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1. Kevin Young’s poem “Expecting” is about his wife receiving an ultrasound and hearing their child’s heartbeat for the first time. The third stanza, “The whoosh and bellows of mama’s body / and beneath it: nothing. Beneath / the slow stutter of her heart: nothing,” stood out to me as being an exceptionally spooky line. You can tell that there is a sense of tension, of worry for the life of the child. Before the feelings of fear and impatience are expressed, before the comparison to spelunking in a coal mine with a dead canary is made, this stanza lets you know that something appears to be wrong. The word that really carries this stanza is “nothing,” the way that it is isolated away from the rest of the sentence using a colon really makes it stand out as being a reoccurring thought. What if there is nothing? Is his baby okay? Will this be a poem about losing a baby? The tension built up is relieved with “And there / it is: faint, an echo, faster and further / away than mother’s, all beat box / and fuzzy feed back.” Comparing the heartbeat of his child to the feelings that arise from hip hop and beat boxing shows just how much Young cares for his unborn child in a way that is rather unique to his experience. The way the first part of the poem is about fear, comparing losing a child to being lost in a coal mine, and the second half is about joy, comparing hearing a child’s heartbeat to hip hop, shows a great contrast in energy. Fear is dark, without a canary in the coal mine you are in danger. But hearing the canary, the heartbeat, the hip hop and jazz, gives direction, hope, and happiness. The poem is written with sentences being split abruptly by lines, the lines not having a clear rhyme scheme or syllabic pattern to it. I think this is done to show the uncertainty that Young is feeling. That’s the only reason I can think of for the abrupt line breaks.

2.

“Expecting” is a poem by Kevin Young where he describes his experience of hearing his baby’s heartbeats for the first time. I picked lines seven to eleven because I noticed the major contrast between the expectation and the result. He describes his wife’s body as one with “whoosh and bellows” (Young, 7). Young uses these words to highlight the uneasiness and the struggles that his wife experienced. And he follows it up with the repetitive action of searching beneath and finding nothing (Young, 8-9). This further adds to the uneasiness of the situation as more efforts to search for the baby are barricaded by unsuccessful results; the division with colons leaves a sense of suspense as well. As the doctor continues to look, Young calls his baby with what seems like nicknames: “fragile / fern, snowflake” (Young, 10-11). Since both ferns and snowflakes symbolize rebirth, or a new beginning, Young wants to draw the connection that his baby’s heartbeat will indicate a new life for him and his wife.