I made this PowerPoint in preparation for my A-Level English exam, in which I achieved an A*. This PowerPoint contains detailed annotations of each line of the poem, separated by stanza. The analysis contains insight into the poem's context and complex literary techniques.
, About
• This stark, spare poem lays bare with frightening clarity the plight of women in India who are
pressured to produce male children; the yearning of a fostered, abandoned, now grown up bab
find her roots; the trap that cultural and societal demands create.
• The title could refer to the birth mother, the nun who rescues the baby, and the adoptive paren
who raise the child. It could also refer to the child herself, who as an adult has to ‘deliver’ herse
of the psychological state of not knowing her origins until she returns to India. It could even ref
the ‘delivery’ of the birth mother from guilt and the dehumanising effects of her hard life when
learns of her daughter’s life in America.
• The tone is flat and emotionless
• It is also a story of the distortion of familial bonds. The nun who rescues the child is “sister”. Th
woman who takes the baby to America feels her loss in her “empty arms”, the adoptive family
but the birth mother has none of these luxuries and is forced to resume life without grieving.
• It also shows the contrast between East and West in attitude to gender; how poverty undermin
human instinct to love and nurture a child. The telling of the story from different points of view
highlights this. No moral judgement is made.
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