Analysis of The Mother by Gwendolyn Brooks For this assignment, I chose the poem "The Mother" by Gwendolyn Brooks. This poem is generally about abortion and the feelings a mother has. It's about the remembrance of the children aborted and the little things children do that the mother will miss. Many images are conveyed throughout this entire poem. When Brooks mentions "the singers and workers that never handled the air" it gives off an air of sadness. You get the feeling that Brooks is trying to convey, to the mother, a sense of longing for those little things mothers are know to be good at. This is shown in the line, "you will never wind up the sucking thumb or scuttle off ghosts that come" .Then when she starts to address the child saying, "you were born, you had a body, you died." its hard not to feel some sadness or even a feeling of injustice. All the incidents that I mentioned in the previous paragraph are among the many vivid images in this work. Brooks obviously either had experience with abortions or she felt very strongly about the issue. The feelings of sadness, remorse, longing, and unfulfilled destinies were arranged so that even someone with no experience or opinion on this issue, really felt strong emotions when reading "The Mother" .One image that is so vivid that it stayed with me through the entire poem was within the third line. Brooks writes, " the damp small pulps with little or no hair" . In the last half of the poem (lines 20 to 33), she changes who she is addressing. Instead of telling the mother what she is missing she is now talking to the "child" .When she does this it expresses other emotions. These new emotions are ones of sorrow, love, searching for forgiveness etc. The arrangement of the poem, going from talking to the mother to talking to the aborted child, is appropriate in my opinion. It helps the poem to flow easily and makes it simple to follow. I find most poems hard to picture in my head , but as I read "The Mother" I can imagine the whole situation happening. In the last lines of the poem the woman attempts to reassure the child that she loved it with all her heart.
Stanza two shows us how the baby is well looked after, yet is lacking the affection that small children need. The child experiences a ‘vague passing spasm of loss.’ The mother blocks out her child’s cries. There is a lack of contact and warmth between the pair.
The author of “Mother to Son”, Langston Hughes, displays the attitude of hopefulness in the poem to show that life will not be easy for the son, but he should never give up because the mother did not. The author uses literary devices like figurative language, imagery, and diction. By using these literary devices, Hughes creates a sympathetic mood in the poem in order to emotionally draw in the reader.
Gwendolyn Brooks' poem "The mother" tells us about a mother who had many abortions. The speaker is addressing her children in explain to them why child could not have them. The internal conflict reveals that she regret killing her children or "small pups with a little or with no hair." The speaker tells what she will never do with her children that she killed. She will "never neglect", "beat", "silence", "buy with sweet", " scuffle off ghosts that come", "controlling your luscious sigh/ return for a snack", never hear them "giggled", "planned", and "cried." She also wishes she could see their "marriage", "aches", "stilted", play "games", and "deaths." She regrets even not giving them a "name" and "breaths." The mother knows that her decision will not let her forget by using the phrase "Abortions will not let you forget." The external conflict lets us know that she did not acted alone in her decision making. She mentions "believe that even in my deliberateness I was not deliberate" and "whine that the crime was other than mine." The speaker is saying that her decision to have an abortion was not final yet but someone forced her into having it anyway. The external conflict is that she cannot forget the pain on the day of having the abortions. She mentions the "contracted" and "eased" that she felt having abortions.
In Francis Ellen Watkins Harper's poem "The Slave Mother, A Tale of Ohio," she uses a shifting tone as well as other specific literary techniques to convey the heartbreaking story of a slave woman being separated from her child. This story specifically draws light to the horrific reality that many slaves faced: families were torn apart. Because this poem tells the story of a mother and her son, it also draws light to the love that mothers have for their children and the despair that they would go through if anything were to ever happen to them. Harper's poem addresses both race and gender, and it effectively conveys the heartbreak of the mother to the audience.
“The Mother” (Gwendolyn Brooks) has three stanza has and aabbccdd etc. rhyming scheme that is called couplets. The first stanza The first stanza started of “abortions will not let you forget” (Gwendolyn Brooks) this is a strong statement that supported the theme of this poem. Then Brooks go on and telling how the mother did not get to hold the child that she aborted and how sad it was for her.
In “Momma” by Chrystal Meeker, the narrator, is telling how their mother cares for her children. In "Momma" by Chrystal Meeker, the narrator is telling how a mother living in poverty cares for her children. In order to understand this poem, readers must understand that the family has arguments, the mother unconditionally loves her children, and the daughters eventually have guilt over the arguments and treatment of their mother.
Motherhood is a compassionate kinship between the mother and her offspring. Becoming a mother can be planned or unplanned depending on the person. Families tend to cherish the new beginning to a little human life. When someone decides to have a new life, it isn’t easy, and not only can some women not get pregnant, but the variation your body endures is amazing. The body goes through many life changing experiences. Some women can gain weight, or have a rollercoaster of emotions due to their hormones. Having a child is a very hard thing, because your whole life changes and it’s not all about you anymore. Children cannot control the family or mothers they have when born, they aren’t able to understand the concept of what is happening with their mothers or families until they are older. In novels, Incidents in the Life of a Slave girl, by Harriet A. Jacobs and The Awakening by Kate Chopin motherhood is portrayed in many different ways. The two stories differ in my way but both encounter similarities of motherhood in various ways.
What does an ideal mother do? In the novel A Thousand Splendid Suns, by Khaled Hosseini, the ideal of mother is described. In the story two mothers, Nana and Mariam, are showed as the model of a perfect mother. Through Nana and Mariam, Hosseini shows that an ideal mother must be willing to sacrifice, must do her best to ensure their children’s survival, and be able to utilize tough love. Throughout the book both moms are constantly sacrificing to make their children’s life better.
Through diction, the tone of the poem is developed as one that is downtrodden and regretful, while at the same time informative for those who hear her story. Phrases such as, “you are going to do bad things to children…,” “you are going to suffer… ,” and “her pitiful beautiful untouched body…” depict the tone of the speaker as desperate for wanting to stop her parents. Olds wrote many poems that contained a speaker who is contemplating the past of both her life and her parent’s life. In the poem “The Victims,” the speaker is again trying to find acceptance in the divorce and avoidance of her father, “When Mother divorced you, we were glad/ … She kicked you out, suddenly, and her/ kids loved it… ” (Olds 990). Through the remorseful and gloomy tone, we see that the speaker in both poems struggles with a relationship between her parents, and is also struggling to understand the pain of her
Symbolism and imagery help Harwood to achieve the poem’s purpose in creating a sympathetic tone towards the woman’s struggle. The use of rhyming couplets and irregular short sentences create a hectic and disorganised structure and rhythm to the poem, which symbolises the mother’s life. Harwood uses emotive description and olfactory imagery to allow the audience to experience exactly what the woman is feeling. “A pot boils over.
In the poem the speaker imagines the lives that her unborn children could have possibly had. Not only does she think about their lives being taken away from them she thinks about what she took away from herself, motherhood. She mentions in the poem that they will “never wind up the sucking thumb”(Brooks 10). She also says that she would never get to breastfeed.
For the most part of the poem she states how she believes that it is Gods calling, [Then ta’en away unto eternity] but in other parts of the poem she eludes to the fact that she feels more like her granddaughter was stolen from her [or sigh thy days so soon were terminate]. One of the main beliefs in these times was that when someone died it was their time; God needed them and had a better plan. Both poets found peace in the idea that God had the children now and it was part of the plan, but are also deeply saddened and used poetry as a coping mechanism.
Katherine Philips gained a lot of attention as a poet after writing “On the Death of My Dearest Child, Hector Philips”. This poem was written in a way to give readers an emotional account of a mother mourning the experience of losing her child. Philips expressed deep emotions from a maternal standpoint in the elegy. Unlike Jonson, Philips had the unspoken right of claiming a deep maternal connection with her son through pregnancy and childbirth. Philips’ approach to writing “On the Death of My Dearest Child” illustrates that the pain of losing her son, Hector, was enough for her to never write another verse again.
But her use of pathos and description shows that even she can’t handle the dark moments that experience with young pregnant women. She describes the process of abortion, the way she feels as well as the pregnant victims. Tisdale wants people to be educated in this area, so less abortion have to be performed. As she narrates her stories of teenagers receiving abortions, she believes that in some circumstances abortion is necessary, but it can also be a cruel, and tragic thing to be a part of, and could easily be avoided if people were more educated in the matter. “Soon I am talking to an eighteen-year-old women pregnant for the fourth time” (Tisdale 650). Tisdale’s use of pathos does not help her in this case. As she describes in detail what goes on during abortion, readers come to realizes how terrible and dark it really is. Tisdale describes the emotion pregnant women feel as they are having their child ripped away from them.
Infant Sorrow by William Blake is about the birth of a child into a dangerous world. The meaning behind this poem is that when a baby is born, they are entering a place that is unfamiliar to them and is full of hazardous circumstances and then seeks for safety and comfort by sulking on the mother's breast. Instead of blatantly telling the reader, Blake uses several poetic devices to deliver the meaning of Infant Sorrow. Some of the devices he uses are images, sound, figurative language, and the structure to bring out the meaning of his poem.