There are many images and word choices in “The Mother” by Gwendolyn Brooks that convey the tone of the poet toward the theme of her subject matter-abortion. The poet uses varying points of view to convey the complexity of the issue being discussed, and the tone therefore becomes a complex thing in itself. Within the poem there is a tone of didacticism, censure, accusation, and understanding that is portrayed through the voice of the poet.
The use of the pronoun “you” at the beginning of the poem universalizes the audience for whom the poem is intended, and makes it less personal. The poet is speaking directly to you, and its effect is a tone that is almost accusatory. YOU will not be able to forget. YOU will “remember the children that you got that you did not get”. The poet uses a paradox with the previous line to comment on the miracle of life, the wonder of conception. “The children that you got” was the life growing in the mother’s womb, and the mother got a child, she was carrying that miracle inside of her until she decided not to carry it through. She got a child, but she did not get it in the end. So despite the miracle, the mother has thrown it away.
The poet shifts the tone to a graphic, uncomfortable feeling with a description of what an aborted fetus usually looks like, “damp small pulps with a little or with no hair”, and draws an almost didactic contrast between the dead and the potential lives of the fetuses, “the singers and workers that never handled the air.” The poet is teaching a lesson, it seems, about what abortion does to the future. Perhaps that fetus was destined to be a great singer or the head of a company, as is suggested by the “workers” the poet references. The tone then changes to one of censure in the lines, “You will never neglect or beat them” and the poet is speaking rather sardonically to the women who are mothers, and who