otion. Guilt arrives later in this poem, as the mother apologies to her child, saying “The pain/ You wake to is not yours.” She seems to accept responsibility for this pain (possibly originating from childbirth) and tries to counterbalance her guilt with lavish decoration: “I have hung our cave with roses,/ With soft rugs”. She goes on to glorify her child at the end of the poem, saying “You are the one/ Solid the spaces lean on, envious./ You are the baby in the barn.” This seems to wildly exaggerate the child’s importance, but one must bear in mind that the child needs only to be important to the mother, and this seems to be the case. The suggestion is that the child is the only secure person in the narrator’s life and that she is needed only by the child. The child thus makes the mother feel wanted, so she feels that she has a purpose on earth. In this way, the child is responsible for the fact that the mother is alive, although paradoxically, it wouldn’t be alive were it not for the mother. This adoration of her child continues into Mary’s Song, with “O golden child”. It seems that the mother is both trying to ease her guilt for her child’s pain, and thank the child for keeping her alive. In Mary’s Song a sense of fear seems to dominate the words of the mother. She appears to have noticed an impending fate which is descending on earth, and resents all the deeds done by humankind. She puts herself in the position of Our Lady, thus implying that she sees her child as a saviour destined to be a sacrifice for our sins (“O golden child the world will kill and eat.”) However, the suggestion is that this foreboding prophecy is enlightened. She feels that she can envisage the future because “The fat/ Sacrifices its opacity” while it cooks, allowing her to see clearly what lies ahead. The tone is rather morbid, with many references to ...
