Morning Song Lyrics
The midwife slapped your footsoles, and your bald cry
Took its place among the elements.
Our voices echo, magnifying your arrival. New statue.
In a drafty museum, your nakedness
Shadows our safety. We stand round blankly as walls.
I'm no more your mother
Than the cloud that distills a mirror to reflect its own slow
Effacement at the wind's hand.
All night your moth-breath
Flickers among the flat pink roses. I wake to listen:
A far sea moves in my ear.
One cry, and I stumble from bed, cow-heavy and floral
In my Victorian nightgown.
Your mouth opens clean as a cat's. The window square
Whitens and swallows its dull stars. And now you try
Your handful of notes;
The clear vowels rise like balloons.
About
Sylvia Plath with her children, Frieda and Nicholas Hughes.
“Morning Song” is Sylvia Plath’s tribute to her newborn daughter, Frieda. Composed early in 1961 when the baby was eight months old, it expresses the ambivalence of new motherhood – the joy, the optimism, the wistfulness, the uncertainty. Plath’s view is beautiful and relatable, though not without its anxieties.
Structure
The poem comprises six stanzas of three non-rhyming lines each. It is a first person monologue in free verse with run-on lines, enjambment, reflecting the meaning and emotions of the poet.
Language and Imagery
Sylvia Plath’s poetry is usually dense and often obscure. She uses vivid and imaginative imagery that can be interpreted in multiple ways. For example, the “song” of the title refers to baby Frieda’s cry, but it may also refer to the instinctive sing-song speech used by parents to their babies. “Morning” may also be a play on words, in the sense that Plath is mourning the passage of her own youth even as she celebrates the beginning of her daughter’s. For further analysis see detailed annotations.
See Sylvia Plath: A Critical Study, Time Kendall, Faber and Faber
Q&A
Find answers to frequently asked questions about the song and explore its deeper meaning
- 1.Morning Song
- 2.The Couriers
- 3.Sheep in Fog
- 5.Lady Lazarus
- 6.Tulips
- 7.Cut
- 8.Elm
- 11.Berck-Plage
- 12.Ariel
- 13.Death & Co.
- 14.Lesbos
- 16.Gulliver
- 17.Getting There
- 18.Medusa
- 21.Mary’s Song
- 23.The Rival
- 24.Daddy
- 25.You’re
- 26.Fever 103°
- 27.The Bee Meeting
- 29.Stings
- 30.The Swarm
- 31.Wintering
- 32.The Hanging Man
- 33.Little Fugue
- 34.Years
- 36.Totem
- 37.Paralytic
- 38.Balloons
- 39.Poppies in July
- 40.Kindness
- 41.Contusion
- 42.Edge
- 43.Words