For a Fatherless Son
For a Fatherless Son - fact Summary
After Nicholass Birth
Plath addresses her infant son, oscillating between tender amusement and a foreboding sense of loss. She frames the child’s present innocence as a respite from her own inner darkness and depressive fears, imagining an expanding absence or “death tree” that the child will one day sense. The poem registers maternal love mixed with anxiety, valuing the baby’s simple trust as temporary protection against the poet’s private grief.
Read Complete AnalysesYou will be aware of an absence, presently, Growing beside you, like a tree, A death tree, color gone, an Australian gum tree --- Balding, gelded by lightning--an illusion, And a sky like a pig's backside, an utter lack of attention. But right now you are dumb. And I love your stupidity, The blind mirror of it. I look in And find no face but my own, and you think that's funny. It is good for me To have you grab my nose, a ladder rung. One day you may touch what's wrong --- The small skulls, the smashed blue hills, the godawful hush. Till then your smiles are found money.
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