How Does Sylvia Plath View On Motherhood

Judith Wright and Sylvia Plath both present different views on motherhood through Wright’s poem Mother To Child and Plath’s Morning Song. Wright explores the joy and liveliness of growing a baby by using a warm, slow, and tranquil tone throughout the poem, including enjambment, as if soothing a baby. In contradiction, Plath has an alternative view of motherhood, exposing the negatives of it at first, because in the narrator’s case it was not love at first sight. This can be heard in the tone during the poem, being detached, enabling the reader to understand her lack of connection with her child. As the poem continues, the tone switches slightly to accepting the child as a human, rather than an object as the motherly instincts develop. This …show more content…
Plath addresses the thought of death in an unsettlingly calm manner, feeling as if the narrator would “rather be horizontal” than vertical, giving an image to the reader of lying lifeless, whether in a coffin or in the ground. The narrator is disappointed in themselves, a metaphor describing how they “must soon unpetal”, comparing their lives to that of a flower, as flowers start to lose petals as they pass away. Dickinson, in her poem, compels the reader to feel as if claustrophobic, as she includes onomatopoeia in the “beating” and “treading” of the mourners at this funeral in her mind, reinforcing an unpleasant feeling invading her personal space, very much like depression does to thoughts. As this continues, her “mind was going numb” after the constant treading and beating, thus indicating to the reader that the mind can only take so much, being noise, or pain. This can also be interpreted as the narrator being walked all over by this “treading”, emotionally. In contrast, Plath incorporates personification when describing her innate state when lying down, and the sky and her are in “constant conversation”. This demonstrates the peculiar infatuation the narrator has with being in a horizontal position, whether resting or passed away. Similarly, Dickinson incorporates personification of the concept of “Sense” by capitalizing it. In this …show more content…
Donne addresses his lover in “Good Morrow” after a night of being together, and expresses their love through a spiritual connection in a dramatic tone. The narrator conveys to the reader that “till we loved; were we not weened till then”, indicating his life did not commence until he found his true love. Dissimilarly, Wright describes the intercourse in a passionate manner, as the narrator describes the conception of a child with the women and man’s reproductive cells. Wright includes oxymoron in the comparison of woman to man, the sperm and egg being “the maker and the made”, needed in order to make a child. Wright incorporates the metaphor “intricate and folded rose” to describe the reproductive organ of a woman, and its delicate nature compared to the harsh and rough “blind head butting” of a man’s reproductive organ. Similarly, a metaphor is apparent as Donne describes worlds, and “each hath one and is one”, conveying to the reader each person has a soul mate, and is one to another. This is also a hyperbole, with Donne using the size of the world to compare to the size of their love. Wright also includes a metaphor in describing a woman’s egg, being a “selfless, shapeless, seed”, as the egg can be interpreted as the seed to a child. Donne describes the lust within intercourse as they “sucked in country pleasures”,