The poem begins with the speaker addressing her new baby. Using a simile, she says that "Love set [her baby] going like a fat gold watch." In other words, the speaker compares her new child to a valuable object.
On the one hand, this suggests that the speaker finds the baby exquisite. On the other hand, it hints at an underlying sense of disconnection: she sees the child as a perfectly made object, something to be admired, but isn't quite connecting to the baby emotionally, despite the "Love" that brought the baby into being. (Here, "Love" implies both the parents' emotional bond and the sex through which they conceived the baby.) She may also feel the weight of responsibility in caring for something so valuable. The juxtaposition, or contrast, between "Love" and a mechanical "watch" reveals the speaker's ambivalence toward her child and her own new role as a mother.
The poem immediately makes use of consonance and assonance. In the first line alone, there is /l/, /t/, and /g/ consonance and /o/ assonance:
Love set you going like a fat gold watch.
These repeated sounds immediately give the poem a sense of rhythm and momentum, reinforced by the three stressed syllables at the end of this first line: "fat gold watch." These stressed beats evoke the emphatic way in which the baby's birth launches the speaker into motherhood.
The speaker then describes the "midwife slapp[ing]" the baby's feet and the baby crying for the first time. She says that the baby's "bald cry / Took its place among the elements." This imagery suggests that the baby's crying immediately becomes a fundamental part of the speaker's universe; in other words, it suggests how important the baby is to her. Yet there's still a sense of disconnection and bewilderment in her description of the baby, as if it has come from somewhere other than her body.