Woman to Child
Woman to Child - meaning Summary
Maternal Origin and Lasting Bond
In Woman to Child a mother addresses her child, presenting the womb as a dark, generative world where a whole imaginative cosmos—time, life, and sense—develops. She claims responsibility for the child's origin and nurture while acknowledging the inevitability of separation when the child moves into light. The poem stresses an enduring bond: the mother is both root and link to the child's night, sustaining its beginning even after release.
Read Complete AnalysesYou who were darkness warmed my flesh where out of darkness rose the seed. Then all a world I made in me; all the world you hear and see hung upon my dreaming blood. There moved the multitudinous stars, and coloured birds and fishes moved. There swam the sliding continents. All time lay rolled in me, and sense, and love that knew not its beloved. O node and focus of the world; I hold you deep within that well you shall escape and not escape- that mirrors still your sleeping shape; that nurtures still your crescent cell. I wither and you break from me; yet though you dance in living light I am the earth, I am the root, I am the stem that fed the fruit, the link that joins you to the night.
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