I have just finished reading "The Mother" by Gwendolyn Brooks. This poem is a very very controversal, personal, and emotional piece of work due to the speakers bias on her sorrow for her abortion. Though we have no background evidence as to why the speaker got an abortion I get the vibe that she is in deep regret for her decision especially due to her frequent use of the words "killed" and "dead". It is almost she feels as if she is a killer when she says "I have heard in the voices of the wind the voices of my dim killed children. " That is a very deep and depressing line; she is not one to soon forget what has happened and is often haunted by it.
Personally, the one line that stood out the most to me that made me right away see through the metaphor and understand what this poem was REALLY about was the line "The singers and workers that never handled the air." The speaker is describing all the success and professions her would be child COULD have been, but her child never got a chance to live, to breath the air. Air represented life in that line, we need air to breath, we need to breath to live.
Overall, this is probably one of my favorite poems I have read this semester thus far. The use of metaphor is superb and the meaning of the poem is not shrouded TOO much in the metaphor to confuse the reader.
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Yes, but avoid seeing this as a "judgmental" poem (not that you are, but your comments here is posed on the brink of judgment); the poem as a whole, read closely, will tilt us away from judgment, and towards clarity of understanding and awareness; rather than judging or criticizing the persona of the poem, she is presenting, as honestly as possible, the complex, conflicting feelings and thoughts of a person of a certain age, gender, and race in particular economic and social conditions. There is a lot of demographic "awareness" here, social commentary. See asp. lns. 23-25, and the last stanza
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