Mother by Gwendolyn Brooks One Term Paper

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Even more striking is the speaker's statement that she loves all of the children she aborted. The language of the poem certainly seems structured to convey the image of motherly love. She speaks with longing and regret about the things her children will never do, such as the baby games and giggles, growing, marriage, and love. However, the speaker begins by making it clear that she is not romanticizing motherhood. She speaks of children she will never beat or neglect, as well as missing the rewards of motherhood. These statements seem aimed to convey the speaker's understanding of what she may have done to her children if she had chosen to carry them.

In fact, it is those statements that resolve the ambiguity in the poem. The speaker is filled with a tremendous self-loathing. The speaker says that she has sinned, that she has poisoned her children's breaths, and seized their lives and their luck. Furthermore, the speaker does not play semantic games about her abortions.

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She acknowledges her children were made, but that they never had the chance to be born, and that they never had the chance to giggle, or plan, or cry. (Brooks). This takes the reader beyond the ambiguity in the poem and to the ambiguity in the abortion debate in general, because the speaker's conflict about her abortions, closed with a bold statement that she loved all the children she aborted, presents the question of whether choosing to have an abortion can ever be the most loving choice a mother can make. Ultimately, it is the presentation of this question that makes the poem so powerful; by presenting the speaker as a remorseful villain, a loving devil, Brooks takes an interesting non-position on a very divisive issue, which may be the most powerful position a poet could take.

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