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Health & Fitness

Happy Mother's Day from Sylvia Plath

"Morning Song" is a quintessential poem about new motherhood.

Maybe "motherhood" isn't the first thing you think of when you think of Sylvia Plath.

Most non-poet people think of Plath, when they think of her at all, as that sad crazy woman who killed herself, but there is much much more to this important poet.

Plath has been described by Eavan Boland as an American Surrealist, which is an image I particularly like, because it brings to mind  a writer who experimented with visions of reality. Think of paintings by Salvador Dali, the famous Spanish Surrealist artist, and you think of melting clocks and extravagantly stretched faces (You can read Boland's essay about Plath here, at the Academy of American Poets website).

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The poem I want to share today, in honor of Mother's Day, is one of my favorites. "Morning Song" is at first glance a sweet poem about a mother's love for her infant daughter. But there is something surreal in the poem that perfectly embodies the twilight world that a new mother often finds herself in—awake/asleep, dark/light, silent/crying. Plath's "fat gold watch" and "moth-breath" conjure a magical reality the mother and child share. The poet compares motherhood to a cloud that "distills a mirror to reflect its own slow / Effacement at the wind's hand." We could discuss for hours what that means, but any woman up early in the morning with a new baby knows how her reality is suddenly changed—appearing and disappearing like clouds in a lake.

This poem isn't in the public domain, so I won't reprint it here. You can find it at this link or simply Google "Plath Morning Song."

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Happy Mother's Day! I'm grateful that poetry is one of the things that links me to my mother and to my daughter—and I hope your day is a good one.

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