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the mother by Gwendolyn Brooks: Summary and Analysis

Updated: Nov 26

Gwendolyn Brooks' "the mother" is a poem about a woman contemplating the babies that she has aborted over the years. The poem can be read as a woman mourning the loss of children she never had. People who are pro-choice will read it and see it as the emotional turmoil women face in making these difficult personal decisions.


People who are pro-life may see it as a passionate plea against abortions. The ability of the poem to garner sympathy from both sides of this issue is based on the honest, simple, and yet eloquent communication of feelings expressed in the poem.



Regardless of the interpretation given by readers, the poem is well-written and deceptively simple. The poet makes expert use of repetition as a rhetorical device and strikes a tone that is simultaneously eerie, mournful, and nostalgic.


The full text of the mother


I have provided only portions of the full text here:


Abortions will not let you forget.

You remember the children you got that you did not get,

. . . 

Believe me, I knew you, though faintly, and I loved, I loved you

All.


To access the full text of the poem, please see this page by Poetry Foundation: the mother


Summary of Gwendolyn Brooks' the mother


Stanza 1


The first line of the poem begins “Abortions will not let you forget." The poet uses second-person narrative. This puts some distance between the speaker and the subject that she’s talking about. Perhaps, the topic is too difficult for her to get directly into. 


The poet in the first stanza provides several creative descriptions of an unborn child. “The children that you got that you did not get” (Line 2). The poet describes the physical appearance of the aborted child in Line 3. And goes on to list all the behaviors that a mother would go through with a child after birth. Both the positive and negative are listed. For example, “You will never neglect or beat” and “scuttle off ghosts that come.” 


The first example is clearly negative. The second seems to describe a mother chasing away imaginary monsters for a scared child. 


Stanza 2


In the second stanza, the persona shifts to first-person narrative and uses the pronoun “I.” The speaker is becoming more comfortable and describes a kind of personal relationship with the “ghosts” that her aborted children have become.


These ghosts are given a name or description — “dim.” The second stanza can be summed up as a half-apology, which the persona appears to rethink in the last half of the stanza. The speaker goes from a voice of regret in lines such as “ . . . Sweets, if I sinned . . . If I stole your births and your names” to one of a kind of compromise at the end of the sentence, which goes on for nine lines. 


The speaker doesn’t apologize per se. The sentence ends in ambiguity: “Believe that even in my deliberateness I was not deliberate” (Line 21). In the last half of the stanza, the speaker elaborates even more on said ambiguity. She isn’t clear if there’s anything to apologize for. Nonetheless, she feels an emotional connection, nostalgia, and regret over these beings. She sums up the dichotomy in the rhyming couplet that ends the second stanza: 


You were born, you had body, you died.

It is just that you never giggled or planned or cried.


Stanza 3


The third stanza is only three lines long. It ends with the speaker asserting the only thing that she seems  to be sure of regarding these dim children — “I loved you all.” 


 


 

 

Persona or speaker 


The persona or speaker in the poem is a mother who is mourning or having nostalgia for the babies that she has aborted. The title of the poem is “the mother” after all. The author in choosing this title meant for us to focus our attention on the feelings of the mother. The feelings expressed by the persona are rather ambiguous.


In the first stanza, we get a hint of regret in the line “Abortions will not let you forget.” However, the speaker goes on to list both positive and negative aspects of raising children, such as neglect. So, we are never sure if given a chance whether she would choose not to abort these babies.


The speaker speaks of multiple abortions. This gives the impression that she had several opportunities not to go ahead with it. It is not clear the extent to which Brooks is the same as the persona in the poem. The poet most likely chose this persona as a symbolic representation of all and any woman who has experienced abortion and the complicated inner life associated with this decision.


Themes in the mother by Gwendolyn Brooks


The themes in the poem include nostalgia, regret, choice, and sorrow. The poet mourns her dim children through a pungent description in Lines 11-13: 


I have heard in the voices of the wind the voices of my dim killed children.

I have contracted. I have eased

My dim dears at the breasts they could never suck


We can describe this as the speaker trying to come to terms with her loss. She doesn’t know what to make of this loss. They were all children who were not children, or as she says in her own words: “the children you got that you did not get.” However, the poem is a testimony of her need to mourn for them.


1. Regret

 

The speaker’s regret may be teased out from her cataloging the list of the experiences that these dim children missed out on. Although these experiences are both negative and positive, one gets the impression that the intention is aimed at grieving the lost opportunities of these children to experience life or living. 


This is expressed succinctly in carefully chosen imagery and language. For example, “The singers and workers that never handled the air.” This line is powerful because it simultaneously suggests the image of a newborn grasping the air after being born with their hands as babies are wont to do, as well as images of these children as adults in occupations that they never got a chance to grow into. 


The speaker appears to be intimating that life with all its pain may have been worth living and is regretful that these children did not have a chance to experience it.


2. Nostalgia 


Nostalgia is a complex emotion. Typically, people associate it with memories that they have experienced in the past. However, in this case, nostalgia refers to ghost memories of ghost children, who were never born.


The whole of the first stanza is a list of the ghost memories that the speaker mourns in her nostalgia. 


The singers and workers that never handled the air.  

. . . 

You will never leave them, controlling your luscious sigh,   

Return for a snack of them, with gobbling mother-eye.


The nostalgia here mentions both the good and bad experiences that a mother has of raising a child. It gives the impression that such nostalgia is informed by the persona’s or even the author’s own experience of raising actual children. 


3. Mourning and sorrow 


In the second stanza, despite the speaker's difficulty in coming to terms with her choice or whether or not she should regret said choice, she mourns her dim children. She speaks of contracting and easing her “dim dears at the breasts they could never suck.” 


She proceeds with a type of confession that extends for almost nine lines. However, her confession is qualified by the conditioner “if.” For example:


If I stole your births and your names . . . 

. . .

If I poisoned the beginning of your breaths


Her apology ends with a polyptotonic line: “. . . even in my deliberateness I was not deliberate.” The poet is not confessing some grave crime or regret here. She is instead trying to explain that the choice was made out of necessity and that the result — the strange fate of dim children who “never giggled or planned or cried” — was simply an unfortunate consequence. 


4. Choices and consequences


Abortion in the American public consciousness is a political issue often described as being based on a woman’s right to choose. The persona in the poem gives us an interior view of the issue. By interior, I mean we get a close look at the inner psychological and emotional turmoil a woman goes through after an abortion. 


The speaker in the poem in the first half of the second stanza seems to apologize, then corrects herself, only to apologize again by the end of the stanza. A polyptotonic line seems to capture her ambiguity and dilemma — “. . . even in my deliberateness I was not deliberate”(Line 22). In short, she made a deliberate choice to have an abortion but did not mean it to cause harm to these children if indeed any harm was caused.


However, her mourning and grief remain to contend with after these choices.


Historical-Biographical considerations 


Gwendolyn Brooks (1917 – 2000) was the first African American Pulitzer Prize winner. She herself was a mother and gave birth to her first child in 1940 at the age of 23. The details of the poem give the impression that the poet has deep experience as a mom.


The poem was included in Gwendolyn Brooks' first published book, A Street in Bronzeville (1945).

The tenderness with which the poet describes the nostalgia of her "dim children" could only come from one with personal experience as a mom. The poem has long been seen as an “anti-abortion” poem, and many in the pro-life movement tend to use it politically as such. The McGrath Institute for Church Life certainly sees it as such in their study guide.


Here is what the poet had to say in her own words about the poem: “. . . I was trying to understand how people must feel— in this case a mother who never really became a mother." Therefore, we can think of the poem as a reflection on what could have been or nostalgia for experiences one never had.


The estate of Gwendolyn Brooks, according to Annie Finch who provided commentary and analysis on the poem for the Poetry Foundation, has even given strict instructions that the poem should not be used to either support or speak out against abortion.


Here is what the estate wrote in full: 


Ms. Brooks left specific restrictions for how this poem can be used. Her intention for the poem was to be neither pro or con abortion. It cannot be used in that context. 

Therefore, if the evidence from the poem wasn’t enough, we should rest on the words of Brooks’s estate that the poem should not be seen as a political treatise. The poem should not even be seen as autobiographical. 


Instead, the poem is simply a woman trying to come to terms with a difficult choice. She has paid and continues to pay the price of her decision by mourning the unlived lives of her aborted children, wondering what they could have been or become. 


She thinks of her dim children as deserving of a ritual of mourning for their unlived lives, which she enacts through the poem.


Rhetorical devices used in the mother


Brooks makes rich use of rhetorical devices in this poem. In particular, she is fond of repetition and turns in phrases that produce powerful effects. One could say that the main rhetorical effects of the poem rest on the frequent use of simple forms of repetition.


This is appropriate as the poem is more or less a conversation that the poet is having with herself and her lost children, and repetition is a rhetorical device frequently used to persuade and explain things to listeners. The persona in the poem is trying to reason with herself and her unborn children by explaining her choice and convincing her unborn children that she is sorry.


Before diving into the various rhetorical devices used, let's take a quick look at some definitions. The repetitive political devices in the poem include anaphora, epistrophe, symploce, anadiplosis, and polyptoton. The table below provides definitions and examples of each.

Rhetorical Device

Definition

Example

Anaphora

Repetition at the start

Dr. Martin Luther King (1963): I Have a Dream speech.

Epistrophe

Repetition at the end

Dan Quayle (1988): Senator, I served with Jack Kennedy. I knew Jack Kennedy. Jack Kennedy was a friend of mine. Senator, you're no Jack Kennedy.

Symploce

Repetition at the beginning and end, with a small change in the middle

Trollope (1876): I am not afraid of you; — but I am afraid for you. 

Anadiplosis

When the same language is used at the end of one sentence or clause and at the beginning of the next.

Benjamin Franklin (1758): For the want of a nail the shoe was lost/For the want of a shoe the horse was lost.

Polyptoton

Repetition of the root with a different ending.

Melville (1851): The prophecy was that I should be dismembered; and - Aye! I lost this leg. I now prophesy that I will dismember my dismemberer.


Any definitions not included in this table will be briefly explained in the text before being elaborated upon.


1. Anaphora


Anaphora is a rhetorical device that occurs when the speaker repeats the same words at the start of a phrase or a sentence. The poet uses this frequently throughout her poem. You could say that it constitutes the main form of rhetoric throughout the poem.


For example, in the first stanza, from the second line, she begins, "You remember the children you got that you did not get." Then she switches to the "you will never" pattern, repeated thrice throughout the stanza.


In the second stanza, she continues with these repetitive phrases. The first one is "I have . . ." before she switches to "If I . . ." The last stanza also has an example of anaphora that begins with "Believe me," which is twice repeated.


2. Epistrophe


Epistrophe refers to the repetition of elements at the end of successive words or phrases. We have at least one prominent example of epistrophe in the last stanza: namely, "I loved you all." The phrase is repeated twice in two successive sentences.


3. Symploce


Symploce combines anaphora with epistrophe. In this device, elements are repeated at the end with a small change in the middle. The entire third stanza is an example of symploce. The first line of the first stanza slightly differs from the second line of that stanza, although they begin and end in the same way.


The persona in the second line adds "I knew you, though faintly" to emphasize the nature of the lost children that she loved.


4. Polytopton


Polyptoton is a repetitive political device and describes when the root of a word is repeated with a different ending. For example, “for the blood you spilled, you will bleed” (not from the poem). In the poem, a good example of this is in Line 2: “. . .  the children you got that you did not get.” 


One of the effects of polyptoton is to emphasize contrast and contradictions in meaning while making a profound point. Here, the poet is highlighting the contradiction of conceiving a baby while not carrying it to term. This polyptotonic effect is perfectly in line with the deep ambiguity that the persona expresses throughout the poem.


5. Polysyndeton


Polysyndeton describes the excessive use of conjunctions in a sentence or phrase. It is also another rhetorical device that relies on repetition. The poet uses this frequently in association with isocolon and other rhetorical devices. 


For example in Lines 5–6:


You will never neglect or beat

Them, or silence or buy with a sweet.

 

The conjunction “or” is used to connect a number of items in the list. The effect is to place equal emphasis on each item being listed. This is important as the poet here is contrasting both the negative and positive consequences of motherhood on these imagined children.


6. Isocolon


Isocolon refers to a parallel structure. The poet uses this frequently. For example, “You were born, you had body, you died.” In this example, we have the persona giving a straightforward and matter-of-fact description of the abortion process. 


However, it is deceptively simple, as the abortion decision has made the mother grieve and contemplate deeply the meaning of what it means to be an unborn baby. Throughout the poem, isocolon is used in conjunction with other devices, such as polysyndeton, which will be given below. 


7. Metanoia 


Metanoia is a rhetorical device that involves one correcting oneself. We see this in the second stanza. The first half of the stanza serves as a long apology of sorts to her “dim children” for killing them. However, by the second half of the stanza, the poet is correcting herself.


Line 22, “Though why should I whine . . .” begins her questioning of herself as to what an aborted child actually means in terms of her own culpability. She reasons that instead of being dead the babies were never made. Metanoia works in emphasizing the ambiguity highlighted in the poem.


8. Metaphor, simile, and imagery


The poem employs the use of subtle and unadorned imagery through carefully selected similes and metaphors. The very first line of the poem begins as a metaphor, with abortion being personified as something that “will not let you forget.” 


The imagery and descriptions of the poem are rooted in concrete realism. For example, the description of unborn children as “damp small pulps with little or no hair.” This line is especially grueling as it suggests that the mom has seen the results of her abortions multiple times. I have already mentioned the effectiveness of “the singers and workers that never handled the air.” 


Imagery and metaphor are also used to evoke an eerie feeling of a woman communicating with the spirits of the departed or those who never were in this case. The description of her aborted children as dim also describes her complicated feelings towards them. They had life, but never got to handle the air, so that makes them dim. They are treated effectively as ghosts. 


The first line of the second stanza where the poet mentions hearing the voices of her dim children in the voices of the wind is also imagery that evokes the sense or idea of her aborted children being ghosts being recalled back to her in a ritual of mourning. 


Mood and tone


The mood and tone of the poem are complicated. The overall mood is regret tinged with nostalgia, which we have already discussed in the themes of the poem. However, more than that the poem is defined by its ambiguity. The persona does not know what to make of her choice and how the lives of her dim children were affected by it.


Let's take a look at each of the moods and tones expressed in the poem.


1. Reminscent & fantastic


The persona spends the entire first stanza reminiscing or regretting a life that never occurred. It's as if her powerful sense of grief and regret have created an alternative or parallel universe that allows her to see and imagine what lives her children could have possibly lived in a kind of weird fantasy.


We see this in language such as "singers and workers who never handled the air." She is simultaneously regretting her loss while engaging in fantasies of what could have been. This may well be a coping mechanism to deal with her grief.


2. Eerie & mournful


The fact that the poem imagines the aborted children as ghosts gives an overall eerie feel to much of the poem. We see this in the first line of the second stanza where the poet mentions hearing the voices of her children "in the voices of the wind."


The entirety of the second stanza from the second line is a conversation of sorts with these "dim children." The persona is apologizing to her aborted children. In fact, one could think of the second stanza as a summoning of spirits.


The line "I have eased my dim dears at the breasts" is laden with pathos. It is essentially describing a mother summoning the spirits of her departed children by offering to feed them breast milk. The poem in this light can be seen as a coping mechanism for intense grief and mourning.


3. A pensive & conversational tone


There is some creative tension in the poem in terms of tone. The poem switches and swings between almost casual and conversational and pensive and depressive. One could even say that it achieves both at the same time. The use of a whole gamut of repetitive rhetorical devices supports the conversational tone of the poem.


However, the subject of the poem is heavy and deep and results in a pensive tone. The poet achieves balance in this creative tension by turning this mother's contemplation into a casual conversation between herself and her children.


It comes across as a curious bout of maladaptive daydreaming. It's as if we can hear this mourning woman speaking to herself in a room alone or speaking to children who are not there.


Form, meter, & sound effects


Overall, “the mother” is a three-stanza poem, and the stanzas are highly uneven. The shortest is the last stanza, which is only three lines long, and the longest stanza is twenty lines long. 


The poem is written in free verse. However, the poet seems to make an appearance to maintain rhyming couplets throughout the poem without any regard for classical considerations of meter.


For example, in the first stanza, the rhyming couplet scheme is maintained throughout — AA, BB, CC, DD, EE. The second stanza partially maintains this but begins with a partial scheme of ABAB from the second line. 


This mixture of free versification characterized by a lack of classical meter and partial rhyming schemes has an overall pleasant effect. The speaker is able to maintain a conversational tone — after all she is speaking to her children and reasoning with herself — while remaining partially within a classical form.


Every rhyming couplet tends to have a slightly surprising effect when contrasted with the casual and informal tone and style of the poem. The sound effects of the poem are not limited only to rhyme. 


The poet makes use of devices such as alliteration effectively. For example, “my dim dears,” or “sweets if I sinned, if I seized.” There is also assonance, that is,  words that are close together and sound similar because they use the same vowels. For example, “dim killed.” 

 

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Conclusion


The poem “the mother” with its topic alone is interesting. Abortion is a high-profile and divisive political issue, and many people might come to the poem trying to figure out what its political stance is.


After the first reading, the apology, nostalgia, and mourning being enacted by the persona in the poem might give the impression that the poem is anti-abortion. However, that would be an oversimplification.


Instead, the poem raises questions about the moral consequences of the choices made regarding abortion. The list of negative and positive experiences listed in terms of neglectful and nurturing behavior by a mother lets us know that the persona may not fully regret her choice.


Nonetheless, she mourns what could have been for her dim children. Life after all is precious, and she thinks that it is tragic that these aborted children never had a chance to experience life’s ups and downs or pain and happiness. 


In short, the poem is a powerful elegy from a woman coming to terms with the decision that she has made. It is an elegy dedicated to the consequences of that decision — her dim children. 

 

Cite this EminentEdit article

Antoine, M. (2024, September 27). the mother by Gwendolyn Brooks: Summary and Analysis. https://www.eminentediting.com/post/the-mother-by-gwendolyn-brooks-summary-analysis



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