Gwendolyn Brooks

Gwendolyn Brooks

• Gwendolyn Elizabeth Brooks (June 7, 1917 – December 3, 2000) was an African-American poet.

• She won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1950 and was appointed Poet Laureate of Illinois in 1968 and Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress in 1985.

• Brooks published her first poem in a children's magazine at the age of thirteen. 

• She had compiled a portfolio of around 75 published poems. At seventeen, she started submitting her work to "Lights and Shadows", the poetry column of the Chicago Defender, an African-American newspaper. 

The Mother: Summary

Gwendolyn Brooks

"The Mother," by Gwendolyn Brooks, is about a mother who has experienced a number of abortions and now has remorse. You can feel the remorse she is going through when reading the poem. She is regretful, yet explains that she had no other choice. It is a heartfelt poem where she talks bout how she will not be able to do certain things for the children that she aborted. This poem may be a reflection of what many other women are dealing with. 

The first stanza starts off with "Abortions will not let you forget," which sounds like the woman is talking in general terms. She is talking about how future experiences will never take place. Things like "You will never wind up the sucking-thumb or scuttle off the ghosts that come," are some of the many that will not be done. In a way, the women being told this are reminded of the pain they are going through. 

In the second stanza, the woman is talking about her pain and loss. In "I have heard in the voices of the wind the voices of my dim killed children," she is haunted by her own children's faint cries that she hears in her mind. She then makes the transition from telling the reader to explaining to her children why she did what she did. It feels as though she can't control her emotions and finally breaks down. She forgets about the reader and focuses on her children. She is asking for some understanding when she says, "Believe that in my deliberateness I was not deliberate. . . . Though why should I whine," she asks, "Whine that the crime was other than mine." 

The Mother: Summary and Critical Analysis

Gwendolyn Brooks

The poem The Mother is an anti-abortion poem by the poet Gwendolyn Brooks. It is an emotional outpour of the sense of guilt by a mother who has performed one or more abortion. She first speaks to the mothers who have done abortions like herself. She tells them how they will never forget their ‘killed’ children. She gives a graphic description of the foetus (child in the womb) that is forced to be born dead by the mothers! She tells the mother what there would be children would have become, and what pleasures of bringing up children they will always miss.

After the first ten lines the speaker ten turns to her own ‘dim killed children’ and talks to them. She tells them how she has heard their voices in the air and how she has seen them in her dreams. She then tells them what she has said to them when she felt guilty. She has said in her mind how she has sinned against them, what she has stolen from them, and how she has taken their lives. For a few lines (24-32) she tries to make excuses, but they all fail, and she ends up by only saying that she loves ‘them all’. It seems that she can’t get rid of her guilt; she can only confess and express her love for them, for partial relief.

The poem 'The Mother' is specifically about female experience because it is based on a woman’s experience of aborting a child and then personally feeling guilty about it, as a mother. It is so typically ‘female’ in its subject, expression and theme that only a woman could have written it, and so it is. The speaker of the poem is a woman who has aborted a child, partly deliberately, and is now remembering the foetus. Like a typical ‘female’, this speaker is very sensitive, loving, tender-hearted and sentimental. Like an experienced mother who has experienced the process of bearing and bringing up a child, she knows so well the typical experiences and pleasures of having and bringing up a child. Details in the poem- like ‘winding the sucking-thumb’ or ‘scuttling off the ghost’ – are things which strikingly suggest that she at least knows every typical experience of a mother with a child.

The Mother

By Gwendolyn Brooks

Abortions will not let you forget. 

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

The damp small pulps with a little or with no hair, 

The singers and workers that never handled the air. 

You will never neglect or beat 

Them, or silence or buy with a sweet. 

You will never wind up the sucking-thumb 

Or scuttle off ghosts that come. 

You will never leave them, controlling your luscious sigh, 

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