Morning Song by Sylvia Plath: Summary

In the first stanza of the poem Morning Song by Sylvia Plath, the mother and the narrator narrates the birth of the child. She also hints at how the fetus grew bigger in the womb: 'love set you going'. But when the mother actually got the child, she didn't feel any love at all!

The very beginning contains several surrealistic images, that indirectly reinforce the oddity and alienation that the mother felt when faced with the infant out of her own body. For instance, the first line contains the simile ‘gold watch’ that is intended to describe the child! A surreal image is one which is not rationally or logically interpretable. How can a newborn, or even the fetus in the womb, be like a gold watch? Such an image, sets the reader’s mind in a wild search for meaning; it also contributes to the open-ended ‘modernist’ nature of the poem. One might say that the mother regards the child a golden thing because it is valuable to her; but here the case is just the opposite. The mother could not feel any so-called maternal (natural?) love for the odd thing imposed upon her body and life. This can be interpreted in another light: the mother feels that the child is a thing, not a living being. She remembers how the infant was beaten by the midwife making it cry and come to consciousness. When the infant cried, the mother felt that its unusual (un-human) voice filled the elements (or things; not to talk about filling the feelings of the mother). She also reinforces the ‘thingness’ of the baby by calling ‘it’ a statue (in a museum). ‘We’, probably she and her husband, stood around the new thing blankly as walls!

In the second stanza, the mother has the courage to confess that she didn’t feel like being a mother to this new thing, as people had perhaps told her.

By the third stanza only do we find that the mother is beginning to feel the natural impulses of being a mother; but that also comes out of an experience. It is probably after a few days, the speaker seems to have been sleeping with the baby, when she suddenly wakes up to ‘feel’ the child’s breathing over her gown. This time she describes the infant in terms of its ‘breath’; it becomes a living being. The night gown full of pink rose print also suggests that the woman is beginning to realize her basic and natural feminine qualities, that she is after all capable of being a mother. She brings out the female image in herself by describing the ‘Victorian’ nightgown, suggesting that she has a social aspect of her life, though the typical Sylvia Plath would vehemently satirize the male-dominated culture confining women to the traditional gown. In the fourth stanza, the child cries, and the mother ‘stumbles from bed’, startled and fascinated by the charm in the magical voice of a child, her own child. Addressing the child, which was previously a thing, as “You”, she says, “Your mouth opens clean as a cat’s”. The child is progressively assuming the status of an animal! It is trying its handful of ‘notes’. She hears ‘clear vowels’ rising like balloons. Now, at last, we can feel that the mother’s words are pregnant with passionate love for the child. The odd comparison of voice with balloon has now been suggested of the mother’s wish for the child to grow and play with the balloon, when she would find herself completed as a mother, with a child she bore and brought up. This also suggests that the child is a new source for the mother, the poetess who was most probably worried that her pursuit as a poetess would have to be sacrificed after the birth of the child. The child’s human voice, its beautiful vowels, will also become a part of the subject matter of the mother-poet.

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Sharma, Kedar N. "Morning Song by Sylvia Plath: Summary" BachelorandMaster, 16 Apr. 2014, bachelorandmaster.com/britishandamericanpoetry/morning-song-summary.html.