A man becomes a father, and Michael John Pickering treats it like a crime scene. Every father, the poem claims, has "through an accident, / in the rush-hour mated," and in doing so has "murdered his death." That phrase is the knot of the poem. A child is a kind of afterlife, a way of outlasting the grave, so fathering one cheats death of its victim. The second half shows the price. The baby, "grave-eclipsing" because he blots out the speaker's own ending, brings a "revenge" that "kills my ambition's life" and "ends reason's age." The father escapes one death only to suffer another: the death of the person he meant to become.
The title does a lot of work. Men do not feel birthpangs, yet the opening line, "Each man who gives birth," insists that they do, and the poem becomes a record of a different labour, a mental and emotional one. "Sonnet" is a teasing label. The poem has fourteen lines, but they are chopped into stanzas of five, five and four, and the lines are short, two or three stresses each, nothing like the stately pentameter of a traditional sonnet. The form is a sonnet squeezed into a cramped space, which suits a speaker who feels his life has been squeezed too.
The sound patterns are worth following. "Fated" and "mated" chime in the first stanza, and "birth" and "death," the first and last words of that stanza, are bound by a near-rhyme, so beginning and ending are locked together before we even grasp the paradox. "Accident" returns later as "incident," a small echo that makes the wife's role feel like a footnote to the same chance event. The long *a* of "grave," "babe's" and "age" links the baby to the grave and to the end of an era. The ending shifts the sound. The earlier rhymes are slippery or half-hidden, but "strings" and "sings," "song" and "long" arrive with the neatness of a nursery rhyme. The poem stops arguing and starts singing, as if the mother's lullaby has taken over the verse.
That final image is the richest. "Braided strings" and a "tearful loom" suggest weaving, and a reader might think of the old idea of life as a thread spun and cut. The same words also suggest a harp, since the woman "plucks" and "sings." Judging by the imagery, the braiding could even hint at the umbilical cord, though the poem never says so. Weaving, music and birth merge into one picture of a woman making a life out of grief and tenderness at once. Her song is "uncarrying," a word I take to be Pickering's coinage. It could mean she is no longer pregnant, or that the song does not carry far, a private sound in a house. Either reading adds to the sense of delicate loss. "For two lives long" is also open: her life and the child's, perhaps, or the father's lost life and the new one.
The mother is the poem's most interesting tension. The speaker calls her "only incident," a mere circumstance in his drama, and the parenthesis that holds her ("for my wife, / his mother") is a small enclosure, as if she is being put aside. Yet in the last four lines the "I" disappears and she gets the only active verbs, "plucks" and "sings." Whether this is the speaker's blind spot or Pickering's quiet irony, the effect is that she, not he, ends up carrying the poem's feeling.
What makes the poem significant is its refusal to be sentimental. It admits an ambivalence that greeting cards leave out: that the joy of a child can arrive with the grief of lost freedom and ambition. It also grounds a grand theme, mortality, in something as ordinary as a rush-hour accident. In fourteen clipped lines it suggests that surviving death and living one's own life may be two different things.