Mothers and children

Abstract

Masculine responses in fiction to the gestation and delivery of babies are few. William Blake, however, in ‘Infant Sorrow’ (Songs of Experience, 1794), gives a lyrical representation of childbirth from the point of view of the baby. The emergence from secure womb to ‘dangerous world’; the travails of the mother; the emotionality of the father; the feeling of being circumscribed by restrictive clothing; the sulking upon the ‘mother’s breast’ — Blake encapsulates what the psychoanalyst Carl Rogers called the ‘birth trauma’. But the word ‘trauma’ — ‘emotional shock’ (The Concise Oxford Dictionary) — exaggerates what is after all only a stage in growth.