic duties.

While all of this activity happens around the woman sitting in the park, an element of surprise appears in the fourth line: a former romantic interest. The final line of the first stanza ends with enjambment, or a line that doesn't end in punctuation, meant to be read continuously with the next. This old lover is “too late” (Line 4)—a phrase that has two meanings and first introduces the poem's interest in text and subtext. The surface meaning is one that revolves around social mores and basic politeness. The beginning of the second stanza clarifies that the woman is too late to ignore this man's nod of recognition. Now, the woman cannot hide and has to engage in pleasantries. However, the deeper meaning of "too late" is all the missed opportunities that the woman knows she can longer access: She cannot rekindle this love, given her marriage and children; she cannot escape the domestic into whatever future this love affair could have had.

The man that the woman "loved once" (Line 4) must now pretend to be a casual acquaintance. Their conversation is stilted and seemingly pre-scripted according to what is proper. Rather than recording all of it, the poem gives us a few tired clichés —“How nice” and “Time holds great surprises”—and assumes that we can fill in the rest of what this banal chat must sound like: "et cetera" (Line 6). Meanwhile, the woman cannot help but imagine the man's judgment and criticism of her just beneath the surface. His "neat head" (Line 7) offers a contrast with her dowdy clothing that has been mangled by her children. She pictures “a small balloon” (Line 8)—a cartoon thought bubble—rising from his head captioning his relief that he does not have her life. Amusingly, even this is a cliché—a truncated version of "there but for the grace of God go I"—even in his innermost thoughts, the man is so bound to conventionality that he cannot escape its linguistic clutches.

Unlike the first two four-line stanzas, the third stanza has six lines. It also follows a different rhyme scheme: ABCABC instead of ABBA. These differences in form and meter reflect that this is the first time the woman will reveals her genuine feelings aloud.

Line 9 brings in the visual elements of “flickering light” (Line 9) to reflect the appearance of evening in the park. Much like the woman's opportunities for a different, more self-directed life, the light is fading. While the conversation with her former love interest could have led to romance, in reality, it only becomes the occasion for standard pleasantries and repetitive back-and-forth. The word “rehearsing” (Line 9) suggests how often the woman is used to reciting “the children’s names and birthdays” (Line 10). The woman's dialog does not reflect her lived experience—rather, like an actor, she is rehearsing the same role over and over again by simply parroting back socially mandated generalities about the blessings of motherhood. In Lines 10 and 11, we hear how the woman enacts this pose: She claims that watching her children grow up is "sweet" (Line 10). The mutual lies have taken the humanity of these two interlocutors out of the scene. The woman's lie about how delightful her children are is addressed not to the man but to his "departing smile" (Line 11), a veneer of politeness that pretends he is glad to see her, but actually reflects his happiness at getting away from the situation.

In Line 12, she tends to her child. This image of a mother with a young child in her arms evokes the iconic image of the Madonna and the infant Jesus—the subject of innumerable paintings throughout the history of Western art. However, the woman is not rapt in maternal bliss. Instead, she is “staring at her feet” (Line 13) in a moment of reflection, as she connects her past life with this man to her current life with her children. The poem's final line is bleak, rueful, and darkly funny. The woman can only tell the truth to the wind, the personified natural phenomenon of the ephemeral. Bitterly, she sighs, “They have eaten me alive” (Line 14), finally acknowledging the truth about the demands of her children and of domestic life, which has violently erased her identity as anything other than a mother—the image of the children's cannibalism is striking and brutal, especially when juxtaposed to the anodyne dialog of the rest of the poem.