Gwendolyn Brooks The Mother
Legally a Crime
What is motherhood to you? Are you still considered a “mother” if you aborted your only child? Suppose you have multiple children but aborted one, are you still a mother? Abortion was and still is a controversial issue in America. When you abort a child, you are taking the life of someone’s niece, nephew, cousin, aunt, best friend, soul mate, etc. In “the mother”, Gwendolyn Brooks challenges the controversy of abortions and motherhood by illustrating how the speaker feels trapped in her sorrowfulness and guilt. The title, “the mother”, contradicts the speaker who has aborted her children. Abortions can be spontaneous miscarriages, or induced. Honoring “the mother” is rejected when the speaker says, “Abortions”, implying she is one experienced it (1). Considering when you abort a fetus, you no longer have a …show more content…
The poem starts off with rhyming couplets when the mother is imagining her un-born’s future. She imagines them as “The damp small pulps with little or with no hair / The singers and workers that never handled the air” (3-4). The singsong way of speaking embraces the mother’s hopeful thinking of the future for her kids if they were alive. However, the rhyming couplets dissipates as the poem gets more intense. The lack of rhyming couplets may reflect the speaker’s solemnness. The woman is talking to her fetus, “Your stilted or lovely loves, your tumults, your marriages, aches, and your deaths / If I poisoned the beginnings of your breaths” (19-20). Her emotional state changes from being hopeful to doubtfulness and guilt. She is in deep regret that she may have taken away the lifetime moments they would have had. This reveals the confusion she is going through, which answers why the couplets aren’t structured routinely throughout the poem. Although, there is a ABAB rhyme scheme, the couplets are a way to track the speaker’s
What is motherhood to you? Are you still considered a “mother” if you aborted your only child? Suppose you have multiple children but aborted one, are you still a mother? Abortion was and still is a controversial issue in America. When you abort a child, you are taking the life of someone’s niece, nephew, cousin, aunt, best friend, soul mate, etc. In “the mother”, Gwendolyn Brooks challenges the controversy of abortions and motherhood by illustrating how the speaker feels trapped in her sorrowfulness and guilt. The title, “the mother”, contradicts the speaker who has aborted her children. Abortions can be spontaneous miscarriages, or induced. Honoring “the mother” is rejected when the speaker says, “Abortions”, implying she is one experienced it (1). Considering when you abort a fetus, you no longer have a …show more content…
The poem starts off with rhyming couplets when the mother is imagining her un-born’s future. She imagines them as “The damp small pulps with little or with no hair / The singers and workers that never handled the air” (3-4). The singsong way of speaking embraces the mother’s hopeful thinking of the future for her kids if they were alive. However, the rhyming couplets dissipates as the poem gets more intense. The lack of rhyming couplets may reflect the speaker’s solemnness. The woman is talking to her fetus, “Your stilted or lovely loves, your tumults, your marriages, aches, and your deaths / If I poisoned the beginnings of your breaths” (19-20). Her emotional state changes from being hopeful to doubtfulness and guilt. She is in deep regret that she may have taken away the lifetime moments they would have had. This reveals the confusion she is going through, which answers why the couplets aren’t structured routinely throughout the poem. Although, there is a ABAB rhyme scheme, the couplets are a way to track the speaker’s