Poem Analysis: The Mother By Gwendolyn Brooks

Throughout Gwen Harwood’s "Selected Poems", Harwood continually seeks to examine the many different faces of human nature, which have been heavily influenced by her experiences as a child, a woman and in the moments prior to her death. Her poems explore and reveal the power of reminiscence and memories, rebellion against authority, as well as the idea of mortality, which are illustrated by many of Harwood’s different personas.

"The Mother," by Gwendolyn Brooks, is a sorrowful, distressing poem about a mother who has experienced numerous abortions. While reading the poem, you can feel the pain, heartache, distress and grief she is feeling. She is both remorseful and regretful; nevertheless, she explains that she had no other alternative. It is a sentimental and heart wrenching poem where she talks about not being able to experience or do things with the children that she aborted -- things that people who have children often take for granted. Perhaps this poem is a reflection of what many women in society are feeling.

Love is not always an easy adventure to take part in. As a result, thousands of poems and sonnets have been written about love bonds that are either praised and happily blessed or love bonds that undergo struggle and pain to cling on to their forbidden love. Gwendolyn Brooks sonnet "A Lovely Love," explores the emotions and thoughts between two lovers who are striving for their natural human right to love while delicately revealing society 's crime in vilifying a couples right to love. Gwendolyn Brooks uses several examples of imagery and metaphors to convey a dark and hopeless mood that emphasizes the hardships that the two lovers must endure to prevail their love that society has condemned.

The spacing and structure of the poem is set up to allow flow and momentum in the poem and its narrative. The speaker’s voice is present with emotion as emphasised in a natural rhythm of thought offering an honest and bare interpretation of motherhood. The open “blank space” of the poem encourages a calm and breathy atmosphere, fulfilling a mood of tranquility and bliss. Each stanza is short with a couple quick fragmented thoughts before closing each section with the power of a single word. Each stanza breaks apart a separate thought filled with a loving passion the speaker uses to stress the beauty, wonder, and over-flowing love present in motherhood. To better the structure, the poem itself is broken into three parts, each representing a stage of motherhood. The first segment of motherhood that is represented is during the moments while the baby is still in the womb and the mother waits in anticipation for the baby to arrive. This “honeymoon” phase is expressed with a tone filtered through a perception of rose-coloured glasses and excitement as the mother is in utter bliss to carry a life into the world. The

Both Mother Who Gave Me Life by Gwen Harwood and Woman to Child by Judith Wright, explore the bonds shared between mother and child. While both poems explore the same themes, each poet uses different techniques in doing so. Woman to Child is from the point of view of a mother. Although the poet has used the personal pronouns ‘I’ and ‘me’, the poem is not from Wrights point of view, rather, from every woman’s, as majority of women have experienced the intimate experience of becoming a mother. Like Woman to Child, Mother Who Gave Me Life also uses personal pronouns, but unlike Woman to Child, Mother Who Gave Me Life is a personal elegy for Harwood’s mother.

Brooks creates a horrific imagery that abortions are terrible; and in the poem “The Mother “,she mirrors herself to reality to show the missed opportunities of a child, that women who have aborted their children, will miss. In the poem, it pinpoints a woman’s experience of aborting a child, and then feeling guilty about it, as a mother. In contrast to the author of the poem, Gwendolyn Brooks is a woman who has also aborted a child numerous of times, feels relentless. She communicates with her audience, women, through the poem to recap what the unborn children would become in the future such as singers and workers. “You were born, you had body, you died. It is you never giggled or planned or cried.” When Brooks talk about the missed opportunities that women will never see, she refers to a mother with treacherous experiences. Symbolically, she reflects as a role model for all women who have undergone the situation.

In Gwendolyn Brooks’ poem “The Mother”, the author expresses a lot of her thoughts and feelings in order to share her experience. It is written in the first person and the narrator is adopted by the author herself, Gwendolyn Brooks, who embodies a weaken mother. In this poem, Gwendolyn Brooks tries to portray what abortion is for a woman and to describe the harsh truth about how women feel afterwards. Thus, this poem is mostly targeted to aim females and their feelings. First of all, abortion is the deliberate termination of a human pregnancy. First, the narrator uses many imageries, description, and a precise choice of words to explain this emotional topic of abortion. Second, her use

The tone of hopelessness in this poem is very obviously the result of regret, or the feelings of what motherhood may have been. For a majority of the poem the mother focuses on what their lives would have been having “never giggled or planned or cried” (4) or how they “will never wind up the sucking thumb” (4). Although these are only a few examples it is very evident how the mother, although denied the joy of motherhood, longs for the child she almost had, saying, “believe me, I knew you, though faintly, and I loved, I loved you/ All” (5). In an attempt to take a more positive outlook on the mother tries to justify herself saying how much better the child’s life would be, that as a mother she would never have the chance to “neglect or beat/ Them…” (4). The story behind “the mother” is just one example of hopelessness that Brooks prominently saw throughout her community, obviously this feeling of regret and lament was prevalent throughout many women who, although chose to have abortions, were not done out of not wanting the child, but by force in order to keep a job, house, or some other commitment in which carrying and properly raising a child would be near impossible.

The poem “The Mother” written by Gwendolyn Brooks in 1945, is a poem that focuses on the immeasurable losses a woman experiences after having an abortion. The poems free verse style has a mournful tone that captures the vast emotions a mother goes through trying to cope with the choices she has made. The author writes each stanza of the poem using a different style, and point of view, with subtle metaphors to express the speaker’s deep struggle as she copes with her abortions. The poem begins with, “Abortions will not let you forget” (Brooks 1), the first line of the poem uses personification to capture your attention. The title of the poem has the reader’s mindset centered around motherhood, but the author’s expertise with the opening line, immediately shifts your view to the actual theme of the poem. In this first line the speaker is telling you directly, you will never forget having an abortion. Brooks utilizes the speaker of the poem, to convey that this mother is pleading for forgiveness from the children she chose not to have.

To use the name of a Saint generally evokes images of holy men and women of the Catholic church, dressed in flowing robes and surrounded by an oil-painted aura. There are patron saints-those with a sort of specialized divinity-of bakers and bellmakers, orphans and pawnbrokers, soldiers and snake bites, soldiers and writers. Each is a Catholic who lived a life deemed particularly holy and was named, postmortem, by the Pope to sainthood. This construct, I find, is something of an empty set of ideas. The process of canonization is one notorious for its pecuniary nature and tendencies toward corruption. What kind of hope, then, can one possibly be offered by a long-dead person so chosen?

In this stylistic analysis of the lost baby poem written by Lucille Clifton I will deal mainly with two aspects of stylistic: derivation and parallelism features present in the poem. However I will first give a general interpretation of the poem to link more easily the stylistic features with the meaning of the poem itself.

It is possible that the narrator is trying to reassure herself in this passage by claiming that the child was never made, but then why write the poem to her unborn children?

Poetry for centuries has been a gateway for incognito artists to display their sorrow and jubilance. As for the poet Gwendolyn Brooks, her poetry was majority sorrow; the poem “Sonnet-ballad”, written in 1949, depicts a young woman's lover going off to war and his original psyche never returning home after the war. The male lover in the poem felt obligated to serve his country; the man in the poem didn’t break free of the social constructs at the time and felt as if he had no free will. Gwendolyn Brooks later in her life became a strong activist for the African-American people during times of the Civil Rights Movement, the poet fought against social normalities to help her community to gain an equal footing (Hobby). The poet uses her unique ability for illustrating through words to construe how lack of choice in a person’s life can affect a person so negatively, it can maim a person forever.

Maya Angelou said, “To describe my mother would be to write about a hurricane in its perfect power. Or the climbing, falling colors of a rainbow” (Wanderlust 1). The relationship a mother has with her child transcends all other relationships in complexity. Maternity largely contributes to the female identity in part because the ability to sexually reproduce is uniquely female. With this ability often comes an unparalleled feeling of responsibility. That is, mothers experience an inherent desire to protect their children from the world and guide them through life. Serving as a child’s protector then transforms a woman’s perspective, or the female gaze. While these protective instincts often arise naturally, they are also reinforced by the ideas society’s perpetuates about motherhood. Globally, women are expected to assume the roles of wives and mothers. The belief that motherhood is somewhat of a requirement assists in the subjugation of women and reinforces a plethora of gendered stereotypes. While some women enjoy the process of childrearing, others feel that having a family comes at an irreparable cost: losing sight of oneself. In response to the polarized views surrounding maternity, several authors have employed different writing techniques to illustrate the mother-child dynamic. Through the examination of three narratives, spanning fiction and non-fiction, one is able to better define maternity and the corresponding female gaze in both symbolic and universal terms.

Being a mother is one of the best gifts from a life. A mother gives her children unconditional love without expecting anything in return. Being a mother means more than having given birth to a child. It is an invisible connection between mother and child; it is a blessing, a relationship that never ends and the love that never dies. However, for some women, motherhood might be challenging in ways they did not expect, forcing them to choose between having an abortion and keeping the child. The debate over abortion is an ardent and polarizing issue as there are those who believe that all humans including those unborn should have a right to life, and on the other side of the spectrum are those who believe it should a woman's right to choose whether she wants an abortion or not. This topic relates to Gwendolyn Brooks's poem, "The Mother", where the author describes the painful thoughts, heartbreak, and awful feelings that a woman experiences after having an abortion. Brooks lays out a helpful framework for understanding the difficult situation of facing unplanned pregnancy. In "The Mother", a woman recollects her inner conflicts as she laments over the guilt of having had an abortion and the future she never gave her would be child. Brooks's poem provides insight into the research which reveals how abortion affects women morally, psychologically, and religiously.