Unknown Girl in the Maternity

Unknown Girl in the Maternity Ward

In reading this poem by Anne Sexton one has to be moved by the imagery of the metaphor and the pathos of the Unknown Girl. The poem begins with the woman in bed with her child, a tender scene to be sure, yet there is already some tension present. The imagery of the child that is given is one of tightness and stress, "You lie, a small knuckle on my white bed; lie, fisted like a snail." (Sexton 24) the pictures are vivid in the mind but they connote some anxiety between mother and child. Added that the word "lie" is also synonymous with falsehood as well, the reader has some trepidation leading into the rest of the poem. She goes on to say that the child's lips are like animals suckling at her breast, but then she says "you are fed with love," (Sexton 24) and at least we know that there is some motherly influence present.

In the next stanza that motherly feeling becomes stronger and she senses that the child knows she belongs with her, yet she also knows that they will not be together long. As the poem plays out we find that she is an unwed mother and in the fifties that often meant that you were to give up the child to an adoption service, so she states, 'you will not know me very long." (Sexton 24) the feel of the institution comes full force presented in the phrase, "The doctors are enamel," (Sexton 24) cold, white unfeeling porcelain that cannot be dented or harmed by outside circumstance. They have no empathy for her circumstances and are cold to her confusion. They only want information and constantly ask for the father's name, which she does not have.

She has been nursing this child for six days, "your breath is six days old," (Sexton 24) as she states in the first stanza. By this time there is certainly a bond that has been built up between mother and child. In fact, she can see the early changes in the infant, the wandering blue eyes begin to grow more focused and she wonders what the child might be seeing, "You blink in surprise and I wonder what you can see, my funny kin,..." (Sexton 24-25) Then she calls herself a "shelter of lies" (Sexton 25) as she knows now she is giving warmth and affection, but realizes she must release her from that protection soon.

There is a sense of parting in this poem that is really its main theme. This parting is also represented in the rhythm of the movement in the poem. The carriages that carry the children back and forth between the mothers and the nursery, the movement of the girl's consciousness as she vacillates between her motherly emotions that want her to keep and protect the child and the knowledge that she must let the child go. This back and forth is the constant parting of the waves and the shore and the rhythm of the ocean and of life, the ebb and flow of existence. In fact in the last stanza the poet tells us in the girl's voice, "I am a shore rocking you off." (Sexton 25)This sense of parting is familiar to us all in some way or another. Here on the surface of the poem it is represented by a mother giving birth to and then giving up a child, but in a more symbolic sense it is the act of creation and the parting with that creation, in particular perhaps the creation of a poem. The author finely crafts and cares for a poem and then has no choice but to release it to the world and that same sense of loss is what Sexton is trying to convey here as well. "You break from me. I choose / your only way, my small inheritor / and hand you off, trembling the selves we lose. / Go child, who is my sin and nothing more.." (Sexton 25) Sexton would most assuredly feel as if her poetry may be her sin exposed to the world and most certainly expressed in the phrase, "the selves we loose."