Today’s Poem: With Child
Genevieve Taggard’s generative poetic territory
With Child
by Genevieve Taggard
Now I am slow and placid, fond of sun, Like a sleek beast, or a worn one: No slim and languid girl — not glad With the windy trip I once had, But velvet-footed, musing of my own, Torpid, mellow, stupid as a stone. You cleft me with your beauty’s pulse, and now Your pulse has taken body. Care not how The old grace goes, how heavy I am grown, Big with this loneliness, how you alone Ponder our love. Touch my feet and feel How earth tingles, teeming at my heel! Earth’s urge, not mine,—my little death, not hers; And the pure beauty yearns and stirs. It does not heed our ecstasies, it turns With secrets of its own, its own concerns, Toward a windy world of its own, toward stark And solitary places. In the dark, Defiant even now, it tugs and moans To be untangled from these mother’s bones. ═════════════════════════
In her 1922 collection For Eager Lovers, the American poet Genevieve Taggard (1894–1948), co-founder of the journal The Measure, marks out a different literary territory from that of many of her Modernist contemporaries: Marianne Moore, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Dorothy Parker, Elinor Wylie, Mina Loy, H.D., Sara Teasdale. Today’s Poem, taken from that collection, engages explicitly with generative human love, in her view “the only profound human experience.”
Taggard meditates on expectant motherhood as a serious subject for poetry, in a way that prepares ground for some of the most profound poems by Sylvia Plath, for example, nearly four decades in the future. With a pregnant woman’s languor, “With Child” moves through its examination of the transformations wrought by this state of being.
The poem’s speaker dwells first on her own changed body, then on the body her body contains, which will shortly push free of her, a swimmer kicking off from shore into new waters. She dwells, too, on her own identity as a person carrying another person — a completely mysterious and separate stranger — inside herself. She is, as she says, “big with” another kind of “loneliness,” the dislocating solitude of being so close to a person who remains unknown, as well as the “death” of her former self.
The form seems felicitously suited to the subject: three pentameter sestets like trimesters. Heroic couplets both underscore the strange oneness-yet-twoness of mother and child in pregnancy and gesture toward pregnancy’s inscription as a literary matter, by casting her exploration of that subject — as urgently existential as H.D.’s minimal mythic retellings — in that high traditional stanza, beloved of the Augustans.
As the the unborn child inhabits the mother’s body, “With Child” also gestates itself consciously in the body of literary tradition. But in entering this largely unexplored territory of poetic concern, the physical and psychological experience of pregnancy and birth, it asserts itself as seeking to be — as much as any child can ever be — “untangled from these mother’s bones.”
