du min Moder, is one of the Swedish poet and performer Carl Michael Bellman's best-known and best-loved songs, from his 1790 collection, Fredman's Epistles, where it is No.

The song has two parts, despairing and celebratory: it begins as a lament, with Jean Fredman lying drunk in a Stockholm gutter outside the Crawl-in tavern, and repeatedly cursing his mother for conceiving him.

[6] The epistles, written and performed in different styles, from drinking songs and laments to pastorales, paint a complex picture of the life of the city during the 18th century.

A frequent theme is the demimonde, with Fredman's cheerfully drunk Order of Bacchus,[7] a loose company of ragged men who favour strong drink and prostitutes.

At the same time as depicting this realist side of life, Bellman creates a rococo picture, full of classical allusion, following the French post-Baroque poets.

The women, including the beautiful Ulla Winblad, are "nymphs", while Neptune's festive troop of followers and sea-creatures sport in Stockholm's waters.

He goes into enough despairing detail to include a curse on the carpenter who made the "four-poster bed" (paulun), unless it was "perhaps upon a table" that he was brought into being:[1][17] He imagines telling his mother that she should have locked and barred her door against his father.

[22] "Ack du min moder" is described by The Bellman Society as one of the most admired epistles, travelling as it does from the emotional depths of the gutter to the skies in the most drunken state of bliss.

[24] Anders Ringblom, writing in the cultural newspaper Tidskrift, calls the epistle an unvarnished picture of the old watchmaker as the rising sun warms him up, the tavern opens, and life once again becomes worth living.

[1][27] Lönnroth commented that Bellman, in this as in other epistles, manages to combine a "low" burlesque approach with a genuinely mythic gaze that goes far beyond parody, awakening his audience's empathy for the portrayed figure.

[29] Indeed, Fredman seems, writes Lönnroth, to have the male point of view that it is always the woman who tempts, as in the Garden of Eden, and the man who helplessly falls for the temptation.

[29] Alongside the biblical overtones, Lönnroth states that the poem is powerfully social-realist, almost, he writes, "like an social justice reportage on rough sleepers in Stockholm's slums", as when in the third verse Fredman curses his old shoes, his ragged coat, and his blackened shirt, complains of his body's itching, and calls "come and help me up".

[39] The monologue of Epistle 23, Lönnroth observes, turns out to be the first in a series depicting the social injustice, disease, and misery in Gustavian Stockholm; examples include no.

Some researchers have, she writes, puzzled over Bellman's piety, but the scholar of Swedish literature Sven Thorén had shown that his viewpoint was "old Lutheran": closer, in Blomqvist's view, to Martin Luther himself than to the dry orthodoxy of his followers.

Leeuwenhoek's observations of spermatozoa made it seem that men contributed more, as the living homunculus, containing a preformed human, joined the merely material egg.

It has also been recorded on the actor Mikael Samuelson's Sjunger Fredmans Epistlar,[43] by Peter Ekberg Pelz,[44][45] and by the musician and composer Martin Bagge.