My first sonne
‘Stillbirth,” written by Barbara Noel Scott, describes and experience of giving birth to a dead child. The mother in the poem is looking back on the birth of her dead child and describes her emotions and feelings towards her labor. The way that the poet describes her feelings are as if this was a real life experience for her. “Stillbirth” is a narrative Dramatic Monologue that is telling a story about a mother’s reaction to having a miscarriage. I get the feeling that the mother felt as though everything she was put through was pointless and futile. There is some anger and also much sadness through out the poem: “I never saw the features I had made…hands I felt groping…life I tried to give, and could not.” The poem consists of four stanzas each one dealing with a different topic. The first stanza describes what labor was like and how she felt while her child was in her womb. Using a metaphor such as: “…bearing nothing but a stone,” she describes the fetus as a stone, meaning it was hard and cold.