Sorting Laundry

I have never experienced such a deep reflection of life while sorting laundry, but I can see how the speaker could assign parts of her life to articles of laundry. Perhaps that makes laundry not so much of a chore, since I thought the speaker did not resent her role as the housekeeper. The hyperbole at the end of the poem, the "mountain of unsorted wash," is built throughout the preceding stanzas. Every article of clothing she describes is thrown onto the bed, adding to the height with each description. The clothes are folded and arranged neatly to make a single pile. This is comparable to how the speaker had to arrange her life to incorporate her lover to make one cohesive life together. Since she is so reflective when sorting laundry and sees so much more than clothes and loose objects, I think she enjoys doing the laundry. That gives her time to see her life laid out before her in the form of everyday laundry.