Agonizing over his best friend’s death in In Memoriam, Alfred Lord Tennyson at one point asks
… but what am I? An infant crying in the night: An infant crying for the light: And with no language but a cry.
At such moments any number of poets, experiencing similar loneliness and desolation, have turned to thoughts of mother. There’s Carl Sandburg, hurdling through darkness on an all-night passenger train, who conjured us a mother-child image to define “home”:
III. Home
Here is a thing my heart wishes the world had more of: I heard it in the air of one night when I listened To a mother singing softly to a child restless and angry in the darkness. (from “Poems Done on a Late Night Car”)
Elizabeth Akers Allen imagines herself as that child in “Rock Me to Sleep.” Here’s the first stanza:
Backward, turn backward, O Time, in your flight, Make me a child again just for tonight! Mother, come back from the echoless shore, Take me again to your heart as of yore; Kiss from my forehead the furrows of care, Smooth the few silver threads out of my hair; Over my slumbers your loving watch keep;— Rock me to sleep, mother, – rock me to sleep!
Irish poet Eavan Boland poem imagines the Virgin Mary as that mother:
Ave Maria
If love’s a country I am its citizen, And if you are the Virgin Mary I am your child.
Christine Rossetti has a wonderful poem expressing appreciation for her 80-year-old mother, whose heart she “is my heart’s quiet home” and whose love serves as her lodestar. Perhaps echoing Milton’s “Lycidas,” where the poet talks of weaving a laurel wreath for his departed friend, Rossetti talks of weaving “a wreath of rhymes wherewith to crown your honored name.” The blessed glow of her mother’s love, she says, “transcends the laws/ Of time and change and mortal life and death.”
The poem has a certain formal air, as though this wreath of rhymes is being presented upon a special occasion:
Sonnets are full of love, and this my tome Has many sonnets: so here now shall be One sonnet more, a love sonnet, from me To her whose heart is my heart’s quiet home, To my first Love, my Mother, on whose knee I learnt love-lore that is not troublesome; Whose service is my special dignity, And she my lodestar while I go and come And so because you love me, and because I love you, Mother, I have woven a wreath Of rhymes wherewith to crown your honored name: In you not fourscore years can dim the flame Of love, whose blessed glow transcends the laws Of time and change and mortal life and death.
