Stillborn
Stillborn - fact Summary
Reflects Miscarriage and Depression
Plath's "Stillborn" presents a stark, clinical scene of infants who are fully formed but lifeless and unresponsive. The speaker alternates factual observation and anguished maternal grief, describing preserved bodies and a mother rendered near-distracted by loss. The poem confronts the emotional and physical aftermath of miscarriage, juxtaposing anatomical completeness with the absence of life and voice, and exposing the corrosive silence that follows bereavement.
Read Complete AnalysesThese poems do not live: it's a sad diagnosis. They grew their toes and fingers well enough, Their little foreheads bulged with concentration. If they missed out on walking about like people It wasn't for any lack of mother-love. O I cannot explain what happened to them! They are proper in shape and number and every part. They sit so nicely in the pickling fluid! They smile and smile and smile at me. And still the lungs won't fill and the heart won't start. They are not pigs, they are not even fish, Though they have a piggy and a fishy air -- It would be better if they were alive, and that's what they were. But they are dead, and their mother near dead with distraction, And they stupidly stare and do not speak of her.
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