Morning Song by Sylvia Plath Summary

Morning Song Summary

In the first stanza of the poem Morning Song by Plath, the mother and therefore the narrator narrates the birth of the kid. She also hints at how the fetus grew bigger within the womb: ‘love set you going’. But when the mother got the kid, she didn’t feel any love at all!

The very beginning contains several surrealistic images, that obliquely reinforce the oddity and alienation that the mother felt when faced with the infant out of her own body. as an example, the primary line contains the simile ‘gold watch’ that’s intended to explain the child! A surreal image is one which isn’t rationally or logically interpretable. How can a newborn, or maybe the fetus within the womb, be sort of a gold watch? Such a picture sets the reader’s mind during a wild look for meaning; it also contributes to the open-ended ‘modernist’ nature of the poem.

One might say that the mother regards the kid a golden thing because it’s valuable to her, but here the case is simply the other. The mother couldn’t feel any so-called maternal (natural?) love for the odd thing imposed upon her body and life. this will be interpreted in another light: the mother feels that the kid may be a thing, not a living being. She remembers how the infant was beaten by the midwife making it cry and are available to consciousness. When the infant cried, the mother felt that it’s unusual (un-human) voice filled the weather (or things; to not mention filling the emotions of the mother). She also reinforces the ‘thingness’ of the baby by calling ‘it’ a statue (in a museum). ‘We’, probably she and her husband, stood round the new thing blankly as walls!

In the second stanza, the mother has the courage to confess that she didn’t desire to be a mother to the present new thing, as people had perhaps told her.

By the third stanza only can we find that the mother is starting to feel the natural impulses of being a mother; but that also comes out of an experience. it’s probably after a couple of days, the speaker seems to possess been sleeping with the baby, when she suddenly wakes up to ‘feel’ the child’s breathing over her gown. At this point she describes the infant in terms of its ‘breath’; it becomes a living being. The nightgown filled with pink rose print also suggests that the lady is starting to realize her basic and natural feminine qualities, that she is in any case capable of being a mother. She brings out the feminine image in herself by describing the ‘Victorian’ nightgown, suggesting that she features a social aspect of her life, though the standard Plath would vehemently satirize the male-dominated culture confining women to the normal gown.

within the fourth stanza, the kid cries, and therefore the mother ‘stumbles from bed’, startled and fascinated by the charm within the magical voice of a toddler, her own child. Addressing the kid, which was previously a thing, as “You”, she says, “Your mouth opens clean as a cat’s”. the kid is progressively assuming the status of an animal! it’s trying its few ‘notes’. She hears ‘clear vowels’ rising like balloons. Now, at last, we will feel that the mother’s words are pregnant with a passionate love for the kid.

The odd comparison of voice with balloon has now been suggested of the mother’s wish for the kid to grow and play with the balloon, when she would find herself completed as a mother, with a toddler she bore and mentioned. This also suggests that the kid maybe a new source for the mother, the poetess who was most likely worried that her pursuit as a poetess would need to be sacrificed after the birth of the kid. The child’s human voice, its beautiful vowels, also will become a neighborhood of the topic matter of the mother-poet.

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