Morning Song by Sylvia Plath

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Morning Song by Sylvia Plath

The poet Sylvia Plath wrote this poem when she became a mother. Initially, – during her 20s – she was not prepared to be like usual women around. She didn’t want to raise and feed a baby like everyone. She was determined enough to write and travel and abroad. After her graduation, she received a Fulbright fellowship and went to Cambridge. She met Ted Hughes at the same University and married him later. After the marriage she realized that she want a baby.
Sylvia Plath confessed her feelings of pre-and post-birth of the child. In the last three stanzas she has showed emotional changes and how she used to listen impulsively to the sound of her child. She has compared her baby’s cry as ‘bald’ and the child to a ‘fat gold watch’. The second stanza of the poem emphasizes on the non-human quality of the baby. Child is considered as a statue and parents as walls in a museum. This means they can’t be separated from on-looking each other.

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The poem was written just after the birth of Plath’s child, she tries to look into her emotions towards are motherhood and the how it has grown after the birth of her child. This poem has tried to depict the strange and unnatural latent that lies between the relationship of a mother and the child. In the later part of the poem, the image of the child depicted takes on some living feeling by introduction of some animal images. 
The initial stanzas of the poem has shown the lack of feelings in Plath about her child, but as time passes, her feelings takes a gradual turn and she starts to see the child with wonder and appreciation. This song details how her feelings changes as she come close to her child and this intimate relationship gives her the vision of the existence of the child.
‘Morning Song’ was published in The Observer in May 1961, but it was not included in any of her collection until after her death. This story has shade light on the waves of emotions she was growing through that can be felt by any mother, only she tried to bring those emotions into ink and paper. The gradual transition of the emotion can be seen throughout the poem.
The theme of this poem was of staying of feeling away from something, and then gradually overcoming those to get attached. She has avoided any sentimental stages to explore the situation of being a mother in a more father kind of a way. (Ted Hughes left her before the birth of the child). It can be judged that a woman does not transform herself into a mother just by giving birth to a child. The process calls for learning new emotional patterns and behavior.
She has also mentioned in the poem the sudden impulsiveness when she hears the cry of the child and fails to control herself from getting up. This shows her lack of control on her will and she was not controlling the emotions, in fact she was in the control of her emotions and attachments to her child.
As per Perloff (Perloff, 1981), the Plath’s plot of the Ariel (the book that has this poem), begins with the brith of her daughter, angrily reacts to Plath’s reaction to her husband’s affair and culminates with the bee sequence. Perloff sees the end of all hope and the time when feminism prevails. Perloff has, in his writing, developed Hughes as villain. Perloff sees her as more than a schizophrenic whose previous suicide attempts leads to the last one that became successful eventually. The alienation from Ted made her outraged wife who gave everything and still betrayed in the end. 
A book published by (Cooper, 2010), mentions the suicidal nature of Plath and her bipolar disorder. The last attempt to die was her second preceded by a pill overdose ten years ago. 
The poetess came out to be a bad parent in the end, leaving all her responsibility to raise her children and embracing the death, leaving them alone in the hands of this merciless world. Her death depicts that in spite of her attachment she showed in the poem, she preferred to die rather than letting the attachments to her children triumph. This shows that the emotion or the bonding she felt with the birth of her child was mere temporary and not a permanent and stable one. 
The reason of this poem’s exclusion from the anthology can be credited to the same allusiveness of the poetess from the actual feelings of her child. The other explanation can be that she never wanted anyone to see what her feelings were for her child when she tried to translate her child’s image to some materialistic and mechanical objects. The involvement of Ted Hughes can be sited as one more reason behind this exclusion.
Though her death doesn’t signifies that creative people tend to be suicidal (Bu.digication.com). It seems as if she had preexisting disorder that led her to the death bed. The aloofness from Ted might led her to the reckless behavior, elevated moods and lack of self esteem, that led her to this situation. 
The only thing I would like to mention in the end is that our relationship whether be it with a child or something else changes with the time. We carry the emotion for few years not for long enough to be fruitful, particularly when one realizes that her position has changed from well known public intellectual (a poet) to someone whose main duty has shrunk to changing diapers and nothing else. In one way it can be identified as demotion but yes a sudden transition to something which one does not like to do is unacceptable, at least in the case of this poet (Sylvia Plath. Her relationship complicated with her husband, and seems even it did with her children. The only instance that doesn’t fit with this explanation is when she left milk of jar before putting her head into the oven.

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References:

  • Perloff, Marjorie. 'Sylvia Plath's 'Collected Poems': A Review-Essay'. Resources for American Literary Study XI.2 (1981): n. pag. Print.

  • Cooper, Brian. "Sylvia Plath and the Depression Continuum." Journal of T he Royal Society of Medicine 96 (2003): 296-301.

  • Bu.digication.com,. 'Digication E-Portfolio :: Sylvia Plath And Psychiatry :: The Final Paper: Plath's Psychosis: Bipolar Disorder As Her Muse And Destructor'. N.p., 2015. Web. 9 Dec. 2015.

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