"Marks"

"Marks" by Linda Pastan

Linda Pastan was born in 1932. She is an American poet known for writing short poems about family life, domesticity, motherhood, and the female experience. She was Poet Laureate of Maryland from 1991 to 1995. Pastan's poem "Marks", written in 1978, represents the unappreciated role of wife and mother in a household. The speaker of the poem is a wife and mother of two who feels judged and somewhat oppressed by her family. Throughout the poem, Pastan uses the metaphor of school grades, or "marks"  to show how her husband and children are judging her on her performance of her roles as mother and wife. She says her husband uses letter grades to evaluate her cooking, cleaning, and performance in bed. Her son calls her "average" and her daughter evaluates her using a pass/fail system. The speaker's worn-out tone helps to portray her negative attitude towards the grading system her family uses to evaluate her. The way that she speaks throughout the poem shows that she is sick and tired of how her family judges her and she feels that they don't appreciate everything she does for them. At the end of the poem, Pastan links back to the metaphor of grades when she writes, "Wait 'til they learn I'm dropping out". This links back to the metaphor because the speaker says that she is no longer going to put up with being graded by her family, she is "dropping out" just as a student would drop out of school.