Bloom's Literary Themes - ymerleksi - home

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Gwendolyn Brooks
of the aborted children, “contracted” also implies a “shudder”—or to
shrink. In the sense of compact or an obligation, as in to contract a
debt, the word offers a further shade of meaning. The image of the
woman holding empty air to her breasts emphasizes the theme of
insufficiency and “not-having”: “I have eased / My dim dears at the
breasts they could never suck” (12–13). There is a hint of a rationale
for the abortion in “breasts they could never suck.” Of course, there
were no children born so there were no nursing babies, but the woman
may also be aware that she would not have been able to be a source of
sustenance. The guilty, importunate, emotionally intense plea for absolution
is abruptly halted with a flat, matter-of-fact observation: “Since
anyhow you are dead” (24)—the sobering, inescapable truth, expressed
more graphically in the harrowing closing lines of Anne Sexton’s later
poem, “The Abortion” (1962): “Yes, woman, such logic will lead / to
loss without death. Or say what you meant, / you coward . . . this baby
that I bleed” (Sexton 20).
The mother’s closing exhortation—“Believe me, I loved you all.
/ Believe me, I knew you, though faintly, and I loved, I loved you /
All”—is, writes Lillian S. Robinson, “all the more [passionate] for
having no object outside her own emotions” (286). The dramatic repetition
of “all” recalls well-known lines from Eliot’s “The Love Song
of J. Alfred Prufrock”: “ ‘I am Lazarus, come from the dead, / Come
back to tell you all, I shall tell you all” (94–95), a poem having to do
with time, impotence, and isolation. That Brooks’ woman has loved—
however imperfectly, becomes her defining appeal and release. Lois
Spatz, an English Professor, used both Brooks’ and Sexton’s poems
on abortion in a seminar with medical professionals unaccustomed to
thinking about the human significance of literature. The response to
“the mother” was mixed and heated: “I,” writes Spatz,
full of my own white liberal guilt, was willing to sympathize and
blame society for the persona’s problem. But the black doctor
did not sympathize with the feelings in the poem because of
her own anger against the type of ghetto woman the persona
represents. She represented what she considered wallowing in
self-pity; she [the doctor] rejected summarily any person who
would keep having abortions and rationalizing them away
instead of preventing conception and taking her own life in
hand. (681)