Love Set You Going...

Morning Song

by: Sylvia Plath

Love set you going like a fat gold watch.
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.

From "Ariel", 1966

I read this poem the first time sitting in one corner of the huge Elphinstone library… It was a quiet afternoon and our Literature lecture had been canceled. Most of my friends had gone to see a movie at Sterling. I was too lethargic and heavy to move around much—on my second last month of pregnancy. Conscious that I stood out from the rest of the students. But by then no one found this strange. My friends had been with me; sharing my experience from the day I discovered I was pregnant.

I wondered, “Had love set her going…” Not really! But how did it matter. She was mine regardless of how I had got her. I was not touched emotionally by the means of conceiving her. She was all the more mine—an immaculate conception. I felt a fierce possessiveness for her, an unwillingness to share her with anyone else.

But I treasured these quiet moments with myself and my baby. I could feel her movement within me, within my very guts, and she was more real to me than all the people I saw and met everyday. I imagined straining my ears, all my senses to feel her “moth-breath,” its very imperceptibleness making me insecure, anxious.

One cry, and I would “stumble from my bed”… groping in the dark, heedless of corners and tables creating obstacles in my path, till I held her against my breast, her mouth open, “clean as a cat’s.” Strangely, these are the moments when I remembered Cat most poignantly; I felt her very close to me, in complete communion with me.

I missed her for my baby. Would she have loved Cat the way I do?

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