A Study Guide for Gwendolyn Brooks's "The Mother"

By Gale and Cengage

A Study Guide for Gwendolyn Brooks's "The Mother," excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Poetry for Students. This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Poetry for Students for all of your research needs.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Cengage Learning - Gale
• Release date: Sep 28, 2016
• ISBN: 9781535838504

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12

The Mother

Gwendolyn Brooks

1945

Introduction

Critically acclaimed Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Gwendolyn Brooks often focused on the experience of poor urban African Americans in her poetry. Known for works that resonate as both deeply personal and culturally and socially conscious, Brooks writes about the tragic emotional aftermath a mother experiences in the years following an abortion in the 1945 poem The Mother. The language of the work is full of pain, and the images are stark and sorrowful. Throughout the poem, Brooks writes as a mother looking back on moments she will never share with children whose lives were not brought into being. She speaks of the fullness of absence in her life, and of the act of abortion as a sin, a crime, but one for which she takes responsibility. Near the end of the poem, the poet struggles with the concept of life and death, resisting the instinct to label the termination of her pregnancy as a death. Rather, she focuses on the love she still feels for the children who were never born. At various points in the poem, and in particular in its final one-word line, Brooks emphasizes that the mother who is the subject of the poem has had multiple abortions.

The Mother was originally published in the collection A Street in Bronzeville by Harper & Brothers in 1945. The work later appeared in the collection Selected Poems, published by Harper Perennial Modern Classics in 2005.

Author Biography

Brooks was born on June 7, 1917, in Topeka, Kansas. She grew up in Chicago, Illinois, on the poor South Side. Her father, David Brooks, was the son of a runaway slave. He abandoned medical school to work as a janitor and support his family. Her mother, Keziah Brooks, had been a school teacher before marrying David Brooks. Brooks attended an integrated high school where she was the target of racial animosity and discrimination. She later graduated