Not The Ideal Relationship
The dating website eHarmony.com guarantees a fertile relationship in which people may blossom and grow together. However, the countless failed relationships and statistics have proven to show this to be untrue. This is also a predominant theme in Maya Angelou’s poem, “The Mothering Blackness” in which the speaker uses symbolism, metaphor, and personification to illustrate that negativity can make the most fertile relationships dead and barren.
In the poem “The Mothering Blackness” Maya Angelou conveys the theme through the use of symbols. The most common is color, it symbolizes the forces that can destroy a relationship. For example in the first stanza she writes “white tears icicle gold plains of her face” (4). The use of the colors as symbols gives the poem a deeper meaning. In the first part of this line she uses the words “white tears icicles”. The phrase symbolize a cold and distinct destroyer. The second part…show more content… Angelou personifies the word blackness giving it multiple actions throughout the first stanza.These multiple actions give the blackness a deeper meaning that supports the theme and gives dynamic to the relationship being described in the poem.Nevertheless, in order to understand the actions the blackness is doing, on must first understand the word blackness. Blackness typically has bad connotations, however in this poem it is something good. Black dirt is rich in nutrients and produces fertile vegetation which sustains life. Angelou personifies the blackness in the first stanza as mothering and smothering. When Angelou writes, “back to the mothering blackness” (2) she is personifying the blackness as a nurturing force, however, in the very next line she writes “deep in the smothering blackness” (3). This phrase shows that while the blackness is being shown as high-yielding it is also a suffocating force from an abundance of