Morning Song by Sylvia Plath

An aubade (morning song) is typically a joyous song sung by lovers at parting. Morning Song is a sort of reversal of the tradition. The couple isn’t parting here, in fact, they’ve added a child, a product of their “love,” and the mother, at least, seems quite unsettled by it. The voice is typical of Plath: cryptic and haunted. Notice the distance the descriptions build between the mother and child. The baby is a described as a machine, a statue; the parents stand around blankly as walls. Critics argue about how autobiographical the poem is. Some suggest the speaker's feelings are typical of post-partum depression. I’d be interested to hear thoughts from any mothers (willing to share).

Reading Plath always makes me feel unsettled. Her demons are always scratching at the surface.


Morning Song

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;
The clear vowels rise like balloons.




Sylvia Plath was born in Boston, Massachusetts, on October 27, 1932. She spent part of her short life in England, and married the English poet Ted Hughes. In 1963, Plath published a semi-autobiographical novel, The Bell Jar, under the pseudonym Victoria Lucas. Then, on February 11, 1963, during one of the worst English winters on record, Plath wrote a note to her downstairs neighbor instructing him to call the doctor, then she committed suicide. She was the first poet to win a Pulitzer Prize after death.