Classic and Contemporary Poetry: Explained

Beth Ann Fennelly’s "Bite Me" is an intense, visceral meditation on the physical and emotional bond between a mother and her child, exploring themes of pain, transformation, and the primal forces of birth and motherhood. The poem moves seamlessly between tender observation and raw physicality, capturing both the ferocity of childbirth and the deep intimacy of maternal love. With its evocative imagery and unflinching honesty, the poem renders the mother-child relationship as one of both deep affection and physical imprint, where love is experienced through flesh and instinct.

The poem opens in a moment of gentle domesticity. The child, still in the early stages of language acquisition, delights in forming the word "Bawoooooon," a mispronunciation of "balloon," and in the same breath, bites the speaker’s thigh. The juxtaposition of this innocent linguistic discovery with an act of physical aggression creates a powerful contrast—the child is both vulnerable and fierce, exploring the world through both sound and sensation. The mother attempts discipline, repeating "No," but recognizes the futility of resisting a force as natural as the wind. The infant?s biting is persistent, an expression of raw physical need, leaving "six-teeth-brooches" on the speaker’s skin, wounds that take a week to fade. The metaphor of a brooch transforms pain into adornment, suggesting that motherhood is not just suffering but a kind of honor—an irreversible transformation marked on the body.

The speaker then shifts from the present to the moment of birth, attempting to trace the origins of this biting instinct. In a graphic, almost mythic retelling, she describes how her daughter, at the moment of crowning, "started turning," resisting a smooth passage into the world. The rotating "mandala of your black hair" evokes both beauty and danger, likening the child’s emergence to a relentless cosmic force—"a pinwheel," "laundry in the eye of the washer," "the eye of the storm." The mother?s labor becomes a battle, a struggle against pain and mortality, as she pushes beyond exhaustion, beyond bodily dignity, beyond her own limits. The description is unapologetically raw: "I pushed so hard I shat, / pushed so hard blood vessels burst in my neck," and the hauntingly visceral "pushed so hard my asshole turned inside-out like a rosebud." This explicit depiction of childbirth as both agony and destruction undercuts any romanticized notions of maternal sacrifice—it is not a gentle surrender but a violent, bodily rupture.

The husband, too, is transformed in this scene. Initially a bystander, he is described in a way that suggests he, too, is being reborn—his terror and the "blood splatter" symbolizing a second, figurative birth into fatherhood. The moment of delivery is triumphant—"finally I burst at the seams and you were out," a phrase that likens the body to fabric torn apart by sheer force. Yet, rather than resenting the child for this ordeal, the mother claims her daughter in the moment of victory: "Look, Ha, you didn’t kill me after all, Monster I have you, / and you are mine now, mine." The use of "Monster" is affectionate but also acknowledges the child?s formidable power—she is a force that nearly overwhelmed the speaker, yet ultimately, the mother prevails and possesses her.

The final lines return to the act of biting, now understood not just as teething behavior, but as an extension of birth itself. The daughter "had to eat [her] way out of me," suggesting that the bond between mother and child is inherently predatory, mutually consuming. The phrase "developed a taste for my royal blood" turns the act into something both violent and sacred. The reference to "royal blood" underscores the idea of lineage, inheritance, and the primal contract between mother and child—a relationship defined by both pain and permanence.

"Bite Me" is a fiercely unfiltered poem that refuses sentimentality in its portrayal of motherhood. Instead, Fennelly presents maternal love as a battlefield, a space of physical endurance and survival, where the mother’s body is both refuge and sacrifice. The poem asserts that childbirth is not just about bringing life into the world but about enduring the profound violence of that transition. The speaker emerges from the experience not merely as a mother, but as someone irrevocably changed, bearing the literal and figurative marks of that transformation. In the end, the poem affirms that love, at its most primal, is not just tenderness—it is blood, teeth, survival, and ownership, a relationship forged in pain and made indelible through touch.

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