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Labor pain essay
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"I thought you were my triumph /however you curtail me like a blade"
The opening lines of Anne Stevenson's ballad The Victory set a tone of clash. This ballad, at its surface, communicates a mother's musings on conceiving a child. Stevenson portrays the blended emotions numerous moms have upon the conveyance of their first conceived. The last discharge from pregnancy and birthing aches, coupled with the energy of carrying a live animal into this planet, at the outset appear a triumph to the new parent. The creator happens to rebut the occasion as a triumph.
Utilizing words, for example, "adversary" (5), "wound" (6), and "scary"(13), she indicates the darker side of labor. The mother has felt her own particular life's blood streaming that a more odd may live "The stains of your greatness bled from my veins." (6-8). That she sees her own particular kid as a more bizarre is clear in lines nine and ten, where the kid is depicted as an "unseeing thing" (9) with "spotless bug eyes"(10). The mother depicts her infant as a bug, not even human. In the last segment of the ballad, two inqu...
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.
In the last stanza it is explained how, even when she was a child, she
The speaker begins the poem an ethereal tone masking the violent nature of her subject matter. The poem is set in the Elysian Fields, a paradise where the souls of the heroic and virtuous were sent (cite). Through her use of the words “dreamed”, “sweet women”, “blossoms” and
The components of marriage, family and loss has played a big role in Anne Bradstreet’s writing of “Before the birth of One of Her Children”, “In Memory of Dear Grandchild Elizabeth Bradstreet”, and Edward Taylor’s “Upon Wedlock and the Death of Children.” In, these writings both authors Puritan culture and their faith plays a big role. In these poems one author starts questioning their God and the other to take honor in their God throughout their grieving process, while both showing different aspects of their everlasting union with their spouse, and the love for their children.
The poem is about the early stages in the narrator’s pregnancy. The doctor gives her news that the baby may be unhealthy. In a state of panic, we see the narrator turning to the methods of her homeland and native people to carry her through this tough time, and ensure her child’s safe delivery into the world. Da’ writes, “In the hospital, I ask for books./Posters from old rodeos. /A photo of a Mimbres pot /from southern New Mexico /black and white line figures—/a woman dusting corn pollen over a baby’s head/during a naming ceremony. /Medieval women/ingested apples/with the skins incised with hymns and verses/as a portent against death in childbirth” (Da’). We not only see her turning to these old rituals of her cultural, but wanting the items of her cultural to surround her and protect her. It proves her point of how sacred a land and cultural is, and how even though she has been exiled from it, she will continue to count it as a part of her
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.
She bore in her arms a child, a baby of some three months old, who winked and turned aside its little face from the too vivid light of day; because its experience, heretofore, had brought it acquainted only with the gray twilight of a dungeon, or other darksome apartment of the prison (49).
These final words sum up her feeling of helplessness and emptiness. Her identity is destroyed in a way due to having children. We assume change is always positive and for the greater good but Harwood’s poem challenges that embedding change is negative as the woman has gained something but lost so much in return.
This is shown through the tone changing from being disappointed and critical to acceptance and appreciative. The speaker’s friend, who after listening to the speaker’s complaints, says that it seems like she was “a child who had been wanted” (line 12). This statement resonates with the speaker and slowly begins to change her thinking. This is apparent from the following line where the speaker states that “I took the wine against my lips as if my mouth were moving along that valved wall in my mother's body” (line 13 to line 15). The speaker is imagining her mother’s experience while creating her and giving birth to her. In the next several lines the speakers describe what she sees. She expresses that she can see her mother as “she was bearing down, and then breathing from the mask, and then bearing down, pressing me out into the world” (line 15 to line 18). The speaker can finally understand that to her mother the world and life she currently lived weren't enough for her. The imagery in the final lines of this poem list all the things that weren’t enough for the mother. They express that “the moon, the sun, Orion cartwheeling across the dark, not the earth, the sea” (line 19 to 21) none of those things matter to the mother. The only thing that matter was giving birth and having her child. Only then will she be satisfied with her life and
The poem being in sonnet form, is ironic as naturally sonnets are about love and its emotions, “In the park” however, highlights the absence of love within the protagonist and portrays a certain harshness of character emotion from change that has already taken place. The beginning of the poem presents the audience with a woman seamlessly trapped by domesticity, suffocated with motherhood and the role given to it by society. Her children “whine and bicker”, draw “aimless patterns in the dirt” - the patterns symbolising the woman’s life and showing her internal and honest thoughts. Bringing attention away from the so called ‘maternal love’, the second stanza links to the first by enjambment in which a person whom was once meaningful in her life as more of a romantic love, is now nothing but ‘someone’ who gives her just a ‘casual nod’. They converse in such a clichéd manner with language of no meaning or emotion using phrases such as “how nice” and “et cetera” which puts across the façade being held, the tone making it clear to the reader she regrets not being able to avoid it as she’s clearly ashamed and embarrassed of what she has become – of how motherhood has consumed her. This external superficial appearance being upheld continues in the last stanza as they both mouth hypocritical statements – the woman’s in particular completely juxtaposing her initial thoughts about her three children in the first stanza. The man enquires about the names and age of her children in whom he evidently has no interest in, and the woman replies with “It’s so sweet…to watch them grow”, her pride leading her to give her past lover a positive impression of her life trying to hide how consumed she really feels by her role and identity loss. The resolution of the poems form, “They have eaten me
“Daddy” contains allusions to World War 2 with images of a swastika in the sky (line 46-47) and references to German concentration camps, “A Jew to Dachau, Auschwitz, Belsen” (line 33). She states her father clearly to be a German man with “I thought every German was you” (line 29), “with your Luftwaffe” (line 42), “And your Aryan eye, bright blue” (line 44). Plath alludes to the popular anti-Semitism of her era in Germany depicted in lines 31-40. She then describes herself as a “Jew” to degrade herself against her German father. The diction of her lines “Chuffing me off like a Jew” (line 32) and “I think I may well be a Jew” (line 35) dehumanizes Jews in which she uses to also describe herself. To describe even more hatred towards her father, the multiple usages of the word “black” (lines 2, 51, 55, 65, 76) depicts her father as a dark menacing shadow in her life that has a evil dark “black” heart. She compares him to the man she married when Plath states, “I made a model of you” (line 64). She then describes that husband as a vampire that drank her blood (lines 72-74), because he reminded Plath of her father in the statement “They always knew it was you” (line 79). In Plath’s mind she only married her husband to be reminded of her father but soon realized it was a toxic relationship in line 80 in which she says “Daddy, daddy, you bastard, I’m through”.
In the literature piece "The Disquieting Muses" the speaker opens the stanza with such anger towards her mother for allowing three women, who are unwanted by the speaker, into her bedroom. The speaker makes it seem as if these three women are immoral and surreal, because these women are described as "illbred", "disfigured", "with heads like darning-eggs" (Plath, page 1047). The first stanza represents failure as a mother who did not provide her child with security and protection from evil mishaps. The connection in their mother and daughter bond is nonexistent. The speaker is broken and speaks on the unhappy memories that disturb her mind. As the poem deepens, these three women muses have become a permanent haunting to the speaker. For example in the second paragraph, "Mother, whose witches always, always, Got baked into gingerbread, I wonder Whether you saw them, wh...
Mrs. Stevenson, an invalid lady who is waiting at her home impatiently for her husband to come back home from work. Leona became querulous and demanding owing to the fact that she overheard a phone call as the operator accidentally dialed the wrong number and hears two men planning on murdering an unidentified, elderly woman. Becoming increasingly frantic and devastated about what had just happened, the operator will not seem to get her to reconnect the phone call of these two unsuspected men, she tries to call the cops, she tries to get that phone call reported. Mrs. Stevenson dejected and miserable, keeps wanting to trace that phone call but cannot happen because she has no evidence of the two men talking. Eventually, miss Stevenson is told
“Woman to Man” by Judith Wright expresses a woman’s thoughts on pregnancy and was written when Wright herself was pregnant. Due to this fact, one can assume that the poem explores Judith Wright’s thoughts on pregnancy as she speaks to her husband through the poem, expressing her feelings through various poetic techniques. The poem displays an unusual strength for moving the reader through the emotional tension, the development of ideas and the structure as this delicate topic is handled with precaution and disciplined craftsmanship. The steady progression of ideas seen in the well laid out structure causes a more dramatic reading on a subject which Wright felt so strongly about.
The woman wears a dress and her feet are bare. Her feet are tired from the long journey she has traveled. The theme of the poem is about Plath’s suicide as many of her poems are. The poem has a feeling of defeat. The woman’s “perfected” death is a seen of bravery not forwardness. Once again Plath creates a somber mood in the repetition of words that emphasize whiteness, blankness, and cold as in “bare”, ”white serpents”, ”milk” etc. There is also an allusion to the Greek goddess Medea, who avenged her husband’s betrayal by killing their children. This allusion creates bigger sense of suicidal feelings. The Greeks did not believe that suicide was a bad thing but rather they thought it was honorable. In many cases I believe that Plath saw her suicidal attempts as honorable that’s why she was documented it in her poems. The “Edge” like “Daddy” does not mean to please the reader but rather give the reader an understanding into the narrator’s feelings and thoughts. The poem can be seen as an act of hopelessness and detachment. There is no sense of pleasure but only in one instance when the woman smiles. When the woman smiles it implies a sense of triumph. In the lines “Each dead child coiled, a white serpent”….”She has folded them back into her body as petals” we can imply that Plath has considered in killing her own children in a family suicide. Never before she