Morning Song BY SYLVIA PLATH summery analysis

POEM : 
Love set you going like a fat gold watch. 
The midwife slapped your footsoles, and your bald cry   
Took its place among the elements. 

Our voices echo, magnifying your arrival. New statue. 
In a drafty museum, your nakedness 
Shadows our safety. We stand round blankly as walls. 

I’m no more your mother 
Than the cloud that distills a mirror to reflect its own slow 
Effacement at the wind’s hand. 

All night your moth-breath 
Flickers among the flat pink roses. I wake to listen: 
A far sea moves in my ear. 

One cry, and I stumble from bed, cow-heavy and floral 
In my Victorian nightgown. 
Your mouth opens clean as a cat’s. The window square 

Whitens and swallows its dull stars. And now you try 
Your handful of notes; 

summery : 

The speaker, "I," addresses a new baby, "you," throughout this poem.

The baby is born and begins screaming. The speaker reflects on how the baby looks and sounds in its first moments of life.

Soon the family watches the baby in its bed, a form of viewership that strikes the speaker as something similar to viewing a statue at an art museum.

At home, the speaker stays awake most of the night, listening to the baby breathing. Once the baby starts to cry, the speaker (who we now know is the baby's mother, judging from the fact that she's wearing a Victorian nightgown), rushes out to take care of it.


She watches as the morning starts to color the windowpanes, and then marvels at how the baby has begun to coo – a form of "singing" that the speaker likens to "vowels" flying up like "balloons.



Analysis: 

Morning Song by Sylvia Plath: Critical Analysis
When Sylvia Plath wrote this unconventional poem of hers on February 1961, she had given birth to her daughter Frieda. The mother love is strangely absent in the beginning of the poem. But the mother does move from a strange alienation to a kind of instinctive sweeping emotion, when she lives with the child for some time and when the child happens to breathe and cry; this probably happens after the intense labor pain is over, so that the mother could feel the love.
Sylvia Plath 
Sylvia Plath




In fact, “maternal feelings” do not automatically occur. Plath is honest to divulge (confess) her feelings of alienation and separation. In the last three stanzas, the emotional estrangement changes and she impulsively listen to the sound of her child as it sleeps. The surreal images and comparisons are functional to emphasize the sense of oddity and alienation in the feelings of the mother. One striking surreal image that somehow supports the ‘thingness’ of the baby is that of its cry as “bald.

To compare a child to a “fat gold watch” is surreal. The child is animate while a watch is inanimate. Love is engaging while winding up a watch is a mechanical act. What the simile suggests, is the great distance between the act of love and the fact of the baby.  What does this baby- this thing with its own existence- have to do with the emotions that engendered it? By raising this question about what most people consider a most “natural” phenomenon – the birth of a child – Plath helps the reader see something very old  (childbirth) as something quite strange, new, and unsettling. The disorienting effect of Plath’s style is typical of surrealism.

Plath seems to emphasize the nonhuman quality of this new being/thing that does not take its place among other humans, but “among the elements.” Stanza 2 reinforces the nonhuman quality of the baby as perceived by its parents. The child is a “new statue.” The parents are pictured as gazing at it “in a drafty museum.” In other words, they cannot help staring at the child as a statue and the parents as walls, not much communication occur. Plath’s surreal images underline the parents’ feelings of alienation and strangeness in this new (to them) situation.

No longer a statue, the child’s presence takes on more spirited animation through the animal imagery. The speaker’s lack of feeling for her child gradually transforms into appreciation and wonder, particularly at its sounds – not a “bald cry” any longer but something shaped, “a handful of notes.”

The child enters the human world when the speaker perceives its attempts at language with the clear vowels rise like balloons. The poem closes with this idea of the child making poetry of the natural and innate human sounds filled with emotion. Morning Song records how the speaker’s perception of her baby changes, her intimacy with her child grants her the vision of its animated being.

The theme in “Morning Song” is alienation and the process by which it is overcome. It deals with material instincts and its awakening. Plath avoids sentimentality in taking up the subject – of becoming a mother in a fatherly way. A woman does not come to motherhood merely by giving birth. New behavior is learned. The being of the mother is as new as the being of the child. Even the speaker listening to the child’s sounds and getting fascinated is not self-willed or under her control. She follows her instinct: “only cry and I stumble from bed.” Her child sings to her with a “morning song” and a bond is established with the help of language, the essential human act. One secondary, but important issue that the poem deals with is; can a woman be both mother and famous poet? In this, she is dealing with one of the major issues that faced women poets in the twentieth century. This poem answers her implied question. The joyous ending proclaims the arrival of both a new signer on the scene and a mother pound of her child’s vocal signals and message.


Second analysis with commentary : 

Sylvia Plath had recently given birth to her daughter Frieda when she wrote “Morning Song” in February, 1961. This eighteen-line lyric is structured in three-line stanzas or tercets. Although the title promises a song, the only song the reader gets is a baby’s cry. Plath may be experimenting with a traditional form of love poem  .

Plath’s poem mentions love only in the first line: “Love set you going like a fat gold watch”; that is, the love of the parents gave birth to the baby. The mother love that the speaker is expected to feel is strangely absent in this poem. Instead, the mother-speaker moves from a strange alienation from this new being to a kind of instinctive awakening to the child’s presence, her connection to it, and her appreciation for its “handful of notes.”

Once the reader grasps the situation of the poem—the birth of a child—the remainder of the poem is reasonably clear. Although the emotional interest of the poem focuses on the new mother, both parents are mentioned: “Our voices echo” and “your nakedness/ Shadows our safety. We stand round.” Plath startles the reader with line 7: “I’m no more your mother.” Maternal feelings do not automatically occur. Plath is...

The clear vowels rise like balloons.