Lucille Clifton's The Lost Baby Poem

Lucille Clifton’s “The Lost Baby Poem” tells the story of a mother who is full of regret and guilt for a child that she chose not to have. The poem depicts many ways that express Clifton’s intentions and how it all fits together. Clifton wrote this poem with so much deep emotions that she was “talking in such a way that the heart can hear”.

Robert Bly stated that when “talking in such a way that the heart can hear” “… The voice naturally drops and we feel an achieved intimacy” (Bly, 42). I noticed that this poem had been written in all lower case letters except for Genesee Hill and Canada. I think that Clifton wrote the poem that way in order for the readers to read it soft and slowly. Clifton even referred to herself as “i” which I think symbolizes the shame that she felt toward herself for doing what she did. Since this poem was written in free verse

According to McCarthy and Quinn “Blues singers are often less concerned with syllable count than with elongations, pauses, and slurred notes to suggest meaning” (Sounding Ideas, 67). Based off of my observation and what McCarthy and Quinn stated I think that this poem is organized like a blues song because it begins with a statement in stanza 1, and then the statement continues to grow n stanza 2, and finally in stanza 3 the tone is eventually adjusted with firmness or denial. The first stanza begins with Clifton narratively introducing the situation with regret. Clifton is talking in first person point of view to allow the reader to feel the intimate relationship that they get from Clifton’s story. In lines 1 to 6 of the poem “The time I dropped your almost body down/ down to meet that water under the city / and run one with sewage to the sea/ what did I know about water rushing back/ what did I know about drowning /or being drowned”. Clifton constantly used repetition to emphasize her feelings and to show that she wanted