Heartbreaking Guilt In Gwendolyn Brooks The Mother

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Someone once said, “The guilt of abortion hurts more than labor”. This is very true for many women who have had abortions. Women who have abortions must endure the guilt associated with taking an infant’s life. Gwendolyn Brooks expresses the heartbreaking guilt of this in her poem, The Mother. The poem conveys the remorse and regret women may experience after having an abortion, while Brooks also is apologizing in the poem to her unborn children for having them terminated. Brooks uses several literary devices to show the shame and grief that she must endure because she had her children aborted. Brooks uses the tone of her poem to make the readers understand how guilty she feels. The tone of the poem can be seen all through the verses, as she says, “If I poisoned the …show more content…

20- 21) and, “You were never made. / But that too, I am afraid / Is faulty: oh, what shall I say, how is the truth to be said? / You were born, you had body, you died” (l. 26-29). By saying these things, Brooks makes the guilt she feels evident, almost as though the regret never gives her a moments peace. When Brooks states, “I have said, Sweets, if I sinned, if I seized” (l. 14), she is admitting that she has sinned by killing her innocent children. She is confessing her wrongdoing and her guilt to the children. The tone brings Brooks contrition to the reader’s attention and allows it to be acknowledged and felt by the audience. Walker 2 Brooks also uses imagery to describe to the readers that she feels as though she stole the babies lives before they had the chance to live them. In lines 3 and 4, she states “The damp

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