Gwendolyn Brooks’s “the mother”

1.

Gwendolyn Brooks’s “the mother” is not an anti-abortion poem, despite being used repeatedly as an argument against abortion. In fact, “the mother” must be one of the most misunderstood poems in the English language.

In the face of that misunderstanding of “the mother,” the poet’s literary estate developed a form letter that staff send when asked for permission to use the poem:

“Ms. Brooks left specific restrictions for how this poem can be used. Her intention for the poem was to be neither pro or con abortion. It cannot be used in that context.” 

What does it mean if a poem is “neither pro nor con abortion”? Readers know the speaker of Brooks’s poem references multiple abortions, but if the poem is “neither pro nor con abortion,” the poem is not saying abortion was a good choice and not saying it was a bad choice. It was just a choice—and the poem leaves space for that choice to exist freely for the speaker and for readers. 

“the mother” firmly undermines two of the most common false generalizations about people who choose abortions: that they are uninterested in motherhood and that they feel no emotion about the experience. The reason so many people feel “the mother” is an anti-abortion poem is because the poem is honest about the pain and nostalgia the speaker feels for the babies she aborted. But the fact that a choice causes pain doesn’t make it a bad choice. “the mother” deserves to be read the way Brooks intended it: as a poem about free choices.

“the mother” is organized into three stanzas of extremely different lengths—10 lines, 20 lines, and three lines—with firm, abrupt transitions between them. This guide is similarly arranged: each section addresses the distinct job of the poem’s stanzas. The first stanza looks backward, wondering about the past and the question poet John Greenleaf Whittier called the saddest of all: “Of all sad words of tongue or pen, the saddest are these, 'It might have been!’” The second stanza shifts into the present to confront the speaker’s current emotional reality and to solve the question of how to think about abortions in the present and how to accept them. The brief third stanza enacts those decisions and moves forward, looking to the future.

2.

Abortions will not let you forget.

The first stanza begins with a firm statement of personal witness in a rational, objective-sounding iambic rhythm: first an unstressed syllable, marked with a cup (u), then a stressed syllable, marked with a wand (/) and then cup wand cup wand again: u/ |u/ | u/: 

u  / |  u        / |  u    /
abortions will not let

However, the line that begins with this calm, stately tone closes with a more energetic rhythm of the anapest (cup, cup, wand), whose extra syllable creates more of a sense of earnestness, even desperation:

 u     u    /

you forget

These contrasting rhythms set up a subtle but inescapable conflict:

u  / |  u        / |  u    / |  u     u   /

abortions will not let you forget

Together, they let readers know that this poem will be complex, communicating various— not always harmonious — aspects of the speaker’s reality.

From this perspective, let’s turn back to the title of the poem: “the mother.” The poem could easily be called “the abortion,” but it is not. The implication is that the speaker is still a mother, like 60 percent of those who have abortions according to a report in The New York Times. The speaker is a mother to her other children, but she is also a mother, still, to the children she has aborted. This idea will become a central theme of the poem.

The poem’s first stanza visits in sensual detail the experience of raising children. Gwendolyn Brooks birthed her first child in 1940 when she was 23 years old, and her second child in 1951 when she was 34 years old. “The mother” was published in between these dates in 1945. The intimacy of stanza 1 underscores that the speaker of this poem is not rejecting motherhood; she is a mother who understands all too well what she is giving up—both in its negative and positive aspects.

Brooks’s decision to begin the first stanza with positive things that will not happen followed by negative things that will not happen complicates the poem’s simpler layer of regret by folding in a conflicting layer: a hard, truthful look at herself and the kind of parenting she and her current family members would have been able to provide for the children they chose not to have. 

This part of the poem appeals to all five senses: the sense of sound with the imagery of singing; the sense of taste with the words snack and gobbling; the senses of touch and perhaps of smell, for the many people who love the smell of babies’ heads, in the line “The damp small pulps with a little or with no hair.” 

Brooks evokes the sense of sight with the neologism “mother-eye.” Her distinctive poetic style is known for her boldly inventive use of language, including inventing new words. This particular kind of invented word, called a “kenning,” creates a new word by combining two existing words. A very ancient technique, the kenning dates back at least to the Anglo-Saxon times of the epic poem Beowulf, in which one of its central uses is to describe the experience of warriors in battle. Swords are called “battle-light,” blood is “battle-sweat,” and warriors are “helmet-bearers.” 

Brooks’s “mother-eye” kenning adds a heroic dimension to the figure of the mother. Alice Walker described abortion in this way: “Abortion, for many women, is more than an experience of suffering beyond anything most men will ever know, it is an act of mercy, and an act of self-defense.” The same claim that Walker makes about abortion surpassing the pain of anything in male experience has also sometimes been made of the intensity of childbirth. By using a kenning to describe the passionate yearning of a mother for the sight of her children—a mother who has, even so, decided to have an abortion—Brooks by analogy endows the mother with heroic stature. The respect given to the mother’s decisions and the trust afforded in her ability to choose the best path for the good of her family in spite of her strong and conflicting emotions endows her with courage and strength to make life and death decisions that male-dominated societies have traditionally afforded, with due honor, to men going into battle.

Just as with a male hero in battle, the fact that the mother’s feelings are powerful and difficult does not invalidate or undermine the actions that gave rise to her feelings. Brooks’s poem seems to say that a mother who chooses to end her pregnancy rather than birthing in what she decides is the wrong time, way, or place deserves the benefit of the doubt that she, in her strength and wisdom, is making choices for the greater good. 

As a whole, stanza 1 makes clear that, as stated in the letter Brooks’s estate sent out, the heroic choice between death and life is entirely the mother’s. As if to emphasize this element of choice and the mother’s power to choose, this stanza lists both positive and negative things that will never happen to her aborted fetus or fetuses. Lines 3 and 4 use the exalted literary meter iambic pentameter, enhanced further by rhyme, to mention two positive, exalted things—singing and working—that will not happen: “singers and workers that never handled the air.” By contrast, these lines are followed by two that describe very negative things that the aborted fetus or fetuses will be spared: neglect, beating, and manipulating (buying off) the child with candy in place of real happiness. 

Recalling Alice Walker’s description of abortion as an “act of mercy,” these lines give a sense of why the speaker might have chosen abortion out of merciful love for her fetuses, knowing that babies birthed into the current circumstances would not have been born into a healthy environment. 

Like the opening lines, the last two lines of this stanza show a nuanced awareness of the double-edged situation into which the fetuses would have arrived had they been born. But this time, the description is from the point of view of the parent, not the child:

You will never leave them, controlling your luscious sigh,

Return for a snack of them, with gobbling mother-eye.

These lines convey the painful conflict between work and family that plagues so many mothers who live in small, isolated, nuclear families common in today’s patriarchal societies.

A final suggestion about the mother’s mixed feelings is evident in the word gobbling. On the one hand, a charming, imaginative way to describe the hunger a loving mother might feel for another glimpse of her children, the word also has a more disturbing resonance. It reminds readers that some people have children out of a need to “gobble them up” in order to fulfill their own psychological needs. Is the speaker revealing self-awareness about her emotionally unbalanced mothering? Could this line indicate another reason for the decision to abort—to spare herself and her fetus from that kind of unhealthy relationship?

3.

I have heard in the voices of the wind the voices of my dim killed children.

Stanza 2 of the poem brings readers abruptly out of what might have been and into the present. The mother has made her decisions, and the abortions are a fact. The speaker must come to terms with it, and readers are invited into the process of acceptance. The stanza opens with one of the saddest, most moving, most memorable lines in “the mother” and also the longest line in the poem:

I have heard in the voices of the wind the voices of my dim killed children.

I have contracted. I have eased

My dim dears at the breasts they could never suck.

Even a wanted abortion that one knows is the right choice can cause a sense of mourning, and for readers who oppose abortion, this line may be moving evidence that those who decide not to have an abortion are making the right choice. The line’s rolling, soft, triple rhythm, created by extra unstressed syllables slowing and softening the space between the accented syllables, invites readers to join in an act of mourning.

This line is much longer than any other line in the poem, has a completely different rhythm, and is full of a heightened word-music that adds to its emotional power: the repetition of the word voices, the assonance between dim and killed. 

As she did in lines 2 and 3, the other two saddest lines in the poem, Brooks again appeals to numerous senses with vivid imagery: the sound of the wind, the visual perception of “dimness,” the feeling of contraction in her uterus, perhaps even the taste of the untasted breast milk. And again, in the last line, she moves into the meter of iambic pentameter as if indulging in a kind of poetic entropy. According to the book Peace After Abortion, 

Distress after an abortion is almost always about another unresolved painful experience. . . . Very often, finding out you’re pregnant, making your decision, or just going to the clinic or doctor’s office for an abortion, makes you feel overwhelming anxiety. . . . You are then flooded with emotions from another time or event in your life.

By making this line about mourning extremely different in length, tone, and word-music from the other lines of the poem, Brooks treats it as a kind of emotional interlude, inviting sadness of all kinds and from all sources to enter the poem, take the stage, and share in mourning the loss of the aborted fetus.

The mourning and the associated sadnesses, whatever their cause, deserve to be honored in this beautiful space, but that does not necessarily change anything about the decisions the mother made. The poem respects readers who see the sadness as cause for regret equally with readers who do not. The beauty of this line and how different it is from the other lines in the poem show the tender complexity of the speaker’s feelings.

4.

If I poisoned the beginnings of your breaths,

Believe that even in my deliberateness I was not deliberate.

As if to clarify that sadness does not mean the choice was right or wrong, the speaker now shifts abruptly from the cathartic emotion of the first line into action. The poem picks up speed and energy as the speaker confronts the task of moving forward, picking up possibilities and discarding them, choosing and judging, with urgency born of a ferocious need for survival. After all, the poem seems to say that some kind of peace needs to be reached to live a loving and useful life. 

When Brooks wrote “the mother” in 1945, she lived in a culture that, as a whole, was deeply hostile to abortion. Since 1880, laws had restricted abortion in all 50 states; after 1910, it was completely illegal and remained illegal for the next 30 years. Women who honestly felt abortion was the most loving and compassionate choice for all concerned continued to carry a huge societal weight of external social pressure, guilt, and shame along with fear of unsafe conditions and death from an illegal, unsupervised abortion procedure. 

Thinking of this context, the shift in tone in the middle of the second stanza of “the mother” is remarkable. The second half of the poem is a kind of manifesto, as if the speaker is working out the best way to live with the reality of her choices in the face of a deeply unsupportive and disapproving culture. The word if in the phrase “Sweets, if I sinned” carries a big burden of possibility in a tiny word, almost as if the speaker is so busy doing her best to be a good mother to her existing children that worrying about notions of sin is a luxury she can’t afford.

Returning to the rhyme Brooks used in lines 2 and 3, the speaker gathers poetic strength to face the worst-case scenario. Is this speaker really going to believe that she–like the thousands of loving mothers like her who made what they considered, in their strength and wisdom, the most compassionate and loving decision for the good of all concerned–deserves to be considered an evil and condemned person, a thief of the gifts of the lives she chose not to bear?

Though why should I whine,

Whine that the crime was other than mine?—

Since anyhow you are dead.

Or rather, or instead,

You were never made.

But that too, I am afraid,

Is faulty: oh, what shall I say, how is the truth to be said?

You were born, you had body, you died.

It is just that you never giggled or planned or cried.

With the word whine, twice repeated, Brooks’s speaker reclaims the courage the heroic kenning “mother-eye” evokes in stanza 1. The mother refuses to “whine” after having made a life and death decision without the psychological and financial support, celebration, and respect that society gives to other warriors and in the face of the greatest religious shame, social condemnation, and legal peril. Readers have already seen the speaker’s internal courage in facing the heroic need to make a decision and in facing the power of her grief. Now her courage turns outward to face the possibility that she has sinned according to conventional society and religion, but she does so at a double distance: the distance of the hypothetical if, which implies that its opposite is equally true and also the distance in time of the past tense.

In the face of possible condemnation and even arrest, the mother must own her choices—and she does not mince words. The rhyme reasserts itself more powerfully than before as she tries the starkest way of phrasing it. The word whine is repeated, underscoring the moment where the speaker catches herself whining, pulls herself up short, and attains a new level of honesty to claim full authority over the act of abortion. The stark, almost shocking words crime and dead appear immediately, as if in a kind of proof that “the mother” is not going to sugarcoat anything:

And your lives from your unfinished reach,

If I stole your births and your names,

Your straight baby tears and your games,

Your stilted or lovely loves, your tumults, your marriages, aches, and your deaths,

If I poisoned the beginnings of your breaths

As the speaker struggles with how much guilt to accept and with the mandate to maintain honesty at all costs, she turns first to iambic pentameter—a meter used for this poem’s moments of conventional regret and sadness, its most socially acceptable emotions:

If I poisoned the beginnings of your breaths 

. . . even in my deliberateness I was not deliberate.

The brief iambic pentameter makes an excuse: she was not deliberate. 

But the speaker is too courageous to avoid responsibility. Having faced the worst possible interpretation of her actions—that her abortions were a crime that made “dead” lives separate from her own—she is free to consider rationally that the fetuses’ lives never did exist separately from her own. In her full honesty, she looks for another way to put it: “Or rather” rephrased “Instead” to show that the idea of “never being made” is objectively a more accurate way to describe the fetuses’ sort-of lives. This is not anything she would “rather” claim to make herself feel better—we know she is too courageous for that—but instead because it is objectively more accurate. 

But then, in her honesty, she cannot say that either: “that, too … Is faulty.” In fact, the language and culture in which she lives has not yet developed an accurate, truthful way to describe abortion, a way that is free of judgements and false metaphors such as crime and death. She ponders, “how is the truth to be said?”

“You were born, you had body, you died.” This is not true in the real-world sense; the aborted fetuses were never born at all. But this is where the speaker ends up in her eagerness not to avoid the truth so that she can fully experience the impact of her action, claim responsibility for it, and move on courageously with her life. Another type of untruth enters the poem now as well. Until this point, the poet has taken pains to clarify that more than one abortion or abortion in general is being discussed. Now, near the end of the poem, those plural markers recede and the “you” becomes more ambiguous, more possibly one than more than one. This stanza of the poem can be read as referring to only one fetus, one abortion, one unborn baby. Like the inaccuracy that the fetuses were “born,” this possibility might feel more painful, more poignant, and more courageous on the part of the mother whose final goal, as the poem ends, is simply the truth. 

5.

Believe me, I loved you all.

The poet used this poem to offer herself honest witnessing of her courage, her fear, and her grief; full listening to all the nuances of the arguments on both sides of any moral question; and compassionate understanding of all the different motives that went into her decision. The final stanza of the poem returns to the possibility—underscored by the emphasis on the poem’s last word, “all,” which is not only repeated but also given a line to itself— that the speaker is referring to multiple abortions. In the end, having weighed all the angles, the poem chooses to bless any and all of these decisions in conclusive terms:

Believe me, I loved you all.

Believe me, I knew you, though faintly, and I loved, I loved you

All.

The ending of the poem offers a complete witnessing of love, and whether readers are, in the words of Gwendolyn Brooks’s estate, anti-abortion or pro-abortion, they will find understanding and love. 

The speaker witnessed herself, and she witnessed her abortion as an act of love. In so doing, she loved us all—including herself.