Sylvia Plath: Morning Song

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Morning Song

The poem ‘Morning Song’ is about a real experience of life. It is about her bearing a child; a poetess bears a child and looks at it by her own view. Sylvia Plath was torn between burning desire for love and equally flaming thirst for revenge.

Her desire for love oriented from her unrequited love for her father; and from her mother. The birth of her brother diverted from all her mother’s attention towards him. Plath felt deprived. Her acute sensitivity developed into hatred for her parent. Her personality was torn between two passions as she says:

“It is as if my life was magically run by two electric currents, joyous positive and despairing negative- whichever is running at the moment dominates my life, floods it.”

Thus her poetry may be divided into two kinds; the first written under the joyous positive spell and second under the despairing negative mood. This poem belongs inseparably into one poem.

The theme celebrates the birth of a child. Plath’s thirst for love sometimes found expression in poems written in motherly mood. In this poem the mother expresses passionate love for the newly born baby. The poem is addressed by baby.

What immediately followed the birth of a baby is described as the midwife slapping the foot- soles of the baby to make it cry. The first cry of the baby is a sign of survival and articulation. This first cry of a baby is the most welcome song for a mother. This cry is the baby’s first impression on the world of elements.

A chorus of congratulatory noise follows the first cry. Plath uses beautiful imagery to describe the baby;                                                      

 “New statue,
In a drafty museum your nakedness,
Shadows our safety".

The mother is compared to a rained cloud;

“I’m no more your mother
Than the cloud that distills a mirror
To reflected its own slow
Effacement at the wind’s hand.”

Still the mother is happy because she has given birth a new life. All night his soft breathe flickers among the pink roses of the cloth that covers him. She wakes to listen to his breathing. It comes like the sound of a distant sea.

His crying is a proof of life. The crying child awakes her and she stumbles down the bed in her old, Victorian gown. She then milks the child and the child open the mouth like a cat’s. But is a real mother-child relationship. She patiently goes through the pains of mother on looking after every cry for milk and bed-wetting.

The poem expresses a mother’s love on all its depths. But the irony lies in the sad fact that Plath was never a food mother to her kids. She killed herself while her daughter was just two years old and her son just eight months. Her suicide was perhaps her revenge on her brother or the male sex which had always failed to give her all the love she needed. Her father severed all connections with his family while she was still a child. Her husband turned out to be a disloyal brute. Anyway, while writing this poem, Plath was surely on her joyous positive mood. Thus the poem reflects the brighter side of her personality as well as creativity.

Plath’s poetry is a complex texture of conflicting passions. Even in this poem, an undercurrent of melancholy can be felt by discerning reader who knows Plath and all she suffered. It is a wistful cry of a person starved of love.

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