"The mother" by Gwendolyn Brooks, is about abortions. The speaker is a mother how tells her experience when she aborted her baby and how she feels sorry about that. Also, this poem contains dramatic monologue between mother and her baby.
In the first stanza, the speaker speaks general to the women when she says "You remember". She warns the women from abortion because the sadness will follow them for rest of their life. They will not see the children grow up in front of their eyes and they will never live motherhood.
In the second stanza, the mother changes her words from general to specific she starts speak about her experience. The mother starts tell about her pain and loss when she says "I have heard in the voices of the wind the voices of my dim killed children". Also, she describe what she lose, she cannot feed them from her breasts when she says "My dim dears at the breasts they could never suck." After that, she feels guilty because she stoles their births and their names. But she tries to give for herself an excuse for what she did when she says "Since anyhow you are dead."
In the third stanza, she repeats what she said in the second stanza. She tries to give herself excuses for what she did. She says why I feel pain and sad while the children never made when she says "You were never made." But she cannot abnegate her feeling that she feels sadness. Finally, she tells her children that she knew them and she love them because they were part from her body and from her soul when she says "Believe me, I knew you, though faintly, and I loved, I loved you all" and she uses repeating to show to the reader that she really honest about her feeling.
In short, this poem tells us how abortion is very bad and how causes sadness for women because the children have a soul which we cannot kill them for any reason.
Zinab Bajou (441)
