Poem of the Day: ‘With Child’

In yesterday’s Poem of the Day, James Weldon Johnson’s speaker meditates on the fraught sense of identity between father and son, the father recognizing himself in his child, but wishing, at least on some levels, that he did not. Today’s poem, by the American poet Genevieve Taggard (1894–1948) takes up again the theme of new parenthood, this time from the perspective of the expectant mother. This poem moves with a pregnant woman’s languor through meditations first on her own transformed body, then the body her body contains, which will shortly push free of her, a swimmer kicking off from shore into new waters. The form seems felicitously suited to the subject: three pentameter sestets, like trimesters, each composed of rhymed couplets which underscore the strange oneness-yet-twoness of mother and child in pregnancy.With Child by Genevieve TaggardNow 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. ___________________________________________ With “Poem of the Day,” The New York Sun offers a daily portion of verse selected by Joseph Bottum with the help of the North Carolina poet Sally Thomas, the Sun’s associate poetry editor. Tied to the day, or the season, or just individual taste, the poems will be typically drawn from the lesser-known portion of the history of English verse. In the coming months we will be reaching out to contemporary poets for examples of current, primarily formalist work, to show that poetry can still serve as a delight to the ear, an instruction to the mind, and a tonic for the soul.

Poem of the Day: ‘With Child’

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