ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses some anxieties surrounding childbirth and the frequent demonization of the mother—important aspects of the cultural context in which mothers composed their child loss poetry—in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England. It explicates the culturally and historically specific thematic conventions for composing upon the occasion of child loss in early modern England. Mothers writing about their own experiences of child loss tend to choose a poetically self-effacing plain style. This maternal plain style, which creates the illusion that a mother’s poem is not the product of a miscreating maternal mind, avoids the appropriation of conventions common to love lyrics that non-parental consolers use frequently when writing epitaphs and elegies for children. Finally, the chapter uses Mary Carey’s poetry as an example to demonstrate how some mothers’ rejection of dominant poetic trends created an opportunity for them to develop and to invigorate the conventions of child loss poetry by simultaneously borrowing from and interrogating them.
