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"Morning Song" by Sylvia Plath

"Morning Song" is part of a collection of poems written by Sylvia Plath but published by her former husband Ted Hughes under the title "Ariel" in 1966. The collection consists of poems written during the last few years of Sylvia's life, while she was trying to come to terms with the break-down of their relationship, and their separation and which ended with her suicide in 1963. Many of the poems therefore record her inner thoughts and feelings of disappointment, despair, and even violence.

"Morning Song", however, was written to record, or celebrate, the birth of Sylvia and Ted's daughter Frieda early in 1961. It does not contain the strong negative feelings of so many of the poems in "Ariel". Actually, Sylvia Plath may have intended to open the collection with this beautiful poem about birth and a new life.

The first thing that strikes a reader on seeing the poem is its form. There are six stanzas sharing a similar form and shape of three lines each and no rhyme scheme. A line sometimes contains a finished sentence, or the sentence is broken off and continues in the next line, as if to record a pause in thought or time.

Each stanza is like a snapshot of an event during the first few hours of the new baby's life. Many contain an image of nature, which Sylvia Plath - like Ted Hughes - often used to illustrate our place within it.

The first stanza opens with a bold line and clear imagery, which is so characteristically of this poem. An act of love created this blond, fat, healthy baby. A midwife slaps it and it draws its first breath. The baby's cry ensures it becomes part of "the elements" - of nature and its cycles.

In the second stanza, the parents - or those present at this birth - are sketched. As in all stanzas, Sylvia uses just a few adjectives and nouns. The reader creates the impression of an impersonal hospital room, with high ceilings causing voices to echo, a draft, blank walls. The "we" in this stanza seem to admire the baby like a statue in a museum. They seem unsure, overwhelmed, even awed by the wonder of birth, standing " round blankly as walls".

Then the "we" changes with another bold statement in the next stanza, describing the mother's thoughts and feelings. "I'm no more your mother ". She continues with comparing herself to a cloud. A cloud which under the influence of the wind will bring forth rain or water, which will reflect the cloud's image, but the cloud will ultimately disappear. This bold start comes as a shock

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