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- Throughout the poem the mother drifts between the imaginative and the real, finally revealing her need to believe in an existence after death. In stanza 2, she imagines giving birth, suckling babies at her breast, and hearing them cry and play games; she even thinks of their “loves” and marriages.
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‘ the mother’ by Gwendolyn Brooks is a three-stanza poem that is separated into an uneven sense of lines. These stanzas range in length from three lines up to twenty. The poem is written in free verse. This means that there is not a single rhyme scheme or metrical pattern that unifies the lines.
- Female
- October 9, 1995
- Poetry Analyst And Editor
The mother is talking about the fetuses that she's aborted. She then goes on to describe these never-born children. She imagines that they would be "damp small pulps" after birth, that they might grow us to be "singers and workers."
The mother is not talking to us now, or to herself; she's directly addressing her non-existent children. She calls them "Sweets," echoing the word from the first stanza. These children are like candy to her.
The speaker of "the mother" is… a mother. Or is she? This is the poem the question asks: can you be a mother, if you have aborted your children? What makes a mother a mother? Is "the mother" actu...
The first stanza introduces the speaker and her situation, while the second stanza delves deeper into her feelings of guilt and regret. The final stanza offers a glimmer of hope, as the speaker imagines what her children might have become if they had lived.
Analysis: “the mother”. “the mother” is a deeply introspective poem driven by the speaker’s internal reckoning. The shape of the poem follows the stream of consciousness of a would-be mother attempting to make sense of the emotional fallout of several abortions.
In stanza 2, she imagines giving birth, suckling babies at her breast, and hearing them cry and play games; she even thinks of their “loves” and marriages.
