What is the tone of Gwendolyn Brooks's poem "the mother"?
The tone of Gwendolyn Brooks’ poem “the mother” is extremely complex. The tone of the opening line – “Abortions will not let you forget” – can be read as regretful and as offering a kind of warning or even (at first) as somewhat accusatory. The tone of line two is mainly paradoxical; the tone of line three is vivid and almost disturbingly graphic. In line four, the tone might be called literally imaginative, while in lines 5-6 the tone seems at first brutally honest and realistic and then affectionate and realistic.
In lines 7-10, as well as in many lines of this poem, the speaker expresses herself as a person who is fully familiar with all the small, subtle realities of parenting – a fact that makes her attitudes toward her abortions even more complex. The tone in these lines is often humorous and at the same...
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time genuinely loving. In line 11 the tone sounds almost haunted; in lines 12-13 the tone seems melancholy, while in the next several ensuing lines the tone might be described as remorseful, apologetic, and even repentant. These lines show the speaker’s capacity to imagine the future even as she laments the past and also mourns for the potential futures that have been lost.
Line 20 seems harshly self-accusatory, but that tone is followed by the mixed, paradoxical, even oxymoronic feelings of line 21. Then in lines 22-23 the tone once again becomes frankly self-judgmental. The tone of line 24 is literally fatalistic. The tones of lines 25-26 might sound self-defensive, but then immediately the tone of lines 27-28 sounds honest and somewhat desperate. The speaker sounds like a woman who wants to speak truth, even as she realizes that the truth of her situation is extremely complicated and cannot be easily or simply expressed.
In line 29, the tone sounds abruptly realistic, but that tone is juxtaposed with the tone of line 30, which is wistful and reflective. Finally, the tones of the closing lines can be described in various ways, including insistent, affectionate, kind, caring, demonstrative, nostalgic, sorrowful, and anxious for understanding and forgiveness:
Believe me, I loved you all.
Believe me, I knew you, though faintly, and I loved, I loved you
All.
In short, the tone of this poem is as complex as the subject with which it so memorably deals.
What is the structure of Gwendolyn Brooks' poem "The Mother"?
Thanks for the clarification!
What I mean here when I talk about structuralism is an approach that looks at a large number of stories (or other short pieces) and seeks to identify the overarching pattern (the super-structure, if you will) that can help us make sense of each individual story. Examples of this method include the "morphology of the folk tale" study of Vladimir Propp and the myth studies of Claude-Levi Strauss.
A structuralist approach to the poem, then, would probably have to connect this poem to a set of other writings in order to identify a pattern across the writings. These writings might all be about life and death, about motherhood and birth, or any other range of topics.
Structuralism (as I understand it) does not stop at examining patterns in just one work. Formalism or New Criticism are often those sorts of approaches.
Gwendolyn Brooks is a highly accomplished poet, and her poem "The Mother" reflects her ability to work with language on a number of levels. The poem uses a variety of elements to give it structure, but it doesn't seem bound to any one of these elements.
End rhyme is used throughout, for example, and while the poem's rhyme often follows the format of couplets (AA, BB, etc.), it occasionally breaks out of that pattern and sometimes uses alternating rhyme (ABAB, etc.).
End rhyme is, of course, the repetition of sounds at the end of lines of a poem. Repetition is used in other ways, too, to lend structure to the poem. Key words and phrases are repeated or closely imitated, such as in the parallel grammatical forms in lines 3-4:
The damp small pulps with a little or with no hair, The singers and workers that never handled the air.
The source cited below, at enotes.com, talks about how the speaker in the poem is vacillating between various ways of making sense of the abortion or lost child:
An important unifying device in the poem is memory. Memory is constantly functioning in “the mother.” The narrator is in a fluid and changing relationship with the past, and specifically with her decisions that have drastically affected the present.
It may be possible to connect the changes in the poem's very structure to the changes in the speaker's "changing relationship with the past."
NOTE: I didn't understand the question in its original form. There's really no such thing as "structuralism in" a specific poem. Structuralism is a theoretical approach that transcends individual pieces of literature and looks for large patterns that organize and explain the individual pieces. In your question, I thus changed "structuralism in" to "structure of."