EXPLORING Morning Song


Sylvia Plath gave birth to her daughter, Frieda, in 1960. This poem, or ‘song’, explores new motherhood and all  society expected mothers to embrace motherhood. They were not expected to express any negative emotions and therefore had to conceal their fears and vulnerabilities. In this ground-breaking poem Plath was brave enough to express all the emotions that a woman might feel at this tumultuous time. The poem begins uncertainly, but as it progresses it grows in certainty and ends in celebration. This cleverly echoes a mother’s growing relationship with her baby.


 and birth: ‘Love set you going like a fat gold watch.’ This simile tells us that the child was conceived in love and also refers to the child’s heartbeat (ticking), appearance (chubby) and value  but it is also primal, ancient and universal. Plath describes the child’s cry as elemental: ‘your bald cry/ Took its place among the elements.’ The child’s cry is as important to her as elements like water and air.


In the second stanza, Plath talks about the voices of the child’s family as ‘magnifying’ her arrival. The voices expressing all the hopes and dreams for the child are making the child’s arrival a big event. The line ‘your nakedness/ Shadows our safety’ may mean that the child’s vulnerability and dependence cast a shadow on the parents, who often  creature.


The third stanza compares the mother to a cloud and her baby to a puddle. They are made of the same stuff but take very different forms: ‘I’m no more your mother/ Than  The cloud rains and the water it releases forms a puddle in which the cloud can see itself being extinguished by the wind. Therefore, Frieda is a mirror in which Plath can see the  


390 VERSE 2025


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