My First Weeks — Sharon Olds
‘My First Weeks’ opens with an adult voice trying to work out ‘what I’m like, underneath’ — and answering that question by imagining her own infancy. The speaker addressing us is Sharon Olds’s poetic persona, looking back at a life that began, she says, in a rush of comfort before it hardened into rules. The poem sits in the Youth and Age cluster because it asks a question every reader can recognise: how much of who we become was decided before we could remember it?
Sharon Olds (b. 1942) writes candidly about the body and about family life, and ‘My First Weeks’ is typical of that directness. Instead of describing birth and infancy in soft, sentimental terms, she gives precise physical detail — breast milk, bottles, a nurse’s measured ounces of water — and lets the reader feel both the pleasure and the discipline of being a newborn.
The poem is built on one paradox: in her ‘first two weeks’ in hospital the timing was already strict — ‘every four hours and not / a minute sooner I could drink’ — but the amount was unlimited, so that at each feed she ‘could have the world in my mouth’, a ‘fortnight of unlimited ration’ she later calls heaven. Once home, the same four-hourly clock brings only ‘four ounces of / water’, and she ‘shrieked for it’ in between. Abundance turns into rationing within a fortnight.
The poem’s first line frames everything that follows as guesswork rather than fact: ‘Sometimes, when I wonder what I’m like, underneath, / I think of my first two weeks.’ No one truly remembers being two weeks old, so Olds is not reporting memory — she is reconstructing an origin story, using her mother’s account and her own imagination to explain her adult character. This uncertain, searching opening matters for comparison work: it shows a poet using an early-life memory to answer a present-day question about identity.
Birth itself is described as a smooth escape rather than a trauma. Enjambment carries the sentence across several lines — ‘The wall opened / like liquid, my head slid through, my legs, I / pushed off, from the side, soared’ — so the reader experiences the same forward momentum the baby feels. She is ‘squeezed out neatly into the cold illuminated air and breathed it’: birth is precise, gentle, almost athletic, not painful.
Olds explicitly links her strict feeding schedule to the formation of her adult self. She says the nurses ‘knew it would build my character, / to learn to give up’ — meaning the deprivation of infancy was designed to teach self-control. The poem suggests personality is shaped by early experiences of comfort and denial, long before conscious memory begins.
The hospital fortnight becomes an extended metaphor for paradise. ‘Paradise / had its laws — every four hours and not / a minute sooner I could drink, but every four / hours I could have the world in my mouth.’ Even paradise has rules, but they are generous ones. By the final lines the metaphor has shifted to memory itself: ‘every four hours — clock of cream / and flame, I have known heaven.’ The repeated ‘four hours’ threads through the whole poem, turning a hospital timetable into something like a religious rite that the adult speaker still measures her life against.
Domestic, comic detail keeps the poem grounded. Olds’s mother holds her up to the window and ‘wagged / my fist at my sister, down in the street,’ who waves back so hard her ice-cream cone flies ‘through the air like a / butter-brickle cannonball.’ This ordinary, slightly ridiculous image sits beside the poem’s bigger claims about paradise and character — showing that the poem’s idea of early happiness includes family relationships, not just food and warmth.
‘My First Weeks’ is written in free verse, and its long, run-on sentences imitate the way memory and milk both flow without clear breaks. The short list ‘Sleep. / Milk. Heat.’ interrupts that flow with three blunt, monosyllabic nouns — a deliberate contrast to the poem’s otherwise winding syntax, mimicking the simplicity of a newborn’s entire world.
Structurally, the poem falls into two halves around a hinge: ‘Two weeks, and then home.’ Before the hinge, description is generous and unhurried; after it, sentences tighten around clock time — ‘four ounces’, ‘every four hours’. This is a paradox: the poem argues that being denied something is what finally made the earlier abundance feel like heaven. Deprivation, not comfort alone, is what fixes the memory as precious.
Comparing methods, not just subjects, matters most. Thom Gunn’s ‘Baby Song’ gives the opposite reaction to birth: his newborn resents leaving the womb — ‘Why don’t they simply put me back’ — while Olds’s speaker calls the same transition ‘Glorious life!’ Pairing the two shows how tone alone can reverse a reader’s view of an identical event.
Sylvia Plath’s ‘You’re’ also addresses a baby directly, through a rapid string of similes and playful epithets rather than Olds’s flowing narrative sentences. Comparing structure here — Plath’s clipped, list-like address against Olds’s long, breath-controlled sentences — is useful revision for the effects-of-structure bullet point in the comparison task.
Theresa Lola’s ‘Equilibrium’ and Zaffar Kunial’s ‘Prayer’ both link birth to death and ageing within the same family, giving a contrasting angle: where Olds isolates infancy as a self-contained paradise, Lola and Kunial fold a birth into a wider story about a grandparent’s decline or a mother’s death. Any of ‘Baby Song’, ‘You’re’, or ‘Equilibrium’ would work well as a second-poem choice alongside ‘My First Weeks’, because each offers a different, well-defined angle on infancy that is easy to hold in memory.
The poem suits both parts of the poetry question. As the printed comparison poem, its clear two-part structure — abundance, then rationing — and its handful of memorable short quotations make it easy to set against an unseen poem about comfort, deprivation, or the shaping of character. As a second, self-chosen poem, a student only needs three or four exact phrases — ‘Paradise had its laws’, ‘build my character’, ‘I have known heaven’ — to construct a full, well-evidenced answer from memory.