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.
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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