All night your One cry, and The window square. Whitens and swallows Select any word below to get its definition in the context of the poem. The words are listed in the order in which they appear in the poem. Plath's Legacy — Read a reflection on Plath's literary afterlife.
An Interview with Plath — Listen to a interview with Plath. Another Take on the Poem — Read an analysis that examines "Morning Song" through the lens of Simone de Beauvoir's feminist writings on motherhood. Lady Lazarus. Mad Girl's Love Song. Nick and the Candlestick. Poppies in October. The Applicant.
The Arrival of the Bee Box. The Moon and the Yew Tree. Chances are that pretty much every person you deal with on a regular basis has inspired feelings that aren't always happy and warm and fuzzy. Emotions, it seems, aren't black and white. In fact, they're usually all sorts of shades of grey. It's exactly this sort of complicated emotional response that speaker is dealing with as she interacts with her baby for the first time. So why should this mixed response seem so shocking? Well, maybe that's because everybody is supposed to looooooove babies.
After all, they're genetically designed to sucker-punch us into cooing and ooohing and aaahing over their witty-bitty fingers and toes. But what if you're the person who has to tote this little, crying, defenseless thing around for the next eighteen years or so? After all, for centuries women's primary "job" was to be a mother. Maybe those witty-bitty toes start to seem less charming when you realize that your job description just went from "poet" or "public intellectual" to "changer of diapers.
It's just one heck of a change. It's this complicated response that Plath works out in her poem — and it's one that helps us think through all the ways that we might have mixed feelings about the ways that our relationships shape our identities, as well. Even if they're not relationships with babies. Think Everyone is Happy to Have a Baby? Think Again. Here's what the Mayo Clinic has to say about postpartum depression.
Confessional Poetry: It's the New Lyric. Confessional poets took themselves oh-so-seriously. In fact, they made talking about the "I" into a new art form. Check out what the American Poetry Society has to say about the movement here. The New York Times Collection of Plath and Hughes' Work The Times has its hands in just about everything, so it's not all that surprising that they'd have a collection of articles reviewing Plath's works over the years. In the last three stanzas, the emotional estrangement changes and she impulsively listen to the sound of her child as it sleeps.
The surreal images and comparisons are functional to emphasize the sense of oddity and alienation in the feelings of the mother. The child is animate while a watch is inanimate.
Love is engaging while winding up a watch is a mechanical act. What the simile suggests, is the great distance between the act of love and the fact of the baby. What does this baby- this thing with its own existence- have to do with the emotions that engendered it?
The child enters the human world when the speaker perceives its attempts at language with the clear vowels rise like balloons. The poem closes with this idea of the child making poetry of the natural and innate human sounds filled with emotion.
0コメント