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Mother

Kinship
Pronunciation

Understanding ARPABET Pronunciation

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The pronunciation guide uses the ARPABET phonetic system—the same system used in speech recognition and text-to-speech applications.

Vowel Examples:
AE1 = cat, bat
EH1 = bed, head
IY1 = see, me
OW1 = go, boat
UW1 = boot, do
Stress Numbers:
0 = no stress (unstressed)
1 = primary stress (loud)
2 = secondary stress (medium)
Example:
AH0 TH IY1 N AH0
= a-THEE-na (Athena)

The stressed syllable (marked with 1) is pronounced louder and clearer than others.

Quick Definition

A female parent or maternal figure in a poem. It may represent nurture, memory, origin, or loss.

Detailed Definition
In poetry, a mother can be a literal parent, a remembered caretaker, or a symbolic source of life and belonging. Poems may address her directly in elegy, gratitude, accusation, or longing. The figure often carries associations of the body, home, inheritance, and early language, while also allowing poets to examine imperfect care, separation, sacrifice, and the complicated emotional bond between parent and child.
Example
Example in poetry:
In Robert Hayden’s “Those Winter Sundays,” the mother’s quiet domestic presence helps frame the father’s sacrifices; A speaker might write, “My mother folds dusk into the laundry,” using mother as a source of care and imagery; In “Morning Song,” Sylvia Plath presents motherhood as both intimate and strange through a new mother’s perspective; A poem can address a mother directly, as in “Mother, teach me the names of the birds you never saw”
Additional Notes
A mother figure may be literal or symbolic, representing nurture, origin, grief, memory, or the speaker’s emotional home. Compare maternal imagery and caregiver figures.
Also Known As
Mom Mum Mama Mommy Mummy Ma
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