Reader-Response Criticism

The Mother by Gwendolyn Brook

Abortions will not let you forget. 

You remember the children you got that you did not get, 

The damp small pulps with a little or with no hair, 

The singers and workers that never handled the air. 

You will never neglect or beat 

Them, or silence or buy with a sweet. 

You will never wind up the sucking-thumb 

Or scuttle off ghosts that come. 

You will never leave them, controlling your luscious sigh, 

Return for a snack of them, with gobbling mother-eye. 

I have heard in the voices of the wind the voices of my dim killed 

children. 

I have contracted. I have eased 

My dim dears at the breasts they could never suck. 

I have said, Sweets, if I sinned, if I seized 

Your luck 

And your lives from your unfinished reach, 

If I stole your births and your names, 

Your straight baby tears and your games, 

Your stilted or lovely loves, your tumults, your marriages, aches, 

and your deaths, 

If I poisoned the beginnings of your breaths, 

Believe that even in my deliberateness I was not deliberate. 

Though why should I whine, 

Whine that the crime was other than mine?-- 

Since anyhow you are dead. 

Or rather, or instead, 

You were never made. 

But that too, I am afraid, 

Is faulty: oh, what shall I say, how is the truth to be said? 

You were born, you had body, you died. 

It is just that you never giggled or planned or cried. 

Believe me, I loved you all. 

Believe me, I knew you, though faintly, and I loved, I loved you 

All.

Analysis:

This poem is generally about the issue of abortion and the feelings of the mother regarding the lost child. Based from the lines the mother is remembering her and child and longs the feeling of having a child. There is the feeling of sadness, remorse, and longing for the unborn child. You can read at the end of the poem that the mother is asking for forgiveness and that she truly loves the child. I think that the mother is regretting her decision to abort the child. Maybe the mother doesn't have the choice that's why she is asking for forgiveness.

Reader - response criticism focuses primarily on the reader's reaction to a text. I think that this falls under reader response criticism because one can have a different opinion about the main idea of the poem which is the abortion. A person who committed abortion could have a different reaction to someone who has not committed one.