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Sylvia Plath was a uniquely troubled individual, whose originality of vision was reflected by her often dark, brooding poetry. Through her poetry, Plath expressed her personal view on a variety of recurring themes, including the obstacles faced by a woman poet, influences that shape the self, the allure of death, and several others. Among her most original and personal perspectives is that on motherhood; her impression of the role of women in child-rearing is not simply unique, but almost perversely different, at times, from the traditional definition of motherhood, and reflects the dark and individualistic aspects of her character.

One poem in which Sylvia Plath's vision of motherhood is made palpably manifest is "Point Shirley." Here, as in the bulk of her poems concerning motherhood, Plath circumvents the traditional emotions and images associated with mothering (i.e. warmth, compassion, softness), and employs, rather, images of harshness, barrenness, and sterility. The speaker's description of her grandmother's home, a beacon of former childhood happiness, is one defined by emptiness, descriptors of something that has been depleted. Though the speaker never explicitly states his or her emotions, they are made evident through the poem's persistent tone of depletion and decay.

Point Shirley is not entirely negative and downtrodden in its implication toward motherhood; it is evident that the speaker felt and still feels love towards her late grandmother, as evident in the musing, "I would get from these dry-papped stones / The milk your love instilled in them" (Plath, lines 41-42), and the description of the grandmother's efforts to maintain her home as "a labor of love, and that labor lost" (Plath, ll. 34). It is apparent that the speaker feels a deep attachment to the grandmother character; therefore, her maternal love and effort was not entirely in vain. However, time, here represented by the sea as it "eats at Point Shirley" (Plath, line 36), conquers all, and renders the efforts of motherhood, that "labor of love," a lost endeavor.

"Point Shirley," in its beleaguered and elegiac tone, is exemplary of Plath's overriding perspective on mothering. Though the speaker in the poem refers not to the speaker's own mother, a grandmother is still an icon of motherhood and the continual labor required of maternal figures. By representing this labor as one that, in the end, is undone by time's erosive effects, like broom straws worn to the nub, Plath reveals her

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