The Courage That My Mother Had

Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1956

A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.

Download PDF

Summary

Background

Poem Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Literary Devices

Symbols & Motifs

The Brooch

The golden brooch represents beauty and the failed communication between the speaker and her mother. Millay introduces the brooch in the second stanza, immediately after lines in which she describes the mother as “now granite in a granite hill” (Line 4). She draws a connection between the granite of the mother, and the more delicate, but still elemental, gold of the brooch, both of which are mined from the earth. The brooch holds a great deal of significance for the speaker as something that her mother intended for the speaker to wear—an attempt at closeness after death. While the speaker treasures this item, it still cannot make up for the mother’s courage, now missing in her daughter’s life. Her mother left the wrong item for her daughter; rather than giving her the courage she needs to face a world without her mother, the mother “took” (Line 10) that courage to the grave. In death, the speaker has no means to communicate with her mother, and can only rue that the mother left the wrong thing for her.

Granite & Rock

In a poem of just 81 words, Millay repeats “rock” and “granite” twice each, choosing to reiterate this metaphorical imagery rather than constructing new ones. The simplicity of these descriptors emphasizes the speaker’s naive, pleading tone, and draws attention to her belief in her mother’s power and influence, which remains rock-like and hovering over the poem from beginning to end.

Granite and rock symbolize the speaker’s idealized memory of her mother. In the first stanza, she inextricably links her mother, her mother’s courage, and the hardest of stones in one image. While the speaker generally has a favorable view of her mother, and cherishes the one inherited item she did receive, casting her mother as a “rock” also conveys coldness, distance, and hardness. Rock imagery allows Millay to explore the speaker’s ambivalent feelings in the wake of her mother’s death. She can celebrate and cherish her mother’s strength and courage, while also coming to terms with the reality that her mother did not leave her equipped to face life by herself.

The Hill

The granite hill represents the finality of death, and the distance between the speaker and her mother. In the first stanza, the speaker describes her mother as part of the elemental landscape: “Rock from New England quarried; / Now granite in a granite hill” (Lines 3-4). Her mother has returned to the earth from whence she came, and now resides as a permanent part of the landscape in the hill, becoming the same material (granite) as the hill itself. The hill is distant from the speaker, inaccessible and insurmountable in its density. Thinking of her mother as a “granite hill” (Line 4) allows the speaker to maintain emotional distance, and consider her ambivalent feelings about what the mother left behind for the speaker (the golden brooch) versus what she took with her (courage). As a metaphor, the hill allows the reader to see the speaker’s complicated feelings toward her mother even as she experiences profound grief.