In "Morning Song," Sylvia Plath dramatizes the antipathy that a first-time mother feels as she confronts the awesome task of attending to a newborn infant.
The poem “Morning Song” consists of six three-line unrimed stanzas. It features a mother addressing her newborn infant.
First Stanza – “Love set you going like a fat gold watch”
In the first stanza, the mother describes the conception of the child by metaphorically comparing it to setting “a fat gold watch.” The image of the watch works well because an infant is somewhat fat, and somewhat gold, especially in terms of it value to the new parent.
Then the mother/speaker notes that the “midwife slapped your footsoles, and your bald cry / Took its place among the elements.” Again, the image created by the word “bald” is consistent to the physical head of a newborn. The speaker claims that the cry “took its place among the elements” sounds rather scientific while also being somewhat vague.
Second Stanza – “New statue”
When the speaker says that “Our voices echo, magnifying your arrival,” the reader can imagine grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins, and friends making their comments about the baby. Some will point out how cute it is, how tiny those fingers and toes are, how sweet it smells. Then the speaker describes the baby as a “New state / In a drafty museum, / your nakedness / Shadows our safety.”
This soft, cuddly, sweet-smelling tiny human being to this mother seems like a stature in a drafty museum. The harshness of that image reveals the mother’s uncertainty about the cuteness and cuddly nature of this strange new being in her life. Her safe life is now under a shadow projected by the “nakedness” of this new bald creature.
Third Stanza – “I'm no more your mother”
In the third stanza, the speaker makes one direct statement that cuts the bonds of mother and child irrevocably: clouds send down rain that form pools of water and those pools in turn reflect the clouds while at the same time the wind is driving the clouds away. This speaker claims that her motherly relationship with this new being is no more than that of the cloud and the mirror-pool.
Fourth Stanza – “A far sea moves in my ear”
Despite all the harsh thoughts and cryptic comparisons of the child to statues and pools, in the fourth stanza, the speaker reveals that she is kept awake all night listening to the breathing of the infant. As the “flat pink roses” entertain the flickering “moth-breath,” the mother hears the sounds of the baby’s breathing. And as she listens, she also becomes aware of the sound of silence, which she calls “a far sea.”
Fifth and Sixth Stanzas – “One cry, and I stumble from bed”
The final two stanzas, which are linked in mid-sentence, dramatize the mother’s actions as soon as she hears the baby cry. She immediately gets out of bed to go attend to the baby. Her body is still heavy from giving birth; she is “cow-heavy and floral / In my Victorian nightgown.”
As she prepares to nurse the baby, she notes that its mouth is “clean as a cat's.” It is almost daylight; the speaker notices that “The window square / / Whitens and swallows its dull stars.” This sentence links the last two stanzas, designating a time lapse between the dark and light of dawn. Then the speaker invokes the reason for the poem’s title: “And now you try / Your handful of notes; / The clear vowels rise like balloons.” The mother sits nursing the baby watching night turn to day; then she listens as the baby beings to vocalize. The final image of balloons rising leaves the reader with splash of color and a “handful of notes” from the throat of the newborn infant.
The Statue Metaphor
It is telling that Plath, in her poem titled “Daddy,” metaphorically likened Daddy to a statue: “Ghastly statue with one gray toe.” While the speaker in “Morning Song” shows at least a modicum of affection of mother for child, the speaker of “Daddy” demonstrates strong animosity for her subject. The bond of a mother’s love is not sentimentalized in “Morning Song,” and the speaker is not shy about elucidating the natural fears and anxieties of new parenthood.
