Morning Song (1961). Content and Description

The first poem Plath selected for Ariel, “Morning Song,” opens with the word love, a deliberate choice for a poem about birth, motherhood, and love, and a symbolic choice for the collection as a whole, which begins with “Morning Song” and ends with “Wintering,” a poem anticipating the new birth of spring yet wondering whether nature will survive. Unexpectedly, ringing like a lost voice of youth, the writer who portrayed birth in The Bell Jar as a cataclysmic event threatening to sever the self from its foundations and a process often controlled by men, turns away from the confining and pain-filled aspects of childbirth in “Morning Song” and pens a work filled with nurturing images and promises of growth.

In six tercets, the speaker focuses on sounds: a baby’s first cry, the elated voices of a midwife and a mother who greet the newborn, a distant sea, and the “clear vowels” of the infant that rouse its mother and “rise like balloons.” Here it is difficult not to collapse the poem’s speaker with Plath, who, in this poem, appears as a lactating mother, stumbling from bed “cow-heavy” and wondering at the miracle of life. Unlike so many of Plath’s poems, “Morning Song” is an intimate work devoid of irony, angst, and struggle.

In short, it is a hymn to life with all of its possibilities. Yet, as in so much of Plath’s writing, here the speaker stands apart, a “statue” in a “drafty museum,” an observer dissociated from her own child, a listener trying to understand, a woman clothed in a “Victorian nightgown” separated from the naked purity of her child but basking in its beauty and aware of its needs.

Throughout the poem “the elements” provide a sense of cosmic wonder, as the baby’s voice and the wind create a scene that is also contained in a small “window square” filling with snow. The speaker depicts a world in microcosm, one where the simplicity and infinite creativity of a child mask, at least temporarily, the world’s weariness. In this still moment a child’s cry and prelinguistic utterances inspire the artist, leaving her to contemplate the coming of the new day and the potential for rebirth the morning will bring.

Capturing a reverential moment, “Morning Song” is a poignant recollection, one that reveals Plath in a moment of fulfillment. Yet, whether it is because we know of Plath’s death, her many other tortured images, the impending failure of her relationship with Ted Hughes, or the bleak London midwinter that enclosed her final days, the poem’s sense of hope appears transient, ephemeral, a shortlived respite from lived experience; a wish fulfillment of what the artist either could have been or may be.

For Discussion or Writing:
1. Read other Plath poems that deal with the love of a mother for her children, “By Candlelight,” “Child,” and “Balloons,” noting the persona of the speaker. Who is speaking? How does this persona express itself? According to Susan Basnett, “The poems to children have a directness about them that brings the reader in straight away to share the beauty of the picture. In these poems there seems to be no I-persona, no intermediary fictionalized figure that intervenes between the I-that-is-writer and the I-that-is-narrator within the poem. The mother who writes so powerfully about her children is also the speaker and the poems are like love letters to those children, messages without ambiguity” (95). Do you agree with Basnett’s assessment of these poems? If so, what message does Plath provide? If not, what ambiguities exist, and what is their significance?

2. Compare “The Manor Garden,” an early mother monologue poem, with later mother poems such as “Morning Song,” “You’re,” and “Balloons.” How does “The Manor Garden” anticipate the later poems; how do the later poems relate to “The Manor Garden”? After analyzing and comparing these poems, write a well-developed essay on the role of the speaker in Plath’s motherhood poems.

3. Compare “Morning Song” with “Barren Woman,” a poem Plath wrote the same week. Are the two poems complementary, or do they define polar opposites? Importantly, why does Plath rely upon the image of a museum in each poem? What connections can be made, and why are these connections significant?