UNSEEN POETRY - Paper 1, 2019

Now That I am Forever With Child
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Now That I am Forever With Child
Audre Lorde (1934-1992)
Lorde begins her poem by telling of the excitement she experienced when she first found out she was pregnant. She describes her daughter as "blooming" within her, a term used to describe the growing of beautiful flowers.
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She says that "the swelling changed planes of my body"- as her child grew inside of her, she began to show and was proud of her unborn child growing inside of her.
As her pregnancy progresses, she imagines how her daughter is developing inside of her, how her hands and hair are growing, forming a woman soon to be brought into the world. This sentiment is pretty much universal. Nearly every mother imagines what her child will look like and how he or she is developing in the womb.
When her child is born, Lorde's entire outlook on life is changed. Her whole world revolves around her child. As independent as many women are, there is often an instinctual change in a woman's attitudes and behaviours upon having a child.
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A woman's primary concern becomes her child and her own desires are often cast aside. While this is a natural and beautiful sacrifice, this has also caused issues for women.
Women are expected to work, take care of the home, cater to the needs of their husbands, and be wonderful mothers to their children. Men tend to be expected to merely be breadwinners.
These standards are unrealistic and cause a great deal of stress upon women. Additionally, there is a stigma surrounding women who do not have children at a certain age.
Because the ability to have children is bestowed upon women alone, society expects that all women will embrace this privilege and want to be a mother. This is an unfair standard. Though women are biologically capable of bearing children, women have other desires as well- as men do- and have reproductive choice.
free verse
there's no rhyme
The first two stanzas beginning 'How...' introduce a reflective sense of savouring the memory.
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Lorde's poem looks at a broader sweep of time with over half the poem concentrating on the pregnancy. The brief last stanza hints at all the time that has elapsed since the birth.
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THE VICTORY
Anne Stevenson (b.1933)
'I thought you were my victory / though you cut me like a knife'Anne Stevenson is trying to portray a mother's feelings of pain and anguish of giving birth to a child in the poem. 'cut me like a knife' - simile.Although she must endure such pain, it is also exciting for the mother to bring new life into the world, which in fact feels like a "victory" to a new parent.However, throughout the poem, the speaker denies the fact that giving birth to a child is a victory, by using words such as "antagonist", "bruise" and "scary". Suggest the negative side of birth.This poem contains a tone of conflict and anger.'The stains of your cloud of glory / bled from my veins'The mother feels her own blood running through the veins of the baby that lives within her'blind thing' 'blank insect eyes'She sees her child as a stranger. This mother sees her child as more of an insect than a human being.'Why do I have to love you? / How have you won?'Shows the mother's true conflicts. These rhetorical questions are the basic questions of human existence.'You sting with bladed cries'metaphor. negative imagery. 'bladed' - repetition of the cutting knife. sharp, painful.made up of four quatrains- each of two intercut rhyming couplets & 2 free verse stanzas.in Stevenson, the speaker focuses almost exclusively on the birth itself as a hard-fought battle. The speaker shifts from viewing her birth as a victory to the view that the all-consuming demands of the child make her the passive victim and him the active aggressor and possible victor.The son is described in apparently negative terms throughout as an objectionable 'thing' that causes pain and suffering. The poem ends in a volley of exclamations and questions, the negativity of which is perhaps undercut by the description in the second line: 'Small son'.