Poem

Your full May 11, Analysis “ The Mother” by Gwendolyn Brooks is one of my favorite short poems. The narrator is an unfortunate mother describing her feelings that she has about her aborted children. Although she admits to her felony and is guilty, yet she articulates her love for the dead children.
The poem starts with addressing the social problem of abortion, and how mothers suffer from the predicament of aborting their children. The narrator tells the story of her own life, and states how she is reminded of her misdeed through “ the voices of my dim killed children” (line 11). She constantly feels the remorse of seizing her children’s luck, life, sweets, births, names, baby tears, games, tumults, marriages, happiness, and sorrows.
The narrator admits that she poisoned their breaths; yet, she tells them to believe that she was not deliberate in her choice of getting them aborted. “ Believe that even in my deliberateness I was not deliberate” (line 22), is what she tells them.
But her inner guilty conscience does not allow her to express this notion of in-deliberateness for more than one line, and she is forced to say again that no matter she wanted it or not, they were dead. At the end, she again expresses her love for all her aborted children and tells them to know that she knew them and loved them all.
To sum up, the poem is an expression of guilt and love of an impoverished mother for her aborted children. The poet has presented the theme of abortion and guilt in a very lucid way.
Works Cited
Brooks, Gwendolyn. The Mother. USA: State University of New York College at Brockport, 1978.