John Masefield

C. L. M.

In the dark womb where I began
My mother's life made me a man.
Through all the months of human birth
Her beauty fed my common earth.
I cannot see, nor breathe, nor stir,

Biological debt

Masefield uses 'death' literally—maternal cells die to build fetal tissue. This isn't metaphorical suffering; it's biological fact. The poem grounds gratitude in physical cost.

But through the death of some of her.
Down in the darkness of the grave
She cannot see the life she gave.
For all her love, she cannot tell

Maternal ignorance

The mother cannot assess her child's life or character. She's invested everything but has no knowledge of the outcome. This powerlessness is central to the poem's guilt.

Whether I use it ill or well,
Nor knock at dusty doors to find
Her beauty dusty in the mind.
If the grave's gates could be undone,
She would not know her little son,
I am so grown. If we should meet
She would pass by me in the street,

Estrangement by growth

The son has become unrecognizable to his mother. Time and development have erased the physical connection that would let her identify him. Recognition requires spiritual awareness, not blood relation.

Unless my soul's face let her see
My sense of what she did for me.

Estrangement by growth

The son has become unrecognizable to his mother. Time and development have erased the physical connection that would let her identify him. Recognition requires spiritual awareness, not blood relation.

Rhetorical paralysis

Four consecutive questions (lines 17-20) with no answers. Masefield performs the speaker's inability to repay or even articulate the debt. The unanswered questions are the point.

What have I done to keep in mind
My debt to her and womankind?

Rhetorical paralysis

Four consecutive questions (lines 17-20) with no answers. Masefield performs the speaker's inability to repay or even articulate the debt. The unanswered questions are the point.

What woman's happier life repays
Her for those months of wretched days?
For all my mouthless body leeched
Ere Birth's releasing hell was reached?
What have I done, or tried, or said
In thanks to that dear woman dead?

Gender politics turn

The poem pivots from personal gratitude to social indictment. Men's systematic oppression of women becomes the real failure—not individual ingratitude but collective injustice. The personal becomes political.

Men triumph over women still,
Men trample women's rights at will,
And man's lust roves the world untamed.
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O grave, keep shut lest I be shamed.

Shame as final answer

The grave should stay shut because opening it would expose the speaker's complicity in male dominance. Shame, not love, is what would result from confrontation with the dead mother.

Source Wikipedia Poetry Foundation

Reading Notes

The poem's structural turn: personal to political

The first two stanzas establish a private emotional debt—the speaker cannot repay his mother's biological sacrifice, and she cannot know whether her investment was worthwhile. This is intimate and unanswerable. But at line 17, Masefield shifts the frame. The four unanswered questions ('What have I done...') move from personal guilt to collective male failure. By the final stanza, individual ingratitude becomes a symptom of systemic male dominance.

This is not a poem that resolves into sentiment. The closing image—'O grave, keep shut lest I be shamed'—refuses comfort. The speaker asks the grave to remain sealed not for peace, but because confronting his dead mother would force him to acknowledge his participation in the oppression of women. Shame is the only honest response.

Biological language and the cost of motherhood

CONTEXT Masefield wrote this in 1902, during a period of growing feminist activism in Britain. The poem predates widespread public discussion of maternal mortality and bodily cost. His choice to frame motherhood in biological terms—'death of some of her,' 'mouthless body leeched'—was unusual for the period.

Notice how Masefield refuses sentimentality about birth. The language is clinical and stark: the fetus cannot 'see, nor breathe, nor stir' without maternal dissolution. 'Birth's releasing hell' treats labor as violent necessity, not miracle. This precision matters because it grounds the poem's guilt in physical reality rather than emotional abstraction. The son's debt is not symbolic—it's metabolic.