Context: "Daystar" by Rita Dove

Rita Dove is an American poet from Ohio. he served as Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress from 1993 to 1995. She has received the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, and a National Humanities Medal.

Daystar

 

She wanted a little room for thinking:

but she saw diapers steaming on the line,

a doll slumped behind the door.

So she lugged a chair behind the garage

to sit out the children's naps.

 

Sometimes there were things to watch-

the pinched armor of a vanished cricket,

a floating maple leaf. Other days

she stared until she was assured

when she closed her eyes

she'd see only her vivid own blood.

 

She had an hour, at best, before Liza appeared

pouting from the top of the stairs.

And just what was mother doing

out back with the field mice? Why,

building a palace. Later

that night when Thomas rolled over and

lurched into her, she would open her eyes

and think of the place that was hers

for an hour-where

she was nothing,

pure nothing, in the middle of the day.

 

In Daystar by Rita Dove the speaker is talking about a mother. The situation that the poem develops around is caring for children. Mothering in this poem is conveyed as a full-time job. The speaker places us in the home of a mentally and emotionally exhausted mother who works day in and day out for her children.

                The poem places the reader in a home full of complete disarray—“diapers steaming on the line, a doll slumped behind the door” (2-3). The setting creates an image of a messy house, run over by children. In this tiresome job the mother looks forward to her one hour break mid-day when the children are asleep. She escapes to the backyard, hidden behind the garage with the field mice. This simple place is calm, and despite the almost boring simplicity it is a place of the mother’s away from the children and away from the clutter—it is hers. She cherishes her short, precious moments isolated behind the garage.  

                The poem revolves around a mother’s daily events from cleaning diapers to having intimate relations with her husband. Being a mother is a full time job; the setting of the cluttered house and her single hour of isolation convey that situation of a full time job. Just as a man working in a factory all day and receiving a lunch break, she works in her home all day receiving an hour to herself in which she enjoys in isolations with simple maple leaf floating before her.