Child as Mother Tender shoot just risen from the sod, Roots taking— We are both one and two, Painstakingly close, agonizingly Distant, In Perfection. Tender cub, just venturing, The vast world growing closer— The hunt yet to start. We stop and go, and I cringe To see my own small Beginnings. I plead out of my lungs to a Space That is more real than I can see. Father— Why am I slow? I should be fast. Why am I blind? I should see. How can Nature don such an unnatural mask? Where are you? Where was I? Pain! Blood shoves its accidents through a soft fleshy shell, Liquid glass rains and splats into vaporizing warmth. Why does she not plead as I do? Again, the little one is moving. Hand and knees, Then feet. What is this? Beauty, and natural. Then it came— My Child, you have your answer.
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Natalie Browning “Child as Mother”: A Devotional Lyric Poem Devotion can represent a commitment to someone or something, or a sense of purpose given because of an individual’s ties to a particular person or mindset. For example, one could be devoted to God, to a sect, to a particular belief, or to a beloved. Devotional poetry often refers to God or to religion in some way. However, this mode of poetry does not always refer to a religious devotion. Carl Phillips explains, “The common understanding, though, about devotional poetry is that it is also religious—and for secular readers, the religious poem too often risks becoming evangelical, . . . narrow-‐minded. . .” (141). He goes on to refer to being devotional as simply having a deep belief in something. [T]o believe is to invest special power in something . . . . [A]nd our wanting to believe becomes a form of belief, is a form of faith, even as the interrogative mood is a form of faith; to ask a question, however irresolvable, implies somewhere an answer . . . . Are we not all of us, then, to shifting degrees, devotional? (141). With this definition of devotion, poetry expressing a degree of faith, a desire for faith, or even just an inner question can be labeled as devotional poetry. “Child as Mother” is a devotional poem that introduces a mother’s relationships with both her child and with God. In the poem we see how she struggles to find her role in her devotion to both. She faces difficulty in knowing how she should respond to her child’s growing abilities and their accompanying risks, and worries to what extent she is responsible for the pain of her child. She cries in
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prayer, “Father—Why am I slow? I should be fast / Why am I blind? I should see” (ll. 16–17). The dichotomy between where she is and where wants to be in the protection of her child brings her to ask God “Where are you? Where was I?” (l. 19) Devotional poetry is also “poetry that speaks from—and about— the cracked nature of the world and what it is (not what it means, necessarily) to live as a human being inside it” (Phillips 144). In these lines we see an inner struggle of control and a sense of powerless in a young mother. However, we are also introduced to another source of turmoil for the mother as she wonders where God is and why life seems so difficult and unnatural sometimes. The woman’s devotion to both God and to her child is what brings her to seek answers from God in the first place. Phillips also concludes that intimacy plays a large role in devotional poetry, and “is what changes the way many people respond to devotion in poetry” (142). This emphasizes the importance of devotional lyric poetry being expressed in the first person. Personal devotion to or purpose for something or someone is an individual matter. What is more, the parental and religious insecurities of an individual are also an individual matter. As we can see in the poem, the thoughts and prayers of a mother are private, earnest utterances (calling God her “Father”), meant to express questions and a hope for answers—not meant for a stage or a neighbor’s ear. Lyric poetry, as well as devotional poetry, expresses the voice of a single speaker who faces an inner struggle of some sort. Wendy Beth Hyman comments, “Lyric, characterized above all by its searching, restless, insistent first-‐person pronoun—that obstreperous “I”—often seems to exist in a world outside time or
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politics, even to its detriment . . . . “[T]he vast majority of these lyrics are less obviously engaged with the external world that with their own internal landscapes” (197–98). Throughout the stanzas, the poem’s speaker is definitely in her own personal world of worry and wonder. She begins by musing about her child’s growth and progression and the insecurities it brings. Next, she opens up her restless heart to God, asking Him why things are the way they are. She searches for answers to why Nature is unexpected and dangerous, and “don[s] such an unnatural mask” (l. 18). Then, she pauses to think about the difference between her and her child before she is finally brought to a final dawning realization. Through this inner struggle, however, both the audience and the speaker are able to conclude with a new piece of information by the end of the poem—another common element of devotional lyric poetry. This new revelation is not required by its mode to be a solution or resolution to the problem introduced, but often affects the way the poem is to be understood, in general.
The speaker of “Child as Mother” notices her child, after being injured, moves
forward without questioning God or the mother. This moment is a changing moment for the speaker, allowing her to receive the personal message from God, “My Child, you have your answer” (l. 26). As a change of perspective rests upon the mother, we, too, are given another piece of the puzzle to use to interpret the poem. In receiving an answer through the mundane repetitions of her child, and through a realization that she already knows her answer, the speaker is brought out of a turbulent state of unknowingness or incomprehensibility, meanwhile granting the audience some sense of peace or resolution by the end of the poem. We as the audience are not
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given the answer, but the knowledge of an answer being present within the speaker brings about the potential for a change within the speaker and how she addresses her responsibilities to God and her child. As both a devotional and a lyric poem, “Child as Mother” follows the exclusive thoughts of the speaker as she battles with the frustrations and insecurities of not understanding her place or why things that are supposedly natural seem difficult. She is a woman devoted to her child, and a woman devoted to God. By expressing these inner conflicts of an individual speaker, the poem represents a private moment, and at the end gives us a nugget of understanding that devotional lyrics (in some form or another) are commonly known to do.
Browning 5 Works Cited
Browning, Natalie. “Child as Mother.” 2014. Hyman, Wendy Beth. “Physics, Metaphysics, and Religion in Lyric Poetry.” A Companion to British Literature. John Wiley & Sons, Ltd, 2014. 13 Nov. 2014. Web. Phillips, Carl. “As For a Poetry of Devotion.” Religion & Literature 42:3 (2010). The University of Notre Dame. Pp. 140–45. 13 Nov. 2014. Web.