Sylvia Plath -- Morning Song, ANALYSIS: SYMBOLISM, IMAGERY, WORDPLAY

There’s more to a poem than meets the eye.

Sense Perception

One of the neatest things about a baby's first few months is that the baby actually learns to experience the world around it. After all, there are just a few more sights and sounds and smells and touches out there in the Big World than there were in Mom's belly. "Morning Song" turns the senses into an ongoing exploration for speaker andsubject, a sign that the speaker might share just a little bit more with her child than even she realizes. One of the most common uses of figurative language in this poem is the incorporation of synaesthesia, or mixed-up sense impressions – which might convey just how confused the speaker is about her feelings towards the baby.

• Line 2: Plath presents readers with a sharp image of a baby coming into consciousness through touch – or, to be specific, through a slap. As the baby feels, the speaker hears: she uses synaesthesia to describe the baby's "bald cry." (Want to know more about synaesthesia? Check our reading of line 10 in the "Line-by-Line Summary.")
• Lines 5-6: Describing shadows and drafts in the "museum" of the hospital allows Plath to play with a metaphorical sense of touch as she describes the baby's arrival. The speaker isn't actually feeling a cool shadow fall on her skin. She just imagines the baby as that shadow.
• Line 10: The "flickering" of the baby's breath creates a delicate image – one that, like a moth's wings, is barely noticeable, even in the silence of the night.
• Lines 10-11: The baby's breath sounds like a "far sea"? That, folks, is a classicmetaphor for the regular rise and fall of rhythmic breath.
• Line 18: Sound rising like balloons? Well, you see balloons. You hear sounds. Once again, Plath uses synaesthesia to develop strong sensory images.

Anything But Human

Notice how Plath develops elaborate metaphors to compare both the speaker and the baby to anything but an infant and its mother? It's a pretty fascinating strategy – and it allows the speaker to defer establishing any sort of relationship with her newborn infant. Think about it: what sort of relationship can you really have with a watch or a statue? This changes, however, as the poem works towards its end – just as the speaker is working through her emotions about the baby.

• Line 1: Baby = "fat gold watch." That, folks, is one strange metaphor. And we're just getting started.
• Line 3: The baby's cry is described as being part of the elements, which helps to create an image of the baby as a sort of force of nature. Not your typical description of a newborn, huh?
• Line 5: Baby = statue. Again, it's a metaphor. Strangely enough, though, Plath asserts the metaphor as its own sentence, "New statue." It's as if the metaphorical identity of the infant forms a logic all of its own.
• Lines 7-9: Notice the negative construction that's used to create this metaphor: the speaker is not the baby's mother in the same way that a cloud is not the baby's mother. But it could also mean that the speaker is the baby's mother just as much as the cloud is. Either way, though, there's a troubled relationship between mother and baby – it's certainly not the declaration of possession that you'd expect to hear from a new mom.
• Line 13: The speaker describes herself as a cow (or, well, as "cow-heavy"), which suggests that her relationship to the baby is an animal one: she's only there to support its physical needs (provide the baby with milk).
• Line 15: Ah, here's an interesting change. For the first time, line 15 introduces a simile to describe the baby, not a metaphor. Its mouth is clean as a cat's. Words such as "like" or "as" introduce a simile, while metaphors usually don't use comparative terms. Why's that important? Well, it suggests that the speaker isn't saying that the baby is a cat. The baby is just like a cat – which means that, for the first time in the poem, she's recognizing the baby as a baby. That's a step closer to recognizing the child's relationship to her.
• Line 18: Here's an image that's definitely human: Plath describes the baby's sounds as "vowels," which means that the speaker recognizes them as parts of speech. Human speech.

Morning Song by Sylvia Plath: Critical Analysis

When Sylvia Plath wrote this unconventional poem of hers on February 1961, she had given birth to her daughter Frieda. The mother love is strangely absent in the beginning of the poem. But the mother does move from a strange alienation to a kind of instinctive sweeping emotion, when she lives with the child for some time and when the child happens to breathe and cry; this probably happens after the intense labor pain is over, so that the mother could feel the love.

 
Sylvia Plath

In fact, “maternal feelings” do not automatically occur. Plath is honest to divulge (confess) her feelings of alienation and separation. In the last three stanzas, the emotional estrangement changes and she impulsively listen to the sound of her child as it sleeps. The surreal images and comparisons are functional to emphasize the sense of oddity and alienation in the feelings of the mother. One striking surreal image that somehow supports the ‘thingness’ of the baby is that of its cry as “bald.

To compare a child to a “fat gold watch” is surreal. The child is animate while a watch is inanimate. Love is engaging while winding up a watch is a mechanical act. What the simile suggests, is the great distance between the act of love and the fact of the baby.  What does this baby- this thing with its own existence- have to do with the emotions that engendered it? By raising this question about what most people consider a most “natural” phenomenon – the birth of a child – Plath helps the reader see something very old  (childbirth) as something quite strange, new, and unsettling. The disorienting effect of Plath’s style is typical of surrealism.

Plath seems to emphasize the nonhuman quality of this new being/thing that does not take its place among other humans, but “among the elements.” Stanza 2 reinforces the nonhuman quality of the baby as perceived by its parents. The child is a “new statue.” The parents are pictured as gazing at it “in a drafty museum.” In other words, they cannot help staring at the child as a statue and the parents as walls, not much communication occur. Plath’s surreal images underline the parents’ feelings of alienation and strangeness in this new (to them) situation.

No longer a statue, the child’s presence takes on more spirited animation through the animal imagery. The speaker’s lack of feeling for her child gradually transforms into appreciation and wonder, particularly at its sounds – not a “bald cry” any longer but something shaped, “a handful of notes.”

The child enters the human world when the speaker perceives its attempts at language with the clear vowels rise like balloons. The poem closes with this idea of the child making poetry of the natural and innate human sounds filled with emotion. Morning Song records how the speaker’s perception of her baby changes, her intimacy with her child grants her the vision of its animated being.

The theme in “Morning Song” is alienation and the process by which it is overcome. It deals with material instincts and its awakening. Plath avoids sentimentality in taking up the subject – of becoming a mother in a fatherly way. A woman does not come to motherhood merely by giving birth. New behavior is learned. The being of the mother is as new as the being of the child. Even the speaker listening to the child’s sounds and getting fascinated is not self-willed or under her control. She follows her instinct: “only cry and I stumble from bed.” Her child sings to her with a “morning song” and a bond is established with the help of language, the essential human act. One secondary, but important issue that the poem deals with is; can a woman be both mother and famous poet? In this, she is dealing with one of the major issues that faced women poets in the twentieth century. This poem answers her implied question. The joyous ending proclaims the arrival of both a new signer on the scene and a mother pound of her child’s vocal signals and message.

 

Further Reading

Morning Song: Introduction

Morning Song: Summary

Biography of Sylvia Plath

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