the Greater Nomadic Council

Sylvia Plath's "Morning Song"

Long one of my favorite of Plath's poems, I've finally had the opportunity to write about "Morning Song" for class. Continuing my tradition of posts no one wants to read, here's my take on the poem:

One of Sylvia Plath's more earth-bound poems, “Morning Song” strikes an intriguing balance between a mother's love for her newborn and the darker thoughts and feelings the birth inspires such as meditations on her own death and the mother's inability to comprehend her child due to its almost inhuman otherness. The poem manages a deft navigation between the rocks of sentimentality and the whirlpool of postpartum depression. The precarious balance between these and other seemingly contradictory emotions and the way in which Plath examines and plays with this tension stand as the poem's primary achievements. Love may set the poem going and ultimately be its main theme, but the problematic and perhaps guilt-inducing emotions the baby causes the mother make the work something other than a straight-forward ode.

The poem's first line eloquently captures the speaker's ambivalent tone by comparing the baby to a “fat gold watch” that, nevertheless, was “set... going” by “love.” From the start, the speaker envisions the child as something apart and not quite human. Instead, it is ornamental and mechanical, however valuable. A watch's workings derive from a mysterious art of gears and levers understood only by its maker. However, here even the mother cannot comprehend the infant. Later in the stanza, the child's first cry is a “bald cry” that takes “its place among the elements.” The adjective “bald” implicitly contrasts with the more guarded emotional expressions of adults and, by extension, the parents, emphasizing the child's vulnerability and difference. The very fact that such a cry “took its place among the elements” suggests another contrast with the mother. Elements must be pure and indivisible. Purity, like the child's cry, requires a simplicity of feeling and consciousness impossible for adults—a fact to which the poem itself attests.

However, the parents' “voices echo, magnifying [the infant's] arrival,” a momentous occasion. Even so, the child is merely a “new statue” which reduces it to something inhuman and ornamental like a “gold watch.” The baby may be beautiful and valuable, but it is an object, not yet a subject or fully human. Standing over it in the “drafty museum” (perhaps a playful reference to hospital gowns), the child's “nakedness / [s]hadows [their] safety,” a dense phrase that allows numerous interpretations. “Shadows” can mean “follows” as well as “being the shadow of something.” In the first case, what does it mean for the newborn's “nakedness” to follow the parents' “safety?” The image suggests the manner in which a toddler might tail its parents around their house, entirely dependent upon them. In the second reading, the child's nakedness is but a shadow of the parents' secure, self-aware, and clothed selves, echoing the “bald cry” from the first stanza. Nevertheless, the child as the “new statue” commands attention, leaving the spectators nothing more to do than to “stand round blankly as walls” due to the infant's inscrutability and role as object of inspection and reverence.

The next stanza expands the mother's effacement to a consideration of her own death, but first states the crux of the speaker's emotional dilemma. She addresses her child with the words, “I'm no more your mother [than a cloud].” Despite its vulnerability and utter dependence, the newborn lies entirely separate from the mother. After forty weeks of pregnancy—an intimate connection—this is a poignant reminder of their irrevocable individuality. Furthermore, the mother, in contrasting herself to her newborn, sees herself like a “cloud that distills a mirror to reflect its own slow / [e]ffacement at the wind's hand.” The child must serve as her mirror, but rather than achieving a form of immortality it is the mother's “slow effacement” and death that the child reflects.

Progressing from watch to statue, the speaker, in the fourth stanza, describes the infant's “moth-breath,” the first comparison she makes between her child and a living creature. Still, the life is a small, insignificant, and fragile one that only “flickers among the flat pink roses.” Despite the tininess of this new life, its breathing causes “a far sea [to move] in [the mother's] ear,” another pairing of opposites. The child's minute breaths crash upon the mother's mind like a vast and distant sea in expression of the mystery inherent in the child as well as the intimacy she and her child share. In stark contrast to the delicate beauty of the child, the mother is “cow-heavy and floral” when she “stumble[s] from bed.” Occurring at the same time as the child's first expression of individual desire, the metaphor used to describe the child evolves from a moth to a “mouth [that] opens clean as a cat's.” Then, at the end of the fifth stanza, the mother, after stumbling half-asleep into the baby's room, notices “the window square” which we assume is clear and open to the world, framing the scene of nursing child and mother. However, the line continues on to the next stanza where its meaning inverts. “The window square / Whitens and swallows its dull stars,” mimicking the child. The occluded window isolates the mother and child from the world and returns them some of the intimacy they shared during pregnancy. Finally, the child tries its “handful of notes” and “the clear vowels rise like balloons.” Here the poem employs no metaphors to describe the child in its first act of proto-speech; it is fully human. The poem ends by reconnecting the mother and child in a shared “morning song.” The infant has its cry and the mother her poem.