17 pages • 34 minutes read
Gwendolyn BrooksThe Mother
Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1945A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Symbols & Motifs
Children
The aborted children in “the mother” live whole, full lives in the mind of the speaker. All of the actions they perform in the poem, from sucking on thumbs to working and playing, are fabrications. In reality, the speaker has very little to work with when crafting these images. Since the children never truly lived, they never displayed any aptitude for a particular career, and so describing them as “singers and workers” is a grand leap of imagination (Line 4). The “killed children” take on supernatural qualities as the speaker hears their names in the wind and clutches them to a breast they cannot nurse (Line 11). The speaker eschews the language of simile, avoiding “like” or “as” and speaking in metaphor. This renders the images more immediately for the reader, and it reveals something about the speaker: The line between the imaginary and the real, the literal and the metaphorical is not of primary concern. Her love has made these children a full emotional reality and their deaths a true loss.
The children as they appear in the poem speak more to the speaker’s understanding of her own actions than they do to any literal children. Her grief and love paint a complex portrait of a life full of joy and sorrow. Perhaps she would have been good to these children; perhaps she would have been cruel. The speaker gives herself credit, or takes responsibility, for both aborted realities.
Christian Imagery
Brooks avoids any explicit references to a higher power, angels, demons, or any other figures that would signal a Christian cosmology. Still, the speaker’s choice of words to describe her feelings and actions betrays a deep familiarity with Christian themes. The first time she addresses her own abortion, she refers to it as a sin (Line 4). No other descriptions of her actions or the fallout from her actions are so concise. As a result, they can read as elaborations on that first description.
The way Brooks describes creating life is reminiscent of the creation story in the book of Genesis. God “created” the heavens and the earth by speaking them into existence (Genesis 1:1). The speaker in “the mother” speaks her children into existence by assigning them lives full of events that never occurred. Wholesale creation—making something out of nothing—is a power only God has, and it is one that the speaker exhibits. Just as God saw “all that he had made” (Genesis 1:31), the mother questions whether the children are dead or “never made” (Line 26). As God granted the breath of life, the mother “poisoned the beginnings of [their] breaths” (Line 20). Omnipotence is partnered with omniscience, and God exhibits knowledge of people before they are even conceived (“Before I formed you in the womb I knew you” [Jeremiah 1:5]). To know someone before they’re born is a relationship only a pregnant person could have, and the speaker assures her children that “she knew [them], though faintly” (Line 32).
The speaker also draws contrast between her abilities and those of an omnipotent god by drawing attention to her flawed humanity. As a benevolent god might declare to creation, she loves her children, though she has to entreat them to hear the truth in her words. Even the choice to avoid capital letters in the title draws contrast between the speaker and an all-powerful being: She is no capital-G God, but merely “the mother”—singular, definite, but ordinary.
Violence
The speaker in “the mother” doesn’t beat around the bush: These are her dead, killed children. She makes violent metaphors for abortion, comparing it to seizing, stealing, and poisoning. The voices of her dead children travel uneasily, untethered in the voice of the wind. She attempts to soften these slights but falls short. Though she draws them in, they are unable to suckle at her breast. There was deliberateness, yes, but it was “not deliberate” (Line 21).
The abortion left a wound on the speaker’s psyche. Her inability to forget, to stop remembering such visceral details about children that didn’t exist in all the ways she sees and smells and feels them in her head, is a raw pain that never heals. She offers her love as a way to comfort her children, but the past-tense, one-way nature of this love illustrates a new facet of her pain. As long as the children lived, they were loved. The speaker, as the only one left alive, can’t receive any of that love in return.
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By Gwendolyn Brooks
