The Full Text of “Plenty”
The Full Text of “Plenty”
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“Plenty” Introduction
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"Plenty" is a poem by South African poet Isobel Dixon, published in her 2001 collection Weather Eye. In the poem, the speaker reminisces about her childhood, a time marked by poverty and drought, and in focuses in particular about her strained relationship with her mother. The poem illustrates the way that time and maturity has changed the speaker's perspective so that she now understands the difficulty of her mother's situation and respects the ways she was able to provide for her and her sisters. The speaker finally comes to feel that though they didn't have much in the way of material wealth, they still had "plenty" of love and support.
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“Plenty” Summary
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Back when I was a kid, and the five of us children would run around like wild while my mother was in a state of quiet distress, our old enamel bathtub—which was stained from age and rough with holes—sat on its griffin-shaped claws, never full of water.
Filling the tub was too expensive in our vast area of drought, where even dams couldn't retain water and windmills stopped working. In the same way, Mommy's smile stopped working. Her lips were pulled back and held down in an expression that I interpreted as meaning she was angry about something I had done.
I didn't know at the time that her frown was like a buckle sealing out trouble. She was always thinking about that trouble, keeping things locked shut and tied up: anxieties about money, shopping lists for things like over-the-counter pain medicine, oatmeal, gas, bread.
She even factored in the cost of toilet paper, and each month seemed to go on for far too many weeks. Her mouth was like a lid keeping all of this down.
We thought she was stingy. We skipped our chores, stole cookies, and best of all, when she was far enough away that she couldn't hear us, we would steal an extra, valuable inch of water in the bathtub.
It would come up to our chests, feeling so wrong yet delightful. We would lounge in this lush, hidden warmth that came out of fat brass faucets, which were like old, accommodating accomplices to our crime.
Now the bath bubbles come up to my chin. I am self-indulgent, devoted to luxury and pleasure. The shower is a hot waterfall and water is abundant, almost overabundant, here. I leave the heater on.
And I miss my sisters, who all live in different places now, as well as those bathroom arguments and also, finally, my mother's smile, set free from the ties of meager, parched times and our long childhood.
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“Plenty” Themes
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Time, Maturity, and Perspective
“Plenty” recalls a childhood in which the speaker and her sisters felt resentment towards their mother due to her strict rationing of everyday goods, even bathwater. The speaker recalls how she thought her mother was “mean” (i.e., stingy and unkind), and how when their mother wasn’t around, she and her sisters would rebel against such stinginess. Once an adult, however, the speaker finds sympathy for her mother as she comes understands the burden of poverty on a mother trying to raise five children in a drought. The poem thus illuminates the way time and maturity can provoke a shift in perspective and change people's understanding of their own past.
The poem begins with the speaker remembering her childhood. She juxtaposes her and her siblings’ loud and boisterous play, which is indicative of their health and happiness, with the “quiet despair” of her mother—something the children seem totally unaware of or unconcerned by.
Not understanding that her mother was constantly worrying about money and making ends meet, the speaker interpreted her mother’s frown as evidence of disapproval at “some fault” of hers. And because they didn’t understand their mother’s motives and just thought her stingy, the children rebelled. For example, the speaker remembers her and her sisters “skipping chores,” “swiping biscuits,” and stealing “another precious inch” of bathwater. These actions seemed like triumphs at the time, but the speaker, as an adult, now understands what they must have cost her mother, who was just trying to keep the family afloat.
As an adult, the speaker luxuriates in her life of “excess, almost.” Compared to the strictness of her childhood, being able to use as much hot water as she wants makes her feel like a “sybarite”—that is, someone who is devoted to indulging in pleasure and luxury. She feels this way because of her upbringing, suggesting the lingering impact of her childhood on her adult perspective. The poem then ends with the speaker thinking fondly of her sisters and finally even of her mother, the phrase “at last” implying that, for a long time, the speaker was only able to associate her mother with the strictness she imposed on the family.
There is a sense of regret here, as if the speaker wishes she had understood her mother’s motives sooner. It isn’t clear whether the mother’s smile being “loosed from the bonds / of lean, dry times” implies that the mother has died or is simply no longer experiencing financial difficulty now that her daughters’ “long childhood” is over. Either way, there is a hint of loss in the speaker’s tone at the end, as if she realizes the toll poverty and her own previous lack of understanding took on the relationship between her and her mother.
Where this theme appears in the poem:- Lines 1-32
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Parental Love and Sacrifice
Though the speaker thought her mother stingy as a child, as an adult the speaker is able to recognize her mother’s strength and force of will in the face of difficulty. By comparing her own relative luxury to her mother’s experience of just trying to keep chaos at bay, the speaker gains an appreciation of her mother’s sacrifice and is able to remember her childhood tenderly, realizing that even though she and her sisters didn’t have much materially, they had “plenty” of love and care. Parental love, the poem implies, is its own form of wealth.
The speaker describes her mother’s smile as an “anchor” and “a clasp to keep us all from chaos.” This description draws attention to the way parents shoulder the responsibility of keeping their children fed and housed while also shielding them from understanding the weight of this burden. By keeping the reality of poverty and her own responsibilities from her children, the speaker’s mother allowed them to retain their innocence a little longer, granted them the luxury of not having to worry about where their next meal was coming from.
The speaker sees this as a sacrifice; her mother chose to prioritize her children’s well-being and sense of security over being liked or even understood by them. As an adult, the speaker recognizes that her mother’s “sums and worries” and her “shopping lists” were in fact evidence of that which they had “plenty” of: love and care. She feels that she and her sisters were fortunate to have a mother who looked after them so diligently.
The speaker acknowledges the strength it must have taken for her mother to run a household during a drought with very few resources. Now able to luxuriate in hot showers and heating she doesn’t ever have to turn off, the speaker finally appreciates what her mother gave up in order to make sure the family had enough “aspirin, porridge, petrol, bread,” and even toilet paper. The speaker understands that her mother was unable to take anything for granted, that everything she and her sisters had growing up they had because her mother planned ahead and sacrificed something else in order for them to have it.
While her mother struggled to make ends meet, the speaker remembers even these difficult times with a fondness that suggests that the care she received as a child was indeed enough Even the tub that was “never full” was, after all, a source of “secret warmth,” and it’s clear that when the speaker takes baths now as an adult that she takes pleasure in her memories of “bathroom squabbles” with her family. While they may not have had much in material terms, then, it is clear the children were loved; the speaker, looking back, feels that love was more than enough.
Where this theme appears in the poem:- Lines 1-16
- Lines 29-32
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Line-by-Line Explanation & Analysis of “Plenty”
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Lines 1-2
When I was ...
... mother’s quiet despair,The poem begins with the speaker reminiscing about her childhood, when she and her siblings would "run riot"—that is, run around wildly. The use of the phrase "run riot" is hyperbolic, or exaggerated, and meant to illustrate the juxtaposition, or contrast, between the children's carefree existence and the mother's "quiet despair." It immediately signals to the reader how overwhelmed the mother must have felt trying to care for five children.
The use of the word "riot" also allows for an internal rhyme between "riot" and "quiet," putting added pressure on the relationship between the children and the mother, between their innocent rowdiness and the distress that comes with knowledge and responsibility.
The poem immediately introduces a bit of tension through its use of meter as well. The first line is in perfect iambic pentameter, meaning that it is composed of five iambs (feet with an unstressed syllable followed by a stressed syllable):
"When I | was young | and there | were five | of us,"
Iambic pentameter naturally infuses the line with a sense of balance and harmony. There is an idyllic quality to the speaker's remembrance, as if she quite enjoys thinking about her childhood. The second line, however, contains 13 syllables, disrupting the balance established in the first line. Because the line still follows the unstressed-stressed pattern of iambic pentameter, however, there is a sense that the line is attempting iambic pentameter but falling short. This echoes the imbalance between the children and the mother, their chaotic energy and her despairing state. The line enacts a sense of things getting away from her, but there is still more of a sense of control than not—the meter doesn't fall apart completely, the line just goes on a few beats too long.
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Lines 3-4
our old enamel ...
... was never full. -
Lines 5-7
Such plenty was ...
... Like Mommy’s smile. -
Lines 7-10
Her lips stretched ...
... all from chaos. -
Lines 11-16
She saw it ...
... hard on this. -
Lines 17-20
We thought her ...
... another precious inch -
Lines 21-24
up to our ...
... old compliant co-conspirators. -
Line 25
Now bubbles lap ... am a sybarite.
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Lines 26-28
The shower’s a ...
... the heating on. -
Lines 29-32
And miss my ...
... our long childhood.
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“Plenty” Symbols
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Water
Water in the poem symbolizes love and comfort. Though the bathtub that the speaker describes in the poem is a literal bathtub from her childhood, the speaker also uses it to reflect how she felt as a child; the fact that the tub was "never full" literally reflects the family's financial circumstances, but also signals that the speaker, as a kid, never felt totally enveloped by love and warmth. Her childhood was instead "dry."
That the landscape at the time was going through a "drought," with its "dams" all dry, enhances this symbolism. The speaker directly connects the drought to her mother's lack of affection, comparing "Mommy's smile" to stalled windmills (which, while not explicitly linked to water, are a part of the drought-ridden landscape in the poem). The speaker believed her mother "mean" and stingy, so it makes sense that she'd be symbollically connected to the parched environment.
Later, in lines 20-24 ("stole another precious [...] old compliant co-conspirators."), it becomes clear that a warm bath was a source of comfort and pleasure for the children in a home marked by poverty. In the bathtub the children felt nurtured, cared for, and enveloped in ways that their mother could not always provide. That the water felt "precious" again implies that it represented more than just water. And as an adult, the fact that the speaker's shower feels like "a hot cascade," or waterfall, with water "plentiful, to excess, almost" implies that she no longer wants for the kind of comfort she was denied in childhood.
At the same time, by the end of the poem, the speaker revises her earlier summation of her childhood. It becomes apparent that though the bathtub was "never full," it was certainly not empty. In other words, thought the children would have liked to feel more tenderness, more warmth, more nurturing from their mother, the speaker recognizes that what they did receive was not only enough, it was "plenty."
Where this symbol appears in the poem:- Lines 3-4: “our old enamel tub, age-stained and pocked / upon its griffin claws, was never full.”
- Lines 5-6: “Such plenty was too dear in our expanse of drought / where dams leaked dry and windmills stalled.”
- Lines 20-24: “stole another precious inch / up to our chests, such lovely sin, / lolling luxuriant in secret warmth / disgorged from fat brass taps, / our old compliant co-conspirators.”
- Lines 26-27: “The shower’s a hot cascade / and water’s plentiful, to excess, almost, here.”
- Line 32: “dry times and our long childhood”
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“Plenty” Poetic Devices & Figurative Language
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Alliteration
Alliteration is one of the many tools Dixon uses to create rhythm in the poem and to place emphasis on particular words. The use of alliteration is perhaps more noticeable because the poem, generally speaking, eschews rhyme; whatever rhythm there is, then, is created through the use of meter and other sonic devices, such as consonance and assonance.
The effect of alliteration changes depending on how close together or far apart the alliterative words are, and which specific sounds are being repeated. So, for instance, in lines 5-6 ("Such plenty was [...] and windmills stalled."), the alliteration of /d/ sounds ("dear," "drought," "dams," "dry,") is spaced apart, but is also insistent: there's not just two alliterative words, but four. The overall effect of the alliteration here is more rhythmic than anything else.
In lines 21-22 ("up to our [...] in secret warmth"), the alliteration of /l/ sounds at the beginning of "lovely," "lolling," and "luxuriant" is compounded by the fact that these words are also utilizing consonance—the /l/ sound isn't just showing up at the beginnings of words, but within them as well. The effect is that the passage enacts what it is describing through the use of sound: so many /l/ sounds all at once forces the reader to slow down and experience the pleasure of "lolling" in a hot bath.
Where alliteration appears in the poem:- Line 2: “running,” “riot”
- Line 5: “dear,” “drought”
- Line 6: “dams,” “dry”
- Line 7: “smile,” “stretched”
- Line 8: “anchored,” “anger”
- Line 9: “not,” “knowing”
- Line 10: “clasp,” “keep,” “chaos”
- Line 11: “snapping,” “straps”
- Line 12: “spilling,” “sums”
- Line 13: “porridge,” “petrol”
- Line 14: “paper”
- Line 17: “Skipped”
- Line 18: “swiped,” “biscuits,” “best”
- Line 21: “such,” “lovely,” “sin”
- Line 22: “lolling,” “luxuriant,” “secret”
- Line 23: “from,” “fat”
- Line 24: “compliant,” “co-conspirators”
- Line 29: “miss,” “my,” “scattered,” “sisters”
- Line 30: “squabbles”
- Line 31: “my,” “mother’s,” “smile,” “loosed”
- Line 32: “lean,” “long”
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Assonance
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Consonance
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Sibilance
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Enjambment
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Asyndeton
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Juxtaposition
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Imagery
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Metaphor
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Personification
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"Plenty" Vocabulary
Select any word below to get its definition in the context of the poem. The words are listed in the order in which they appear in the poem.
- Running riot
- Enamel
- Griffin claws
- pocked
- Dear
- Mean
- Luxuriant
- Lolling
- Disgorged
- Compliant
- Co-conspirators
- Sybarite
- Cascade
- Squabbles
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(Location in poem: Line 2: “all running riot to my mother’s quiet despair”)
In this case, running riot means to run around without restraint; uncontrolled.
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Form, Meter, & Rhyme Scheme of “Plenty”
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Form
"Plenty" consists of eight four-line stanzas (a.k.a. quatrains), for a total of 32 lines. This gives the poem a feeling of regularity and structure that reflects the mother's attempts to "keep [the children] all from chaos." At the same time, though, the speaker also often uses enjambment between stanzas. This, combined with the lack of rhyme scheme and conversational tone, creates a sensation of spilling out of the prescribed form, as though the speaker is unable to stick within the rigid confines of the poem. One might say, then, that the more structured aspects of the poem reflect the speaker's strict upbringing, while the more relaxed aspects reflect her current state of self-indulgence, or at least her feeling of self-indulgence as she soaks in a hot bath remembering her lean childhood.
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Meter
The poem is written in a mixture of free verse and iambic pentameter, a meter in which each lines consists of five iambs—poetic feet with an unstressed-stressed, da-DUM, syllable pattern. That said, the poem's meter is relatively relaxed and loose. Many lines fall short of or run over the expected 10 syllables and/or make use of other poetic feet.
The first stanza sets up an expectation that the poem will mostly adhere to a regular meter, as three out of the four lines are in near-perfect iambic pentameter (the second line runs on three syllables too long, and its stresses are irregular):
When I | was young | and there | were five | of us,
all run- | ning ri- | ot to | my moth | er's qui- | et despair,
our old | ena- | mel tub, | age-stained | and pocked
upon | its grif- | fin claws, | was nev- | er full.As the poem moves on, the meter gets looser and looser. By stanzas 5-7 ("We thought her [...] the heating on."), only the occasional line is actually 10 syllables long, most of them being much shorter.
This reflects the rebellion of the speaker and her sisters against their mother's strict rules, which they didn't understand as necessary at the time. Shorter lines, such as line 20 ("stole another precious inch"), seem to indicate in their shortness what these acts of rebellion potentially cost the speaker's mother—not being able to make resources stretch until the end of the month, perhaps.
Other lines, such as lines 25 ("Now bubbles lap my chin. I am a sybarite.") and 27 ("and water's plentiful, to excess, almost, here.") stretch beyond the 10 syllable mark, reflecting the excess of the speaker's current circumstances.
Finally, the poem returns to 10 syllables in its final line, though its inconsistent stresses still keep it from being a perfect iambic pentameter:
"of lean, | dry times | and our | long chi- | ldhood."
This imperfect return to balance seems to indicate the speaker's understanding that though her childhood wasn't perfect, she was provided more than enough love and care.
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Rhyme Scheme
"Plenty" does not have a rhyme scheme. In fact, it hardly uses rhyme at all. This keeps the poem from feeling overly constructed, preserving its conversational, reflective tone.
There are only a handful of instances of subtle rhyme, which can be attributed to the presence of consonance and assonance throughout the poem. For example, in line 2, note the internal rhyme of "riot" and "quiet." The rhyme helps draw attention to the contrast between the children's innocence and the mother's state of distress.
Another internal rhyme pops up with "anchored" and "anger" in line 8. This rhyme is not quite a full rhyme, but rather a slant or near rhyme; nevertheless, it illustrates the relationship between the speaker and her mother, and the speaker's feeling as a child that she was to blame for her mother's unhappiness.
Moments like these, however, are not part of any broader pattern of rhyme in the poem.
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“Plenty” Speaker
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The speaker of this poem is someone looking back on childhood with the maturity that comes with age. As an adult, the speaker is able to recognize the difficulty of their mother's situation as a parent of five children during a drought. It's clear that while the speaker may have resented the mother for her strict rules and rations as a child, they now understand and appreciate the hard work and sacrifice that goes into being a parent, and the poem expresses the speaker's myriad feelings in realizing this—a mixture of empathy, admiration, nostalgia, and regret.
It's also worth noting the autobiographical nature of the poem. Dixon herself is one of five sisters, and grew up in the Karoo region of South Africa, which is semiarid and prone to droughts. The poem does not explicitly state the speaker's gender, but as it is autobiographical, it is fair to assume that the speaker is Dixon herself. Given that the poem is usually interpreted in this way, we've used female pronouns throughout this guide; do note, however, that it's possible to understand the poem on its own, it without knowing anything about the poet.
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“Plenty” Setting
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The first six stanzas of the poem are all written in the past tense, and take place in the speaker's childhood home. This home is marked by poverty and drought; the drought more than anything can be seen as the setting of this poem, as it is the lack of water which makes the children's warm baths and stolen inch of water feel so luxurious.
In the second-to-last stanza, poem switches to the present. The speaker is located in a bathtub inside her house. Based on this information, it is safe to assume that the speaker is reminiscing on her childhood while taking a bath—the bath itself having reminded her of the tub she and her sisters used as children.
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Literary and Historical Context of “Plenty”
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Literary Context
Isobel Dixon grew up in South Africa and studied English Literature at Stellenbosch University. She later earned her postgraduate degree in English Literature and Applied Linguistics in Scotland. "Plenty" was published in South Africa in 2001, in Dixon's first collection, Weather Eye, though it later appeared in her first English publication, A Fold In the Map, as well.
As a contemporary poet and literary agent, her work has been influenced by fellow contemporary writers (including other South African writers, writing in both English and Afrikaans) as well as canonical English-language writers. Among her poetic influences are Sylvia Plath, Ted Hughes, Seamus Heaney, Derek Walcott, and Emily Dickinson, as well as many novelists and memoirists. Contemporary poems that similarly focus on the shifting relationships between parents and children include Seam Heaney's "Follower" and Robert Hayden's "Those Winter Sundays."
Dixon doesn't belong to a particular school of poetry, though generally she can be referred to as a lyric poet. Her work is often oriented towards the natural world, and though she might be described as a "nature poet," her work deals just as much with humanity—with the emotional and the political, and in particular her own family and experiences of in-between-ness as someone who has lived in vastly different cultures and landscapes.
Historical Context
Dixon was born in the Eastern Cape province of South Africa in 1969. When she was three years old her family moved to the Karoo region, which was farther inland and semiarid, in an effort to relieve her father's asthma. Dixon has cited these landscapes—the coastal hills and the almost-deserts of South Africa—to be a great source of inspiration in her work.
Dixon was pursuing her master's degree in Edinburgh during the 1994 general elections in South Africa. This election was momentous as it officially marked the end of apartheid in South Africa—for the first time, citizens could not be denied the right to vote based on their race. This resulted in the election of the African National Congress, a fully democratic political party, and the election of Nelson Mandela, the country's first black head of state, whose administration set to work dismantling institutionalized racial segregation and investigating human rights violations. While Dixon had initially planned on going into academia, the 1994 election and everything it symbolized caused her to re-evaluate; in short, she said it made her want to do "something more creative and grass roots."
She now lives in Cambridge, England and works in London as a literary agent, often representing other South African writers. She is the Head of Books at Blake Friedmann.
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More “Plenty” Resources
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External Resources
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"About Me" — A brief introduction to Isobel Dixon, written by the poet herself.
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More Poems About Childhood — A roundup other poems that involve speakers reminiscing on their childhoods.
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The Poem Out Loud — A video recording of Dixon reading "Plenty" at Poetry Parnassus in 2012.
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The Karoo — A compilation of images of the Karoo region of South Africa.
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An Interview with Dixon — A conversation with Dixon for LitNet.
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