The Mother By Gwendolyn Brooks Analysis

The responsibility of the female poet is two pronged: to “give name to the nameless” and “answer the received cultural imagination of the subject with something utterly different.” Sylvia Plath and Gwendolyn Brooks do it exceptionally well. Their poetry tackles subject matter vital to the task of complicating cultural imagined archetypes for women. Almost immediately, first line Gwendolyn Brooks’ poem “The Mother” fulfills its responsibility of meeting culturally imagined standards with something utterly different through the poem’s conception of motherhood. A poem with a title that implies it will discuss an individual mother, or an archetype for motherhood is followed by the line: “ Abortions never let you forget.” In the cultural imagination, …show more content…
She is just a person like everyone else trying to fit their complex experience into boxes of right and wrong like everyone else. While she is doubtful of how to categorize her experience as right or wrong, she does not ask for sympathy or pity from the reader. She writes, “I have heard the voices of the wind, the voices of my dim/ killed children./ I have contracted. I have eased.” The speaker in this poem knows and understands the weight of her choice has “contracted” in the face of that and “eased” in order to accept it. A statement that is crucially important coming from a female perspective whose autonomy or capacity for complex thought is always under siege from cultural forces. To declare that the mother has eased and can live with her decision is critical. The speaker’s unease is not intrapersonal, it 's the unresolved conflict between herself and the dead. Brooks directs her message to the wind ending the poem with: “believe me, I loved you all.” The speaker’s main concern is assuring her dead children that she only had love in her heart. The poem ends having completed a portrait of a woman assured in her decisions and herself but forever torn by an unresolvable …show more content…
Portraying herself as possessing a mastery of situations of defeat and a Phoenix like power outside of death itself and therefore her attempted suicides. Also casting disdain on idolitiizations. “A sort of walking miracle, my skin/ Bright as a Nazi lampshade” “One year in every ten/ i manage it” “the peanut crunching crowd/ Shoves in to see” “them unwrap me hand and foot---/The big strip tease” ‘I may be skin and bone,// Nevertheless, I am the same,” “I rocked shut// As a seashell./ they had to call and call/ And pick the worms off me like sticky pearls” “Dying/ is an art, like everything else,/ I do it exceptionally well” ‘it’s the theatrical” “the same brute,/ amused shout” “There is a charge// for the eyeing of my scars, there is a charge/ for the hearing of my heart” “I am your opus,/ I am your valuable,/ the pure gold baby// that melts to a shriek” “do not think I underestimate your great concern” “ Beware/ Beware/ Out of the ash/ I rise with my red hair/ And I eat men like the