Baby-Sitting

BABY-SITTING

This poem, in contrast with ‘Catrin’, focuses upon the poet’s distance from another mother’s child rather than on the close bond that exists between her and her own daughter.

Clarke again uses a bipartite structure. The two ten line sections may just be called stanzas. The first focuses upon the persona’s response to the baby and her fears relating to her possible waking. Words like “wrong”,  “don’t”, “afraid”, “hate”, “shout” and “rage” build up a strong picture of negativity and rejection. There is no maternal bond and the baby will only be repugnant to her; she would not fail, of course, to “enchant” her natural mother with “the perfume / Of her breath” (lines 9-10)

The second stanza concentrates more upon the child’s potential reaction to her babysitter. The atmosphere created in the first stanza of the poem is one of trepidation, familiar to anyone who is looking after someone else’s baby. The fact that it is a baby makes any dialogue impossible should she awaken. Emotion and instinct are lacking in the

The concluding line of the poem is both tender and resigned. The repeated “it will not come” refers on one level simply to the fact that the child has no biological connected to her and will therefore not be consoled by her smell. On another level, the child’s distress is emphasised by the words of a mother who is alarmed at having no milk to feed her child. If milk “does not come” then the child goes hungry. Although the child depicted clearly has a lactating mother, the experience of deprivation is acute.

The child’s natural mother would be able to deal with the baby’s heavy cold, ignoring the streaming snot, bubbling as the child struggles to breathe because she loves her. The poet clearly delineates here the boundaries that love does not but exist for anyone who is not the parent.

Although the speaker does not “love /this baby” (lines 2-3), she is not indifferent to her distress. She may not react emotionally to her but is able to empathise in realising that she represents for the child “absolute / Abandonment” (lines 11-12) The transferred epithets of the metaphor “cold lonely sheets” uses a metaphor to explore the baby’s sense of desertion, this is couched in very adult terms too, though as the poet commandeers grown-up equivalents for the situation. The child’s distress will be “worse / Than for a lover cold in lonely / Sheets” (lines 11-13)