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The opening line of Sylvia Plath's "Morning Song" combines personification, metaphor and simile in a single nine-word sentence. The opening word "Love," the sentence's subject, is a personification. The noun "love" is an abstraction. No abstraction can activate a timepiece. But the watch is not the direct object of the verb "set." That grammatical function is filled by the pronoun "you," which refers to a newborn infant.

The infant created by the couple and their intercourse is then compared in a simile to a "fat gold watch." Love may be interpreted either as the act of coition or the emotional involvement of husband and wife. Whether one wants to interpret "set you going" as in utero zygotaxis or parturition lies with the individual reader. The poem is not taking a position on whether life begins at conception, fetation, or birth.

In any case, the metaphorical comparison of the offspring to "a fat gold watch" mingles concepts of plumpness and precious metal. I read the first-stanza-concluding phrase "among the elements" as a reference to the Periodic Table, where the element gold (symbol: Au) occupies place number 79. The activated timepiece is metaphorically the heartbeat and respiration of the new-born, activated by the midwife's slap.

In the second stanza, the new baby is a nude statue newly installed in the world (a drafty place compared to the womb). Adult observers oohing and ahhing at the new arrival are garmented, safe in their immediate continual existence, and they stand like walls, not knowing what to say, though like shadows of this infant, they have all "been there before."

Stanza three contains another simile that demands contemplation and will be interpreted differently by different readers. The speaker who has just given birth feels herself no more the child's mother "Than the cloud that distills a mirror to reflect its own slow/ Effacement at the wind's hand." I read the verb "distills" not in its ordinary meaning of chemical change but as a disturbing of stillness. A child is a mirror image of its mother, but not a permanent one. As a cloud is slowly changed in shape by the wind, so also mother and child gradually alter and lose their mirror reflection moment by moment. The child begins to establish independent personhood.

During the night the respiration of infant lungs is so tiny in volume that it seems "moth-breath." I'm unsure how to paraphrase "flat pink roses" nor the "far sea" moving in the ear of the mother. Perhaps the roses, being flat,

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