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What My Child Learns of the Sea | Introduction

When Audre Lorde wrote “What My Child Learns of the Sea” in her daughter Elizabeth’s first year of life, she was struggling to come to terms with her identity. The year of the poem’s creation, 1963, found Lorde in her first and only marriage, a young mother, writing poetry while also working as a librarian. The United States at the time was in the throes of an energetic and contested civil rights reform movement during the final year of President John F. Kennedy’s administration, just before its violent end. Set within the context of the times, “What My Child Learns of the Sea” reflects the anxiety and upheaval in Lorde’s personal life. In this poem, Lorde explores the responsibility, legacy, and limitations she felt as a mother and daughter. Avoiding specific allusions to historical events, Lorde focused her imagery on the primal cycles of nature. The language of seasons, including manifestations of growth and decay, give the poem a resilience that transcends the time and place of its creation and ensures its continued relevance and thoughtfulness as an exploration of motherdaughter and parent-child relationships.

“What My Child Learns of the Sea” was published in 1968 as part of The First Cities, Lorde’s first book. By that year, her daughter Elizabeth was five and Lorde herself turned thirty-four. With its publication in book form, “What My Child Learns of the Sea” reached a wider audience and became part of the turbulent and vibrant cultural and political scene. Between 1963 and 1968, the civil rights movement expanded from a mostly race-oriented effort into a broader societal upheaval that included an outcry for feminist and gay and lesbian rights and for dramatic changes in the status quo, aiming particularly for wider acceptance of diversity in American society. “What My Child Learns of the Sea” can be found in Audre Lorde’s 1992 collection Undersong: Chosen Poems Old and New (Revised) and anthologized in The Garden Thrives: Twentieth- Century African-American Poetry (1996).

What My Child Learns of the Sea Summary

In “What My Child Learns of the Sea,” Lorde’s speaker muses upon her daughter’s future development and growing awareness as a person. One discovers that the speaker is the mother and that “my child” is her daughter. The poem, comprised of four stanzas, turns around the cycles of nature, but not in the typically accepted seasonal order of spring, summer, autumn (or fall), and winter. Rather, three seasons are introduced in the first stanza in this order: summer, spring, and autumn. The poem’s title, reinforced by its repetition in the first line of the first stanza, introduces the key phrase “learns of the sea.” The speaker’s daughter will learn something about the sea and about life. She will learn about mystery, of the existence of “summer thunder” and “of riddles / that hide in the vortex of spring.” Given that a riddle is something mysterious and difficult to understand, the speaker’s daughter will move from a position of lesser understanding to one of greater comprehension, as if on a voyage of discovery and learning. Because a vortex, by definition, is a dangerous whirlpool, there is an element of danger that will be better understood. The speaker expects that her daughter will better understand these natural mysteries of sea and season “in my twilight.” Though the concept of twilight embraces the half-light periods just before sunrise and just after sunset, used here, twilight represents the speaker when she approaches old age. Thus, she projects that her daughter will come to understanding when the speaker is aged. The final two lines of the first stanza introduce the idea of revision, an important part of learning. Because of the incorporation of new sense data, ideas, and reflection, one’s initial ideas about the world are periodically revised. In this case, the speaker predicts that her daughter will “childlike / revise every autumn.” As a metaphor, autumn can represent a person at or past middle age, but in this instance, it is modified by the word “every,” indicating that... » Complete What My Child Learns of the Sea Summary