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.