The Deliverer

• Themes


  • Sexism
  • Discrimination
  • Poverty
  • Motherhood
• "she came to collect children because they were crippled or dark or girls"

  • The language is unemotional but shocking. The reasons babies are abandoned is set out as bald facts. Hard, poverty-stricken lives lead to this.
  • the brutal term ‘crippled’. Today, the softer word ‘disabled’ is usually used, but in this context euphemism is a luxury. Also, no apology is made for the sexism of a society that favours boys and not girls.
  • List of words lists undesirable faults in children
• "the head barely poling above the ground was bone or wood something to chew"


  • the dog digging up a baby is even more stark; humans have descended to animals here, reduced to ‘bone’ and ‘wood’ and ‘poking’ and ‘something to chew’. This forms a dramatic climax.
  • The alliterative “dug up by a dog”, with its consonantly rhyming, nursery-rhyme rhythm is deliberately brutal and shocking.
• "they are American so they know about ceremony, and tradition, about doing things right"

  • The ‘ceremony’ is significant. Adoption and birth are taken seriously in Western culture, and celebrations are elaborate.
  • Overseas adoption in these circumstances will be preceded by training for parents in the psychological effects of abandonment and deprivation.
• "but they were crying. we couldn't stop crying"

  • They are comparatively wealthy Americans and can afford the luxury of crying.
  • The ‘strangeness’ of the adoptive mother’s ‘empty arms’ perhaps indicates the rightness of this adoption. This child has been rescued from death, and although it isn’t stated, the implication is that that every child deserves the chance of decent life.
  • The sense of loss experienced by the “deliverer” is also positive, establishing the power of humanity.
• "sees how she's passed from woman to woman. She returns to twilight corners."


  • Her adoptive status is important to her. She will be different from children who have birth parents, and wants to know more about her origins.
  • As many adopted children do, she returns to her place of birth to seek information and understanding - twilight corners suggests something forbidden
• "squeeze out life, watch body slither out from body"


  • The language is stark, the understated significance of the words ‘desolate’ and ‘squeeze out life’. The birth is a repulsive ‘body slither out from body’, with none of the language of wealthy societies, his child is another burden and heartache for a deprived mother.
  • the sibilant ’s’s in ‘squeeze’ and ‘slither’ create an uneasy feeling, combined with the visceral onomatopoeia. The mothers are presented as bodies, vessels for childbirth, with no emotion or purpose; their femininity and maternal drive are obliterated.
• "Toss the baby to heaps of others, trudge home to lie down for their men again"


  • ‘Toss the baby to the heap’. The verb ‘toss’ is chilling; another dramatic climax.
  • The last line ends the poem with a terrible understatement about the hardship of the women’s lives. That they ‘trudge’ home to go through the process again is an indictment of the inequalities of humans on the planet. Again, there is no moral judgement, either of the mother or her husband who is equally trapped in poverty. The reader is left to think about the realities.