Plath movingly captures the different experiences of the three women, all patients, all pregnant at the beginning of the poem, but in very different situations by the end. The first woman experiences the ambivalence of going into labor, calling herself "A seed about to break," and saying of the process itself that "there is no miracle more cruel." Her feelings about the new child are similarly complex, at first questioning: "Who is he, this blue, furious boy . . . ?" but soon she is feeling like "a river of milk, . . . a warm hill" and wondering "What did my fingers do before they held him?" She takes her new son home to his nursery, hoping for normality, that he’ll be "unexceptional."

The second woman’s horror and sense of guilt are made even more palpable by their juxtaposition with the fulfillment of the first. After losing the child, she says "It is a world of snow now" and, haunted by her other unborn babies, she believes she is only able to "create corpses." She leaves the hospital to go back to her job and her husband and a terrible sense of isolation: she calls herself "a heroine of the peripheral."

The third woman reflects the helplessness of unwanted pregnancy. Inside her, she feels "the face . . . shaping itself with love, as if I was ready." After the birth, she sees her child, "my red, terrible girl," only through glass, briefly, before she must say goodbye and leave her behind to return to college feeling like "a wound walking out of hospital."

The three voices together capture an enormous amount about women’s experiences of reproduction. Instead of describing the clinical practicalities of the "maternity ward," Plath provides a glimpse into the minds of three of its patients, using powerful and psychologically convincing images to convey the complicated ways birth, infertility, and unwanted pregnancy are felt.