The Mother by Gwendolyn Brooks: My Body, My Forever Choice

Gwendolyn Brooks was a 20th century American poet born in Kansas but grew up in Chicago. She was a kind, loving, and supportive role model to all colored poets in her time. She was often known to be in the front row engaged in poetry events she attended staying until the last poem was read, just vibing with them and making an “ooh” noise with her mouth when a line touched her soul. Gwendolyn was the first colored Pulitzer Prize winner and displayed a lot of political consciousness in her poems. This was big for her as she was a voice for the civil rights movement and emphasizing black as being beautiful and assert humanness in human nature in a harsh time for colored people. In the poem The Mother by Gwendolyn Brooks, the author depicts the way a mother will feel from beginning to end when she finds out she is pregnant and decides to abort the baby. This is politically motivated to show that abortion is the killing of a human.

The theme and subject in the first few lines are descriptions of a fetus in the womb forced to be born dead by the mother. The descriptions show what they could have become or what the mother would have witnessed in their lifetime but instead she will fail to see. By line 11 she is speaking to her “dim killed children” about having to go through the birth but never feeling the suckle. Lines (24-32) she tries to explain her actions and judgments to make the decisions made but ends up failing to convince even herself and better yet just apologize for her sins and how she has sinned against them. “Believe me, I loved you all” this is a realization coming from a woman who has experiences first hand what it must be like to abort a child and the vivid images of that small dead child. She states that she will never forget and with the bold, strong poetry you can tell that this is only written by a women to warn other women of how they may feel about abortion.

The speaker in this poem goes through a lot of turmoil throughout the stanzas. First she is named as in the title “the mother” who is given the title in lowercase form as to say that she is a mother but not “The Mother”, the capital “M” makes it a proper noun making it personal. She starts talking about the idea that you will never forget this decision, the children that you were blessed with and yet you’re taking that away. She describes the likely hood that this child might one day become someone, and that the “mother” will never be able to she has done to the world and herself. In the second stanza which contains 20 lines, speaker almost gives insight to that this was not a decision made on her own or that having a child is not done independently or that she was forced to keep these children from never seeing their birth and you can see the turmoil of what may be right and what may be wrong. By the end she reveals herself to actually be the mother of all unborn children in a very deeply saddened reality. The setting doesn’t have a specific place such as dark room or circus but rather a place in her mind. A place that she is trying to free.

In the first stanza the imagery is intense. With Brooks’s words, I see the mother of a small baby and that infants soft head when she says “the damp pulps with a little or with no hair” and I see the mother being silly and chasing the “ghosts that will never be” as she plays with her young child. Or when she describes the desire to “never want to leave them” without a sigh. When the speaker says “Return for a snack of them, with gobbling mother-eye”, I see the mother wanted to gobble up the baby because of how sweet it is and a snack of kisses and nibbles mothers adorn their small children. In stanza 2, she imagines contracting and giving birth, the babies breastfeeding suckles, hearing their cries and them playing games; she even thinks of their “loves”, “names”, and “marriages”. However these thoughts are then candidly followed by the carefully chosen grim words, “anyhow you are dead”. By the last stanza which contains 3 lines the Speaker becomes the mother in an intense apology to the lost lives.

The structure of the poem shows that it is written free verse and doesn’t follow a form it allows Brooks to speak and hold back her rhymes and then come back to the couplet rhyming. She at times flows very well and the words rhyme and then you can tell there is turmoil and angst in her chosen words and she goes against the rhyme. There are 33 lines and they are separated into 3 stanzas. It is a short poem with no meter.

Though it is a wonderfully written piece of art it gives us the insight into what it may be like to have an abortion. A political subject so intense today as it was back when it was written. This could have been a part of a political movement for women’s rights at a time that we know women were fighting for a voice to what happens to their bodies. I began this poem with the very firm stand on abortion and that every female get the choice to decide what happens to them no matter what the situation. After reading this first person internal powerful dialogue about how you may feel, it left me feeling sad and sympathetic for a person having to go through this process.