English Literature: How Would you Characterise the Speaker’s Relationship to her Child in ‘Morning Song’?

Wednesday 14 February 2018

How Would you Characterise the Speaker’s Relationship to her Child in ‘Morning Song’?

Speaker’s Relationship to her Child in ‘Morning Song’


The speaker in Morning Song is not a conventional mother, though she begins the poem with the word ‘Love’. The poem deals with maternal instincts and its awakening. Sylvia Plath does not show any sentimentality in taking up the subject of becoming a mother in a fatherly way. A woman does not come to motherhood merely by giving birth to a child. New behaviour is learned in the process of bringing a child up. The being of the mother is as new as the being of the child. Even the speaker listening to the child’s sounds of cry and getting fascinated is not self-willed or under her control. She follows her instinct ‘One cry and I stumble from bed’. Her child sings to her with a ‘morning song’ and a bond is established with the help of language gradually.
Speaker’s Relationship to her Child in Morning Song
 


At the beginning of the poem, MorningSong the mother-speaker feels a kind of strange alienation from the new-born baby. But the mother does move from this strange alienation to a kind of instinctive sweeping emotion, when she lives with the child for some time and when the child happens to breathe and cry. This probably happens after the intense labour pain is over, so that the mother could feel the love for her child.

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