In her poem, "Sow", Silvia Plath portrayed an awed speaker and described to the reader his encounter with a gigantic pig. In the poem, the hog is depicted as a supernaturally massive animal, an effect that the author achieves through specific images of the pig and by utilizing diction in a peculiar manner.
             The title of the poem already implies what Plath will focus on in her verses. She then continues on to introduce the "secret" pig to the reader. By maintaining a mysterious tone, the author magnifies the curiosity of the reader as well as the almost mythical size of the pig. The secretive atmosphere is created through images such as the "lantern-lit maze of barns", which is an alliteration to the mythical figure of the Minotaur, a Greek monster (half man half bull) that was imprisoned in a maze. These images surround the pig in the reader's mind with an almost unearthly aura and prepare him for further description of the hog.
             The speaker then continues to further explore the imaginative picture of the pig that had been aroused in the previous stanzas. He does so by stating what the pig is not instead of directly revealing its characteristics. Images such as "this was no rose-and-larkspurred china suckling with a penny slot" and "nor dolt pig ripe for heckling" slowly take away the possibilities of what the pig could be that are forming in the reader's mind as he is following the speaker's observations. Plath consciously utilizes these techniques to painfully slowly reveal to the reader how the pig actually looks like. However, there is an exception to this technique that Plath uses in that particular part of the poem. Amongst the things that the sow is not, the speaker also describes her as "maunching thistle and knotweed on her snout-cruise, bloat tun of milk". Plath seems to slip into the poem a foreshadowing of what the pig is really g
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