The Courage That My Mother Had

Millay’s poem opens with a frank, straightforward tone, telling the reader that the subject of the poem will be the mother’s courage, and establishing the mother’s absence: “The courage that my mother had / Went with her, and is with her still” (Lines 1-2). The reader immediately understands the stakes of the poem: The speaker’s mother has died, and in her grief, the speaker is ruminating on the mother’s particular quality of courage. In these first two lines, Millay alludes to the speaker’s anxiety, which will surface again later in the poem: The phrase “with her still” (Line 2) implies that the speaker misses and no longer has access to the courage that was a part of her mother’s life. The mother has taken the courage away to the “granite hill” (Line 4).

The first stanza establishes the metric form of the poem, setting the lines in rhyming iambic tetrameter. Each line consists of four metric feet (hence “tetra” or “four”). Each foot is an iamb, a sequence of two syllables, one unstressed, followed by one stressed. This pattern creates a rhythmic tension that propels the reader through the poem with its speech-like pattern.

Line three replaces the first iamb with a trochee, or a metric foot where a stressed syllable is followed by an unstressed one, breaking the poem’s meter briefly. In that line and the next one, the reader learns that the speaker’s mother is “Rock from New England quarried; / Now granite in a granite hill” (Lines 3-4). By having a heavy beat fall on the first word of the line—“Rock” (Line 3)—Millay signals an important truth to the reader: that unlike the speaker, her mother was as strong and solid as the quarried stone from her birthplace, New England. The speaker plumbs the root of her emotional anguish, as she describes the lost mother with a metaphor that combines the description of her dead mother’s resting place underground, the courage she possessed, and her indomitability, likening all of these to granite. Millay roots the mother as having come from and now having gone back to a specific place; she also explicitly emphasizes the mother’s strength by identifying her with one of the hardest types of stone, even in death. This metaphor also alludes to the biblical phrase from Genesis, “for dust you are, and to dust you shall return” (Genesis 3:19), though unlike the vast majority of humans, the speaker’s mother has returned to not to “dust,” but to “granite.” In this, Millay sets the mother apart from other humans, emphasizing her strength, and the speaker’s outsized notion of her mother’s power.

In stanza two, the poem shifts from the natural world to the human-created world, and adds another dimension to the mother’s character. “The golden brooch my mother wore / she left behind for me to wear” (Lines 5-6), while also made from an elemental material mined inside the earth, contrasts with the granite and rock of the first stanza. A typical item of inheritance, the brooch is a beautiful heirloom and remembrance that proves useless in the wake of the mother’s death. Although the speaker has “no thing I treasure more” (Line 7), this decorative object is simply not what the speaker valued most about her mother’s personality and life: “it is something I could spare,” the speaker confesses, admitting that nothing about the brooch is central to her life (Line 8). The speaker is grateful for the brooch, which reminds her of her mother, but ultimately, it does not provide the comfort and reassurance that her mother’s rock-like stability did.

In the final stanza, the speaker reiterates what would have been a more valuable inheritance to her: her mother’s courage. Her tone grows more desperate as she says, “Oh, if instead she’d left to me / The thing she took into the grave!” (Lines 9-10). The speaker needs her mother’s bravery more than anything else—certainly more than any physical item the mother could have left her. Millay ends the poem with the bitter regret that the “courage like a rock, which she / Has no more need of, and I have.” (Lines 11-12). The speaker feels deeply the unfairness of the situation: Her mother left her a brooch that she “has no need of,” while her mother necessarily kept the courage that she couldn’t possibly use in death. In an ironic twist, both women are stuck with possessions they’d rather exchange for each other’s. Millay returns to the rock metaphor of the first stanza, perhaps echoing the cyclic thought patterns of the speaker as she processes her sorrow and ruminates on her lack of courage in facing her grief.

The poem ends sadly, on a word that echoes a breathy sigh or even sob (“have” connects to the word “heave” and features an exhalation as its main syllable). Throughout the poem, Millay uses simple language and often repeats words, creating a sense of the speaker talking to herself, and attempting to talk herself through the grief process. By ending on the rueful note of “and I have” (Line 12), Millay suggests that the speaker is still in the throes of her anxiety and grief, and has not come to any resolution. Death, in its finality, has robbed her of her mother and, she believes, of the possibility of courage. “Courage” in the poem has become the rock, or the mother herself, buried in the granite hill, distant and inaccessible.