Gwendolyn Brooks The Mother Essay

“The Mother” is a poem by Gwendolyn Brooks where she conveys themes of deep regret and remorse after a mother has gone through with an abortion. By utilizing types of repetition to enhance the impact of the speaker’s words, providing apostrophes to enable the speaker to share their inner thoughts of guilt and desperation, and by incorporating enjambment to build emphasis on specific lines and ideas, Brooks is able to clearly illustrate how our actions, regardless of how certain we may be in them, will always have lasting consequences that we will ultimately be left to deal with.

Brooks utilizes repetition throughout her poem for a few different purposes, though firstly she introduces anaphora by saying, “I have heard in the voices of the

Such is displayed when the speaker says, “Believe that even in my deliberateness I was not deliberate” where she speaks directly to her child that was never born (Brooks 21). The purpose here is to display the speaker’s regret for her actions by showing how she now makes excuses to her unborn child, stating that she was not in her right mind, even though she thought that she was at the time. As she pleads to her child, her deeply set grief becomes ever more apparent as her true regrets are fully put into perspective. Furthermore, Brooks uses apostrophe again when saying, “You were born, you had body, you died./It is just that you never giggled or planned or cried” though in this case its purpose is to highlight how the speaker has become to fully understand the consequences of their actions (29-30). While before she may have just thought of an abortion as an act of avoidance, she now sees it as murder, a reality much harsher than what she had previously imagined. This change in perspective stems directly from the guilt that has built up within our speaker, which becomes far clearer in these instances of

Such is seen in lines 5 and 6, “You will never neglect or beat/Them” which showcases how the speaker has come to understand that once you have had an abortion, you will never be able to interact with that child. In this specific instance it is even emphasized that you will never be able to do them any harm, for you have already done the greatest harm that they could experience, which in turn revokes them of their right to be punished and to suffer in life. Brooks again uses enjambment to a similar effect when she says, “I have said, Sweets, if I sinned, if I seized/Your luck/And your lives from your unfinished reach,” (14-16). Here the speaker again highlights how they have effectively robbed their to-be-children of any opportunities they may have had. They just wish to make it known that they apologize for taking those chances from them before they had any chance to seize them. Robbing her children of their lives and opportunities entirely has filled the speaker with a deeply set remorse, which is highlighted by Brooks’ use of