Audre Lorde

In “Now that I Am Forever with Child” Audre Lorde announces how the speaker in the poem goes through the pregnancy process into giving birth to her child. The speaker explicitly mentions the changes of a mother’s physically during the process of her fetus. The distinction of the lines that I have chosen to the whole poem is that the first half speaks of the normality form of a child’s development and to the changes it undergoes from the outside of the mother’s body to the inside of her womb due to the growth of her child with the passing days, weeks, and months. Lorde’s speaker uses metaphors and syntax to describe the natural and obvious development process of the mother’s and child’s pregnancy both internal and external; however, the speaker’s

before spring” which metaphorically indicates that her child’s creation after birth brings a new possibility for her loving child. Through the text we are able to see how the speaker’s child’s physically stops being created; thus, it is continued through her “head.” The work “head” metaphorically refers to her imagination in the wholeness her child will become in terms of identities. Lorde indicates “before spring” metaphorically to implicate a new uprising image of her child that has not been created before, but will be created through the experiences in of this new life in her newborn’s child: identity(ies). The use of metaphors in “my head rang like a firey piston” contextualize how everything is being process in her mind in just a rushing moment of how the child becomes a creation of being, in her mind, and no longer in her womb. The natural development in her fetus is comes to an end, but the creation in her mind on how her daughter will become bring many images and possibilities. These two lines is distinctive to the first half of the poem. The first half was contextualizing the natural creation of a child in the fetus. Lorde goes further in the following two lines implicating the creation of the speaker’s child by giving the child the opportunity to

The speaker uses “legs” and “towers” to show her reader the opening of her child’s new beginning in life. The speaker then includes “new World was passing” to include how her child was going to be creating new identities in her by her birth and development. Thus, as part of a human being into a world there will be new creations of identities so this is where her child will be developing her/himself as opposed being in the speaker’s fetus. Here the speaker brings up an interesting symbolic figure by the use of “passing” since it relates back to the earlier part of the poem in relationship to time. In lines one and seven the speaker speaks of the time being of her child’s pregnancy process which illustrates the “passing” in line seventeen to demonstrate all the identities she will come upon as the her child moves forth into the world as she continues to distinguish this possibility of her own