"A heart terrifying sorrow": An occasional piece on poetry of miscarriage

Papers on Language and Literature, Winter 1997 by Anselment, Raymond A

All that beauty and no way to stopping it, not even

with a name. No way to warm her hands. I watch her

step back into the snow. I know her gift for me

is ice. But I will not take it, it is not mine. (27-30)

The unquenchable fire and frozen water embody the extremities of a dissociation reflected in the numerous miscarriage poems written by women. Occasionally their authors re-create the suffering from a point of view other than that of the mother, but sympathetic imagination alone does not always forge the speakers' strong empathic bonds.21 The firstperson points of view in these and the many other often decidedly confessional pieces complement a preoccupation with fulfillment common in other poems that celebrate motherhood. Women who exalt the joys of pregnancy and the wonders of birth often value the act of becoming-certain that, as Alicia Ostriker insists, "no matter what your age is you / are born when you give birth / to a baby you start over" (25-27).22 At the same time that these poems emphasize that the helpless child "creates the mother," they also recognize that a woman's life is hers "until it is taken away / by a first particular cry" (Stevenson 19-20). And even abortion poems that attempt to reclaim the woman's life tend not to minimize the emotional costs of severing the physical bond. Indeed Lucille Clifton's "The Lost Baby Poem," which may have been prompted by either abortion or miscarriage, struggles to resolve the guilt and grief of an ambiguous but undeniable loss.23 For many the experience of spontaneous abortion accentuates the tension between motherhood and self.

Essential conflicts emerge powerfully in Sylvia Plath's "Parliament Hill Fields." The poem set in the Hampstead area of northern London never mentions the miscarriage Plath had suffered little more than a week earlier, but the sorrow of maternal loss intensifies unmistakably as the speaker struggles with isolation in her indifferent surroundings: "Your absence is inconspicuous; / Nobody can tell what I lack" (4-5) .24 The winter deadness of Hampstead Heath accentuates her depression as the rays from the pallid sun blur her tear-filled eyes, ashen smoke to the south "Swaddles" the view, and the cypress trees "Brood, rooted in their heaped losses." Further suggestive of her pain is the group of blue-uniformed school children, "A crocodile of small girls," who seemingly threaten to swallow her as they part to let her pass, "a stone, a stick." Unlike their disregard of the pink barrette none of them notices has been dropped, the mother cannot as easily let go despite what Lynda Bundtzen identifies (210) as a growing and perhaps bitter irony evident in the speaker's declaration that "I suppose it's pointless to think of you at all. / Already your doll grip lets go" (24-25) . Though the disembodied cry and sight she could in fact never have heard or seen appear to fade as "The day empties its images," the mind that runs with the rivulets of rain pools and falters. Rather than empty her sorrows, letting them go into the oblivion of night, the speaker is drawn by a maternal counterpull to the nimbus of her daughter's nursery. The pale blues and orange of its light are more comforting than the harsh, scar-like whiteness of the partial moon, but the renewed commitment to the present and future leaves undissolved the grief from which she turns away: "The old dregs, the old difficulties take me to wife. / Gulls stiffen to their chill vigil in the drafty half-light; / I enter the lit house" (48-49). The affirmation Carey and Hecht express eludes this mother who can escape neither the deadening pain of the failed pregnancy nor the constraining duties of a troubled marriage.