101 Poems, Number 90

Favorite Poems Throughout My Life

90: “The Courage That My Mother Had,”draft in 1942, pub. 1954, by Edna St. Vincent Millay (1892–1950)

Some poems have a history—

Are piercing with their pain,

And this brought tears into my eyes

So recently—again.

She wrote about her mother’s death

In 1931.

A painful death for Vincent,* who

Knew what it had begun:

The long cortège of loved ones, who

Proceeded to the grave.

A line that swells and soon becomes

A grim, black tidal wave.

When Joyce’s mother died, I said

These lines to praise her life.

I wept as I was doing so—

And so did Joyce, my wife.

Then—just last week—my mother’s turn—

The words she could not hear.

Oh, what I’d give to whisper them

Into her living ear.

I wept again there in that church

As I recited lines

And wished that they could could ever serve

As endless anodynes.

*What all her friends and family called her.

Link to poem.