Literary Analysis Of Morning Song By Sylvia Plath

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“Morning Song” is a poem that was written by Sylvia Plath and published shortly after her death in 1965. It is a poem that openly expresses the depression she was going through leading to the events that caused her death. The poem represents the hope a baby brings to the world and the effect it has on his/her mother. It is a lyric poem that contains eighteen lines and six stanzas. Plath uses imagery, tone, metaphor to convey the impact a new life has on not only the world but on her as well. Born on October 27, 1932 in Boston, Massachusetts, Sylvia Plath was a daughter to Aurelia Schober and Otto Plath. Sylvia had to experience the tragedy of having to grow up without a father having lost him to diabetes when she was only eight years old.
“Morning song” was one she wrote in lyric style and separated into six stanzas. It has been thought that Plath was experimenting with a French Style love poem. Each stanza contains three lines with no rhyme scheme. These stanzas are also known as tercets (Keyes). Each stanza has almost a different meaning and a different element in it giving it a unique style of reading and understanding to it (Overview: ‘morning song’). Having wrote it the way she did allowed for her to fully express how she felt in each line. Some lines being short and some being longer each line has a significant
In the first stanza she describes the child’s way of crying as “bald” as the baby was first coming into life and describing that his cry is as of that of earth’s elements. She then goes on and describes that the parents voice intensifies the babies cries. It gives a sense that there is only two parents and a newborn baby in a small room and at that moment all three were going to be together for life. “Flickers among the flat pink roses. I wake to listen: A far sea moves in my ear.” She describes the child’s cry or “song” as the sound of a sea which is pleasing to her ear (poets). However there is imagery that convey the separation she felt from the child. She describes herself as a “cow’ when getting to attend to the Child’s cry. The line that expresses this the most strongly and freely is when she states “I’m no more your mother”. This shows that she does not feel a bond with the baby. It insist that a mother who has just gave birth to a child has to adjust and overcome the fear of having to care for a life that they are now responsible for. She tries to free herself of the responsibility by saying “…Than the cloud that distills a mirror to reflect its own slow”. She tries to uses this to explain how distant she feels from the child. Like that of a cloud being carried away by the

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