This week’s choice is “Tribute to Mother” by John Greenleaf Whittier and celebrates my mother’s birthday.
A picture memory brings to me;
John Greenleaf Whittier (1807—1892)
I look across the years and see
Myself beside my mother’s knee.
Poem 203. Tribute to Mother
A picture memory brings to me;
I look across the years and see
Myself beside my mother’s knee.
I feel her gentle hand restrain
My selfish moods, and know again
A child’s blind sense of wrong and pain.
But wiser now, a man gray grown,
My childhood’s needs are better known.
My mother’s chastening love I own.
This short poem recalls the poet’s childhood and the way that his mother taught him to control himself and how he has come to understand the reasons why she acted as she did.
In the first three lines, the poet sees his younger self with his mind’s eye, standing by his mother. The first line is like one of those memories that flash upon us from time to time, so clear that they could almost be a photograph of the occasion, except that we can remember not just the image but the sensations and the emotions of the moment.
The second three lines emphasise this—the poet remembering the naïve way he thought and acted as a child: that “blind sense of wrong and pain” we feel when we are too young to appreciate the world’s twists and turns.
In the last three lines, the poet returns to the present and admits that as a grown man, he has a better appreciation of his mother’s motivations and the knowledge that she knew best.
I like this poem because it contrasts the naïve view of the child with the more sophisticated view of the adult and the insight this brings into the wisdom of one’s mother. I’ve certainly had cause to appreciate my own mother’s love and wisdom over the course of my life.