The mother Themes

Themes and Meanings (Critical Guide to Poetry for Students)

“The mother” mourns the loss of children aborted because of the poverty of the mother. By extension, it also mourns the loss of things that do not reach their potential, such as the loss experienced by a race of people whose growth has been interrupted or altered. One contrast and conflict that emerges in the poem is that between the desire of the mother to do what was best for her children and the finality of her decisions. The depiction of the narrator—honest, reflective, and self-aware—prevents an immediate positive or negative characterization. Instead, like the decisions she has made, the narrator is complicated—full of conflicting emotions regarding both herself and her lost children. Ironically, it was the mother’s moving concern for her children as well as her own circumstances which caused her to decide to have the abortions.

Throughout the poem, the narrator examines the fates she knows would have awaited her lost children. Because of the harsh honesty with which she refers to her decisions to have abortions, this reflection upon what the lives of the children would have been like is made more believable. Her reliability as a narrator is established by the time she gets to an accounting for the reasons she made her decisions.

An important difference between Gwendolyn Brooks and contemporary writers Richard Wright and Ralph Ellison, who also use poor urban settings in their writing, is that she devotes much more attention...

(The entire section is 446 words.)