13. SENTIMENTALITY

Sentimentality is the state of being emotional and affectionate to an idea. Writers and speakers use this to induce or heighten the reader or listener’s emotional response. Using sentimentality can be overdone and the meanings of the poems can become lost through the reader’s personal emotional response. On the other hand sometimes writers try to avoid the sentimental literary device to remain unbiased and allowing readers to interpret their poems differently.

Sylvia Plath is a poet that uses sentimentality throughout her poems. In “Morning Song” she avoids the blatant sentimentality by the use of contradictory emotions. In the third stanza she starts with “I’m no more your mother” (line 7) which reveals the beginning of her postpartum depression. This expresses her detachment of the child from within the womb. Within the fifth stanza she mothers her child. “One cry, and I stumble from bed, cow-heavy and floral” (line 13). This conveys the mother’s love for a child. A single cry from the child and the mother without hesitation goes to the child. Throughout this poem she does not use words that capture the reader’s emotions to her poem but slowly unwinds to the reader her personal story of her newborn.

Even though in “Morning Song” Plath does not force the same sentimentality as she does in “Daddy” and in “Lady Lazarus.” In “Daddy” she speaks of the little she knows of her father. “I was ten when they buried you.” (line 57). She lost her father at a young age and throughout the poem mentions the heartache and loss. As reading the poem the reader connects with the emotion of Plath. She uses the same style throughout “Lady Lazarus” as she speaks of her personal suicide attempts.

I feel that the poem that used sentimentality the best this week was Galway Kinnell’s “After Making Love We Hear Footsteps.” He sets the poem up well describing the sounds that he can make. He then expresses that the soft noise of love making seem to be “louder” than the ones previous mentioned. He then climaxes with “and he appears—in his baseball pajamas,” (line12) slowly revealing that it is his son that is awakened through the soft noises. He ends the poem exposing that he is not upset with his son for it was the same act that created him. I feel the way Kinnell slowly uncovers the meaning through his poem with the touch of sentimentality at the end is used successfully.