On the text that
expresses the universal experience of new parenthood as well as any I’ve
encountered—while still being clearly its unique and talented author’s
handiwork.
First I have to
ask you to check out a couple of past posts: this
one, on the incredible challenges of parenting in general and motherhood in
particular; and this
one, on Sylvia Plath’s much more varied and rich body of works than we
often give her credit for. I’ll understand if you skip right to the next paragraph,
but I’d love for you to have a sense of both of those posts before I move forward
here. Thanks!
Welcome back. Given
those two posts, it’ll likely come as no surprise that the poem of Plath’s on
which this post focuses, “Morning Song”
(1961), is about motherhood; new motherhood, and the experience of new
parenting overall, to be exact. I’ve seen critical arguments that the poem is
bleak or cynical, but I don’t think that’s nearly the whole story; instead I’d
argue that it captures, in its six three-line stanzas, the many different
emotions and sides to new parenting, from those darkest responses (which are
definitely there, especially with a first newborn, whether we like to admit it
or not) to the more awed and amazed and powerfully inspired ones. To me, the
poem’s best stanza, and its most Plath-ian metaphor, captures those multi-faceted
responses pitch-perfectly: “I’m no more your mother / Than the cloud that
distills a mirror to reflect its own slow / Effacement at the wind’s hand.” But
if that doesn’t seem amazed enough, the next stanza (and these two occupy the
poem’s midpoint) moves more toward those emotions: “All night your moth-breath
/ Flickers among the flat pink roses. I wake to listen: / A far sea moves in my
ear.”
Great stuff. But
in my title I called this Plath’s most personal poem—and given that this is the
poet who wrote about her suicide attempts (“Lady Lazarus”) and
her love-hate relationships with her dead father and estranged husband (“Daddy”), among many
many many other profoundly personal topics, that might seem to be a stretch. But
to my mind, those poems are personal yet performative, the confessional
mode as a combination of diary and one woman show. That’s not a bad thing,
but neither is it raw or intimate enough to be truly personal. Whereas in “Morning
Song,” written when Plath’s first child (her
daughter Frieda) was 8 months old, I believe we’re getting something far
more immediate, a genuine reflection (note again that cloud-mirror metaphor) of
all that Plath was experiencing and feeling in that first year as a mother. Granted,
she still turned it into a dense and complex poem; but that was Plath. I love
her, and I love this poem most of all.
My next American
love tomorrow,
Ben
PS.
What do you think? Responses to this post? Loves you’d share for the weekend
post?
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