Mother Poetry Interpretation

Poetry Interpretation

The Mother

Abortions will not let you forget.

You remember the children you got that you did not get,

The damp small pulps with a little or with no hair,

The singers and workers that never handled the air.

You will never neglect or beat

Them, or silence or buy with a sweet.

You will never wind up the sucking-thumb

Or scuttle off ghosts that come.

You will never leave them, controlling your luscious sigh,

Return for a snack of them, with gobbling mother-eye.

I have heard in the voices of the wind the voices of my dim killed

children.

I have contracted. I have eased

My dim dears at the breasts they could never suck.

I have said, Sweets, if I sinned, if I seized

Your luck

And your lives from your unfinished reach,

If I stole your births and your names,

Your straight baby tears and your games,

Your stilted or lovely loves, your tumults, your marriages, aches,

and your deaths,

If I poisoned the beginnings of your breaths,

Believe that even in my deliberateness I was not deliberate.

Though why should I whine,

Whine that the crime was other than mine?--

Since anyhow you are dead.

Or rather, or instead,

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.

It is just that you never giggled or planned or cried.

Believe me, I loved you all.

Believe me, I knew you, though faintly, and I loved, I loved you

All.

Gwendolyn Brooks

Analyzing Your Response Cognitively

This poem is interesting because there are many contradictions and comparisons. In the beginning it is surprising that a poem titled "The Mother" would start talking about abortions. Right away this woman is giving the abortion power over her mind when she says that "abortions will not let you forget." The writer makes a contradiction about "the children you got that you didn't get" she is using the pronoun you which is very confusing in the beginning because we are still at this point asking who had the abortions. She calls the children pulps which means small, damp, shapeless pieces of matter. This is important because it refers to the fetus as not human. After referring to them as shapeless matter, it goes on to remember the children as if they were real or alive. All of the sudden there is a line that breaks the rhyme scheme, this is where she takes responsibility for the death of her children. I think she refers to the children in a negative way by saying "dim killed children." When this woman says she has "contracted. I have eased" it could mean that she had labor pains after the abortion or that she signed the abortion paper for ease. I feel that it means she has talking about the abortion paper and taking responsibility. In the next line, I see something new, the children are called dears while she talks about not being able to breast feed them. This makes them children and not the pulps she had called them before. After all of this the mother starts to apologize for taking the life these children could have had. She said she had the abortions deliberately but without evil intentions. As I got to the end of the poem it seemed as though she started to back track. She says "the crime was other than mine?" Is she asking for someone else to blame