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Motherhood
Poems for, by, and about Mothers
Edited by Heather Johnson
23 October 2003
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Table of Contents
Introduction
3-4
Poems:
“You’re” by Sylvia Plath
5
“Infant Sorrow” by William Blake
6
“A Cradle Song” by William Blake
7
“Nick and the Candlestick” by Sylvia Plath
8-9
“Spelling” by Margaret Atwood
10-11
“Looking at Them Asleep” by Sharon Olds
12
“Piano” by D.H. Lawrence
13
“Advice” by Ruth Stone
14
“Mother o’ Mine” by Rudyard Kipling
15
“Women” by Alice Walker
16
Biographical Sketches
17-18
Conclusion
19
Bibliography
20-21
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Introduction
The selected poems in this anthology represent all of the facets of motherhood, including
pregnancy, raising small children, raising adult children, and observing and remembering mothers. The
unique aspect of these poems is that that they have only been published recently. In the anthology
Motherhood, it is pointed out that:
Although maternity has been celebrated and consecrated for centuries,
and although as primary caretakers mothers have always helped shape
civilization, poets have just in the last few decades begun to speak as
mothers and about mothers with unprecedented complexity, intensity,
and subtlety (17).
One of the reasons the situation changed in the twentieth century is that women gained legal,
political, social, economic and intellectual rights.
The poems included in this anthology are both written by modern women poets and 18th and
19th century men. Sylvia Plath is one of the contemporary poets who writes metaphorically in free
verse about anticipating the birth of her baby in uttero. In the poem “You’re,” Plath writes, “Vague
as fog and looked for like mail. . . A clean slate, with your own face on” (lines 10 & 18) to describe the
new life that grows inside her. The message is quite different compared to the masculine poets of
earlier centuries who perhaps “scoffed at the emotional excesses they associated with versified mother
love” (Gilbert 18). A Sylvia Plath Overview in Feminist Writers concludes:
Her struggles, however (in life and in poetry), were clearly understood by her to
be gendered and often, as a result, unjust. She struggled to articulate the
contradictions that a woman who wanted to be both devoted wife and mother
and a successful creative writer faced in the late 1950s and 1960s. That her
struggles have proved inspirational, fascinating, and tragic to subsequent
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generations of readers is testimony to the enduring relevance of her insights
and to the stunning brilliance of her work (Devoney n. pag).
In “The Piano”, for example, D.H. Lawrence writes about an early boyhood memory and how, as he
enters manhood, he yearns for his boyhood years. This is clearly a different approach between a man
and a woman’s perspective on motherhood.
Oppress is defined as :”1) to weigh heavily on the mind, spirits, or senses of; worry; trouble 2)
to keep down by the cruel or unjust use of power or authority: rule harshly; tyrannize over 3) to crush;
trample down; to over power; subdue” (The New American Webster’s Dictionary 715). Oppression
based upon gender is omnipresent throughout history and in contemporary times. The female discussion
of motherhood in the form of prose or poetry, is no exception, but rather the epitome of gender
oppression in the past, however changing over the last few decades
In the anthology Motherhood,, the editors write, “To many thinkers, the words “mother” and
“poet” seemed to be contradictory terms. . . it was thought that a poet had to have what the age saw
as “masculine” qualities of authority and assertiveness (Gilbert 18).
The poems selected for this anthology that are written by the contemporary women poets and the few
selected men poets are for, by and about mothers, as the subtitle indicates. Thankfully, it is no longer
necessary for women to take on a masculine tone or attitude to illustrate the beauty of maternity by
including their personal experiences and deepest emotions.
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You’re
By Sylvia Plath
1961
Clownlike, happiest on your hands,
Feet to the stars, and moon-skulled,
Gilled like a fish. A common-sense
Thumbs-down on the dodo's mode.
Wrapped up in yourself like a spool,
Trawling your dark as owls do.
Mute as a turnip from the Fourth
Of July to All Fool's Day,
O high-riser, my little loaf.
Vague as fog and looked for like mail.
Farther off than Australia.
Bent-backed Atlas, our traveled prawn.
Snug as a bud and at home
Like a sprat in a pickle jug.
A creel of eels, all ripples.
Jumpy as a Mexican bean.
Right, like a well-done sum.
A clean slate, with your own face on.
The poetic form used in “You’re” is free verse. Plath uses a series
of metaphors such as “moon skulled,” “gilled like a fish” and “little loaf”
to symbolize the physical characteristics of the fetus (lines2, 3, & 9). Her
anticipation for the birth is depicted by the metaphor, “Vague as fog and
looked for like mail./ Farther off than Australia” (lines 10 & 11).
This is a very playful poem by Plath. One can sense her playfulness
with words and happiness with the experience.
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Infant Sorrow
By William Blake
1794
My mother groaned, my father wept;
Into the dangerous world I leapt,
Helpless, naked, piping loud,
Like a fiend hid in a cloud.
Struggling in my father’s hands:
Striving against my swaddling bands:
Bound and weary I thought best
To sulk upon my mother’s breast.
Blake uses the poetic form quatrain with a four line stanza
rhyming the first two and the second two lines.
“Infant Sorrow” describes the helplessness of a newborn child at
the mercy of his mother for survival. Blake refers to the child as
“Helpless, naked piping loud,/ Like a fiend hid in a cloud” (lines 3 &
4) which has mixed meanings of helplessness and obsession. When
Blake uses the word “fiend,” he is most likely using the informal
meaning of one who is desperately in need (line 4). The final lines in
the poem include the painful words, “struggling, striving, and bound”
that make the birth experience negative until the infant consoles
himself by sulking on the mother, near the food source (lines 5, 6 & 7).
This image is clearly one from a male perspective of the 18th
century.
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A Cradle Song
By William Blake
1789
Sweet dreams form a shade,
O’er my lovely infants head.
Sweet dreams of pleasant streams,
By happy silent moony beams
Sweet sleep with soft down.
Weave thy brows an infant crown.
Sweet sleep Angel mild,
Hover o’er my happy child.
Sweet smiles in the night,
Hover over my delight.
Sweet smiles Mothers smiles,
All the livelong night beguiles.
Sweet moans, dovelike sighs,
Chase not slumber from thy eyes,
Sweet moans, sweeter smiles,
All the dovelike moans beguiles.
Sleep sleep happy child,
All creation slept and smil’d.
Sleep sleep, happy sleep.
While o’er thee thy mother weep
Sweet babe in thy face,
Holy image I can trace.
Sweet babe once like thee.
Thy maker lay and wept for me
Wept for me for thee for all,
When he was an infant small.
Thou his image ever see.
Heavenly face that smiles on thee,
Smiles on thee on me on all,
Who became an infant small,
Infant smiles are His own smiles,
Heaven & earth to peace beguiles.
Blake writes this poem
also using a quatrain, fourline stanza with the first two
and the last two lines
rhyming.
When Blake uses the
synecdoche, “Sweet smiles
in the night” and “Sweet
sleep with soft down,” he is
meaning for the child to feel
a sense of security and
peacefulness during the night
(lines 5 & 9).
The end of the poem
uses metaphors such as,
“Thy maker lay and wept for
me” and “Heavenly face that
smiles on thee” to represent
the Lord’s protection over
the sleeping child (lines 24
& 28).
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Nick and the Candlestick
By Sylvia Plath
1962
I am a miner. The light burns blue.
Waxy stalactites
Drip and thicken, tears
The earthen womb
Exudes from its dead boredom.
Black bat airs
Wrap me, raggy shawls,
Cold homicides.
They weld to me like plums.
Old cave of calcium
Icicles, old echoer.
Even the newts are white,
Those holy Joes.
And the fish, the fish---Christ! They are panes of ice,
A vice of knives,
A piranha
Religion, drinking
Its first communion out of my live toes.
The candle
Gulps and recovers its small altitude,
Its yellows hearten.
O love, how did you get here?
O embryo
Remembering, even in sleep,
Your crossed position.
The blood blooms clean
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In you, ruby.
The pain
You wake to is not yours.
Love, love,
I have hung our cave with roses.
With soft rugs---The last of Victoriana.
Let the stars
Plummet to their dark address,
Let the mercuric
Atoms that cripple drip
Into the terrible well,
You are the one
Solid the spaces lean on, envious.
You are the baby in the barn.
The poem “Nick and the Candlestick” is another free verse written
by Plath about the birth of a child (most likely one of her own).
When Plath uses the metaphorical image of “panes of ice” and “a
vice of knives” she helps the reader to see and feel the pain of labor (lines
15 & 16).
Alliteration is present in the lines, “The blood blooms clean” and
“Wrap me, raggy shawls” and assonance is heard throughout the poem as
well, whereby Plath conveys a message with “Those holy joes” and
“black bat airs” (lines 6, 7, 13, & 27). During this difficult time of giving
birth, she seems to be frustrated with religion as she feels on her own with
only the baby to comfort her.
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Spelling
By Margaret Atwood
1982
My daughter plays on the floor
with plastic letters,
red, blue & hard yellow,
learning how to spell,
spelling,
how to make spells.
I wonder how many women
denied themselves daughters,
closed themselves in rooms,
drew the curtains
so they could mainline words.
A child is not a poem,
a poem is not a child.
There is no either / or.
However.
I return to the story
of the woman caught in the war
& in labour, her thighs tied
together by the enemy
so she could not give birth.
Ancestress: the burning witch,
her mouth covered by leather
to strangle words.
A word after a word
after a word is power.
At the point where language falls away
from the hot bones, at the point
where the rock breaks open and darkness
flows out of it like blood, at
the melting point of granite
when the bones know
they are hollow & the word
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splits & doubles & speaks
the truth & the body
itself becomes a mouth.
This is a metaphor.
How do you learn to spell?
Blood, sky & the sun,
your own name first,
your first naming, your first name,
your first word.
Spelling is a free verse poem that describes a mother whom is most
likely the poet herself, watching her daughter as she learns how to spell.
The daughter is playing with the building blocks that led her mother, the
poet, to be the person she has become. The struggle is whether the choice to
have a child and give up the writing is worth it.
Atwood works through her feelings by remembering the women past
whom were tortured and stifled just for being women. One woman had her
“thighs tied/ together by the enemy/ so she could not give birth” during a
war and another had “her mouth covered by leather/ to strangle words”
(lines 19-21 & 23-24).
Atwood recognizes the importance of women to be educated and to
have a voice, “A word after a word/ after a word is power” (lines 25-26).
The metaphor in the poem is literally pointed out by Atwood. The
empowerment of her daughter is reflected in the lines “The truth and the
body/ itself becomes a mouth” (lines 35-36).
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Looking at Them Asleep
Sharon Olds
1987
When I come home late at night and go in to kiss the children,
I see my girl with her arm curled around her head,
her face deep in unconsciousness-so
deeply centered she is in her dark self,
her mouth slightly puffed like one sated but
slightly pouted like one who hasn’t had enough,
her eyes so closed you would think they have rolled the
iris around to face the back of her head,
the eyeball marble-naked under that
thick satisfied desiring lid,
she lies on her back in abandon and sealed completion,
and the son in his room, oh the son he is sideways in his bed,
one knee up as if he is climbing
sharp stairs up into the night,
and under his thin quivering eyelids you
know his eyes are wide open and
staring and glazed, the blue in them so
anxious and crystally in all this darkness, and his
mouth is open, he is breathing hard from the climb
and panting a bit, his brow is crumpled
and pale, his long fingers curved,
his hand open, and in the center of each hand
the dry dirty boyish palm
resting like a cookie. I look at him in his
quest, the thin muscles of his arms
passionate and tense, I look at her with her
face like the face of a snake who has swallowed a deer,
content, content-and I know if I wake her she’ll
smile and turn her face toward me though
half asleep and open her eyes and I
know if I wake him he’ll jerk and say Don’t and sit
up and stare about him in blue
unrecognition, oh my Lord how I
know these two. When love comes to me and says
Who do you know, I say This girl, this boy.
This is a beautiful
narrative, free verse poem
about a mother observing
her two children sleeping
and recognizing their
unique differences.
Olds uses similes to
describe the physical
characteristics and position
of the children when she
sees her son with “one
knee up as if he is
climbing/ sharp stairs up
into the night” and “the dry
dirty boyish palm/resting
like a cookie.” (lines 13-14
& 22-23) There are many
similes throughout that
help us to understand how
olds sees her beloved son
and daughter.
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Piano
By D.H. Lawrence
1964
Softly, in the dusk, a woman is singing to me;
Taking me back down the vista of years, till I see
A child sitting under the piano, in the boom of the tingling strings
And pressing the small, poised feet of a mother who smiles as she sings.
In spite of myself, the insidious mastery of song
Betrays me back, till the heart of me weeps to belong
To the old Sunday evenings at home, with winter outside
And hymns in the cozy parlor, the tinkling piano our guide.
So now it is vain for the singer to burst into clamor
With the great black piano appassionato. The glamor
Of childish days is upon me, my manhood is cast
Down in the flood of remembrance, I weep like a child for the past.
D.H. Lawrence writes a quatrain poem rhyming the first two
and the last two lines of the four stanzas.
He clearly is being nostalgic and yearning for his boyhood
by remembering a special time with his mother playing the piano.
This is a narrative poem whereby Lawrence uses the piano as a
symbol for the happy times in his childhood when he felt safe and
loved as he refers to “the old Sunday evenings at home with the
winter outside/ And hymns in the cozy parlor, the tinkling piano
our guide” (lines 7-8).
This poem is very likely to be an elegy about Lawrence’s
mother. In the opening he writes, “Softly, in the dusk a woman is
singing to me,/ Taking me back down the vista of years” which is
most likely a memory of his mother who has passed away (lines 12).
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Advice
By Ruth Stone
1987
My hazard wouldn’t be yours, not ever:
But every doom, like a hazelnut, comes down
To its own worm. So I am rocking here
Like any granny with her apron over her head
Saying, lordy me. It’s my trouble.
There’s nothing to be learned this way.
If I heard a girl crying help
I would go to save her:
But you hardly ever hear those words.
Dear children, you must try to say
Something when you are in need.
Don’t confuse hunger with greed:
And don’t wait until you are dead.
Ruth Stone writes a free verse poem about a mother who
wants to give her children advice to protect them. Her tone is a bit
helpless and desperate. She wants to help but she “hardly ever
hears the words” (line 9).
The irony is that now she is an old woman removed from her
children and now she has so much to say in order to protect them
from the world. Why was it not said before?
The metaphor used for “doom” is a “hazelnut falling down”
which hardly seems like an accurate comparison (line 2). This
metaphor leads one to think the old woman has lost some
perspective on the dangers of life.
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Mother o’ Mine
By Rudyard Kipling
IF I were hanged on the highest hill,
Mother o’ mine, 0 mother o’ mine!
I know whose love would follow me still,
Mother o’ mine, 0 mother o’ mine!
If I were drowned in the deepest sea,
Mother o’ mine, 0 mother o’ mine!
I know whose tears would come down to me,
Mother o’ mine, 0 mother o’ mine!
If I were damned of body and soul,
I know whose prayers would make me whole,
Mother o’ mine, 0 mother o’ mine!
“Mother O’ Mine” is a quatrain with the first and third lines
rhyming and the second and fourth lines rhyming. There is a
rhythm that one could easily put to music.
Kipling writes a narrative poem about the endless and
enduring love a mother has for her child. It is quite sentimental
for its time which makes it more appropriate to be written by a
man.
Hyperbole is the primary usage in this poem. When Kipling
writes, “When I am drowned in the deepest sea, . . ./ I know
whose tears would come down to me,” he wants the reader to feel
how much love, beyond all reason, a mother exhumes (lines 5 &
7)
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Women
By Alice Walker
1986
They were women then
My mama’a generation
Husky of voice-Stout of
Step
With fists as well as
Hands
How they battered down
Doors
And ironed
Starched white
Shirts
How they led
Armies
Headragged Generals
Across mined
Fields
Booby-trapped
Ditches
To discover books
Desks
A place for us
How they knew what we
Must know
Without knowing a page
Of it
Themselves.
The poem “Women” is written in free verse by a woman, Alice
Walker, about the women of her mother’s generation.
There is an allusion of wartime that is symbolized by “battered
down doors,” “mined fields,” and “headragged generals” (lines 7-8 & 1416) The only reason the allusion exists is because Walker does not come
right out and use the term war, instead she paints a picture of an event that
the women of her mother’s generation had to endure in order to better the
lives of their children. Walker writes that these women had to lead armies
“across mined/ fields/ booby-trapped/ ditches” to get to a place where
they could educate their children symbolized by “books” and “desks”
(lines 15-20).
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Biographical Sketches
Atwood, Margaret (1939- )
Margaret Atwood was born in Ottowa, Canada where she wrote poems, short stories, and
novels.She published her first book of poems, Double Perephone, in 1962. Her books have received
critical acclaim in the United States, Europe, and her native Canada, and she has been the recipient of
numerous literary awards. Atwood's feminist concerns also emerge clearly in her novels, The Edible
Woman, Surfacing, Life before Man, Bodily Harm, and The Handmaid's Tale (Almanac of Famous
People).
Blake, William (1757-1827)
William Blake was born in the Soho district of London apprenticed to an engraver. Author of
mystical and metaphysical works including Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1793), America: A Prophecy
(1793),Europe: A Prophecy (1794), Book of Urizen (1794), Book of Ahania (1795), Book of Los
(1795), and of symbolic poems terminating with Milton (1808) and Jerusalem (1820). Blake also made
illustrations for Bible, Paradise Lost, Blair's The Grave, Pastorals of Virgil, etc.(Merriam-Webster’s
Biographical Dictionary).
Kipling, Rudyard (1865-1936)
Rudyard Kipling was an English writer, born in India, reared in England, and returned to India
in 1882 on the editorial staff of the Civil & Military Gazette and Pioneer. He began writing verse
and tales while in India and was awarded The Nobel prize for literature in 1907. Among his works
were Departmental Ditties (1886), Plain Tales from the Hills (1888), Wee Willie Winkie (1888), The
Jungle Book (1894) and many, many more (Almanac of Famous People).
Lawrence, D.H. (1885-1930)
D.H.. Lawrence was born in Nottingham, England. The English novelist, poet, and essayist took
as his major theme, the relationship between men and women, which he regarded as disastrously wrong
in his time. The quarreling of his parents and the consequent damage to the children, became the
subject of perhaps his most famous novel, Sons and Lovers (1913). Critics immediately regarded it as a
brilliant illustration of Sigmund Freud's theory of the Oedipus complex. But in Lady Chatterley's
Johnson 18
Lover, his last full-length novel, Lawrence went much further. The book was banned in England, and
this was followed by the seizure of the manuscript of his poems Pansies (Kennedy and Gioia).
Sharon Olds (1942- )
Sharon Olds was born in San Francisco and attended Stanford and Columbia University. Her
first collection of poems was Satan Says (1980), and her second volume, The Dead and the Living,
won the Lamont Award and National Book Critics Circle Award. She currently teaches at New York
University (Kennedy and Gioia).
Plath, Sylvia (1932-1963)
Sylvia Plath was born in Boston. She was the dasughter of German immigrants who taught at
Boston University. Plath was a scholarship winner at Smith College and received early publication,
however she struggled with mental illness for which she underwent shock therapy. Plath committed
suicide leaving two children and the manuscript of poems that were later published in the highly
acclaimed Ariel (1965). Other major collections of Plath's poems are Crossing the Water (1971) and
Winter Trees (London, 1971; New York, 1972); her prose includes Letters Home: Correspondence
1950-1963 (1975), edited by Aurelia Schober Plath, and a collection of short stories, Johnny Panic and
the Bible of Dreams (1979) (Almanac of Famous People).
Stone, Ruth (1915- )
Ruth Stone is an important, relatively unknown, American poet. Stone's first book of verse, In an
Iridescent Time, was published in 1958. Other works include Cheap: New Poems and Ballads (1975)
and Second Hand Coat (1991) (Almanac of Famous People).
Walker, Alice (1944- )
Alice Walker was born in Eatonton, Georgia, a southern town where most African Americans
toiled at the difficult job of tenant farming. Her writing reflects these roots, where black vernacular
was prominent and the stamp of slavery and oppression were still present. Walker has earned critical
and popular acclaim as a major American novelist and intellectual. Her literary reputation was secured
with her Pulitzer-Prize-winning third novel, The Color Purple, which was transformed into a popular
film by Steven Spielberg (Merriam-Webster’s Biological Dictionary).
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Conclusion
I chose the theme motherhood strictly for personal reasons. I am nine months
pregnant and prepared to deliver my third daughter. I have a nine and ten year old now
who have changed my life more than I could put into words. So when I read poetry
written by such incredibly talented women writers who were able to convey feelings
and emotions I have experienced, it moved me to create this anthology with the theme of
motherhood.
Out of all of the poets I researched for this anthology, I was most impressed with
Sylvia Plath. I not only loved her poems and would have liked to include more, but I
found it intriguing that she suffered from depression, wrote dark poetry, committed
suicide at thirty, but wrote such happy whimsical poems about pregnancy and
motherhood. It seemed to be the only time she was truly happy.
I also have an interest in women’s history and find it fascinating that there are
little to no poems written by women about maternity issues; something so significant to
the female gender. It is about time we no longer have to look and behave like men in
order to be considered “equals” in our society. A woman should be able to celebrate her
womanhood, femininity, and compassion if she so chooses and rank equal to but not the
same as her male counterpart.
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