![]() Her love has made these children a full emotional reality and their deaths a true loss. This renders the images more immediately for the reader, and it reveals something about the speaker: The line between the imaginary and the real, the literal and the metaphorical is not of primary concern. The speaker eschews the language of simile, avoiding “like” or “as” and speaking in metaphor. The “killed children” take on supernatural qualities as the speaker hears their names in the wind and clutches them to a breast they cannot nurse (Line 11). In fact, the mother must be one of the most misunderstood poems in the English language. ![]() ![]() Since the children never truly lived, they never displayed any aptitude for a particular career, and so describing them as “singers and workers” is a grand leap of imagination (Line 4). Gwendolyn Brooks’s the mother is not an anti-abortion poem, despite being used repeatedly as an argument against abortion. In reality, the speaker has very little to work with when crafting these images. All of the actions they perform in the poem, from sucking on thumbs to working and playing, are fabrications. The aborted children in “the mother” live whole, full lives in the mind of the speaker.
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