Summary Of Mother Who Gave Me Life By Gwen Harwood

As we get older we tend to reflect more on our life and get our priorities together. We tend to realize who and what is important, the people who mean the most to us and the ones we can’t live without. Who would those significant individuals be for us? For most people it would be their parents. In the poems “My Father’s Song” by Simon J. Ortiz, and “My Mother” by Ellen Bryant Voigt, both writers express their emotion towards a parent. The poems are similar in many ways simply because they share a parent child relationship, they are also vastly different. “My Fathers Song” is a poem about a son who lost his father and is grieving and referring back to old memories, reflecting on their past and the wonderful time he had with his father. “My Mother” on the other hand is a poem about a daughter who lost her mother and is having a difficult time coping as she reflects on the decisions she made as a child and how that affected her relationship with her mother. Despite their differences, the two poems share a true connection of love towards their parent. Most notably “My Fathers Song” and “My Mother” differ in the relationship with their parent, the settings in which the memories they hold of their parents take place, and who they are mourning over, yet the two have a strong emphasis on love.

1.) Overall main topic of this book connects between the issue of motherhood and feminism. One major key point I found while reading this book is the author, Amber Kinser explains the growth and progress of the role of mothers in the american society meaning how the roles have changed overtime. A major theme of Kinser’s book is that the public debates may focus on mothering, but the issues affect us all.  Cutting back on health care for women, on education, and on jobs for teachers, social workers and others in the service sector have their greatest impact on mothers, but they affect all of us. Motherhood becomes a symbol for how men and women, single and married, gay and straight, deal with the need for individual options and the need to act for the good of others.

Sylvia Plath and Gwen Harwood tell two very different stories of parental relationships, Mother Who Gave Me Life praising Harwood’s mother and speaking with love and affection, whereas Plath’s Daddy is full of hate for her father. These reflections on the poet’s parental relationships are made using imagery, symbolism and tone.

As evident by the title of this poem, imagery is a strong technique used in this poem as the author describes with great detail his journey through a sawmill town. This technique is used most in the following phrases: “...down a tilting road, into a distant valley.” And “The sawmill towns, bare hamlets built of boards with perhaps a store”. This has the effect of creating an image in the reader’s mind and making the poem even more real.

LeAnne Howe made this book to tell the story of American Indians who fought for their freedom and land from the white men. She featured moments of her life in an effort to include an insight to show that all American Indians, even now, are affected by the allotment of the American Indians. LeAnne Howe even dedicated Miko Kings to “all the American Indians who’ve played the game.” Baseball was a sport that the Indians had been playing for years as a way to pass time and connect the tribes (48) (LeAnne Howe, Miko Kings, 112) in this story. Baseball intertwined with this story because baseball and the events that followed are emblematic of the struggles the American Indians faced in the early 1900s.

metaphors are used to symbolize the turbulence in the house and how rapidly it spreads throughout the house. In line 4, “greasy stains spreading on the cloth”, the ‘greasy stains’ refer to schizophrenia and how it spreads through the family. In lines (4-6) “Certain doors were locked at night, feet stood for hours outside them…” this is a metaphor for paranoia. It could also show how family members would shut themselves off from the rest of the world. The use of diction sets up the tone of anger throughout the poem by using words such as: slammed, shouting, threats, cracking, broken and madhouse. (2) “It had begun with slamming doors..” the use of slamming shows how infuriated the family was and how they took their anger out of the house. (11) “...reconciliations, the sobbing that followed.” Reconciliations

It initially shows worry for her children and sadness for departing from them. For example, the passage states that “when she thought of all the food she had cooked… well the children showed it.” She is proud of her work raising her children and this illustrates that she worked very diligently and strenuously in doing so. The theme of pride continues as she remembers the work she did to make life better for herself and her family after John left her. However, death returns as the image of lighting the lamps represents her lifeforce fading and her initial emotion is fear, then peace as “the lamp is lit” meaning the time has come for her passing and there was no need for her children to “hang on to mother anymore,” meaning she is realizing that her children will be fine without her and is making her peace with

In Strauss’s 1992 essay titled “she/I/you/it: construction mother and motherhood in the writing of Gwen Harwood, Jennifer effectively argues that Harwood is misaligned with her role as a mother and, simultaneously, provides the framework in which the title “mother” is contextually presented in both Harwood’s mental fixations and eloquent disputations. The concept of Harwood’s misaligned role as a mother is discussed , in depth and succinctly by Strauss and , as a definite result, will contribute heavily to my research essay on Harwood’s treatment of the title “mother” in her poem titled “In the park”. Moreover, such works in the likes of Jennifer Strauss which are found within Poetry Critism (volume 160) are made easily available to both the laymen and academician in

In the poem “Mother Who Game Me Life”, Harwood relates to a profoundly personal experience and also reflects upon human history to display the self-sacrificing figure of motherhood. Here, the declination of a mother to her daughter throughout the passage of time and change, is made eternal by the typical nurturing role of a mother, that is universal to the human condition. The individual experience is expressed through Harwood’s personal tone of reflection and sentimentality, in which the use of personal pronouns convey a confidential and sincere connection between a daughter and her mother. “Mother who gave me life, the wisdom I would not learn from you”, strikes unity within the audience through the use of her authentic reflection on a universal

In “Momma” by Chrystal Meeker, the speaker offers a glimpse into the poverty stricken life of a struggling mother and her children. In this poem, the youngest daughter looks back on her childhood and reflects on her mother’s selflessness and willingness to put her children’s needs ahead of her own and the fact that her mother’s sacrifice often goes unnoticed.

In Saidiya Hartman’s, Lose Your Mother the question is expanded and complicated through out the text. Saidiya begins her search for identity when she was a child, as she would pretend John Hartman was her father because of the same last name. This evidently ended up becoming a life long journey of a self-made identity. Which Saidiya states, “Saidiya liberated me from parental disapproval and pruned the bourgeois branches of my genealogy.” (Pg.8) Identity can be both found and created with even a mix of both as seen with Saidiya.

A mother’s love is the kind of love that gives meaning to life, when everything seems to have your back against the wall, somehow the reassurance of a mother’s presence and support takes away all of the pain. A bond created from early on inside your mother’s womb, is the same bond that is cherished for a lifetime. From mother’s day cards every year, to special surprises for her birthday, a mother’s love can never be replaced. This kind of love is truly indescribable. But what happens when you’re only left with the memories and vivid imagination of what life would have been like if you had more time to spend with your mother. Imagine not knowing anything about who your mother was, or what kind of woman she turned out to be, the only thing

For Mom is an about-mother poem by the spoken word artist Sy Stokes. It is a beautiful image of a mother from a son’s point of view and the story since he first acknowledged the new from his mother about the illness that she is diagnosed. He is stunned and frightened as his mother is fighting against cancer. By using a variety of poetic devices associated with the spoken word poetic form, Sy Stokes successfully brings his story to audiences as well as readers. First of all, the content of For Mom poem is very touched to readers’ mind due to the true feeling of the writer attached.

The poem The Mother is an abortion poem written by Gwendolyn Brooks. It is an emotional outpouring poem with a sense of guilt by a mother who has performed one or more abortions. The speaker of the poem is none other than the mother who has aborted multiple children. She is characterized with nostalgia and penitence.

The poem “My Mother’s Face” by Brenda Serotte depicts the difficulty of a mother and daughter with a close bond trying to cope with a difficult situation of becoming an adult. “My Mother’s face” talks about the women’s state of affairs, the words used in the poem indicate that the mother is going through a difficult situation and the speaker can feel it through her close observation and on her own accord. The poem basically highlights the human aging process and the difficulty for a mother to realize the fact that her beloved daughter doesn’t need her anymore. The daughter sees the mother’s reflection and passes it for her own, feeling empathetic to the sorrow being shown on her mother's face. The daughter now realizes that with time,