Morning Song Love set you going like a fat gold watch. The midwife slapped your footsoles, and your bald cry Took its place among the elements. Our voices echo, magnifying your arrival. New statue. In a drafty museum, your nakedness Shadows our safety. We stand round blankly as walls. I’m no more your mother Than the cloud that distills a mirror to reflect its own slow Effacement at the wind’s hand. All night your moth-breath Flickers among the flat pink roses. I wake to listen. A far sea moves in my ear. One cry, and I stumble from bed, cow-heavy and floral In my Victorian nightgown. Your mouth opens clean as a cat’s. The window square Whitens and swallows its dull stars. And now you try Your handful of notes; The clear vowels rise like balloons. Sylvia Plath 19 February 1961 When my son was born, I was shocked to realize that among all the poems I knew, hardly any were about a baby or about becoming a mother. For a long time I had been accustomed to find, on almost any occasion of substance, a line of verse rising unbidden to consciousness, unerringly telling me what I was feeling. But the joyous line that had risen spontaneously and immediately at childbirth —”For unto us a child is born, unto us a son is given” — was followed by no others, and an unaccustomed silence lay heavy on my mind with the absence of any resonance between my life and a poem commenting on it. One of the poems that I did know (remembered from childhood because my mother had quoted it) opened with a putative dialogue between a mother and her newborn baby: Where did you come from, baby dear? Out of the everywhere into the here. I eventually read the poem (by George MacDonald, the Victorian novelist), and while I recognized the wit in the graphic decline of the enormous invisible “everywhere” into the diminished visible “here,” as a whole the fantasy was too sentimental for me: Feet, whence did you come, you darling things? From the same box as the cherubs’ wings. I flinched at that as I did at Mother’s Day cards. When, as an adult, I read Blake’s Songs of Experience, I at last found (in “Infant Sorrow”) a newborn baby speaking credibly of its own birth-agony. Outraged by its forced eruption from warm amniotic comfort into an unfamiliar and chilling world, and rebelling against both its restrictive swaddling clothes and its father’s constraining arms, the helpless baby screams cries unintelligible to the horrified parents, who wonder what demonic force is obscured behind the cloud of their struggling infant’s flesh. The exhausted baby, in its first intellectual moment, thinks it best to retreat into a silent sulk: My mother groaned! my father wept. Into the dangerous world I leapt: Helpless, naked, piping loud; Like a fiend hid in a cloud. Struggling in my father’s hands: Striving against my swaddling bands: Bound and weary I thought best To sulk upon my mother’s breast. A poet — imagining the words a terrified newborn might shriek if it had language — exposes the pieties of the usual “baby poem.” A fierce empathy with the baby’s sufferings at birth prompted Blake’s glimpse here into the disillusioned state he called “Experience,” while his earlier “Infant Joy” (from the Songs of Innocence) screened out the real baby, entering instead into the new mother’s projection (onto her actually silent baby) of her own self-absorbed joy. The mother’s fantasy that her infant (the Latin infans means “unable to speak”) begins life by complaining of its lack of a name prompts, with exquisite reciprocity, her own mirroring response: “What shall I call thee?” The baby declares that its name is “Joy,” and the mother, completing the circuit of dialogue, utters a blessing: “Sweet joy befall thee!” As the dialogue opens, the baby speaks first : I have no name I am but two days old.— What shall I call thee? I happy am Joy is my name,— Sweet joy befall thee! The whole second stanza belongs to the mother, as she
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