The Mother

Literary Commentary

Robert Service published "The Mother" in Rhymes of a Rolling Stone (1912), the third of his ballad collections and the one that bridges his Yukon years and his European reinvention. Three octave stanzas span an entire life of motherhood: the rapture of holding the child, the grief of watching the child go, and the love that survives both.

Structure does the argument. Each stanza is sealed by an envelope refrain — the opening couplet returns at the close — so each phase of the mother's life feels complete in itself, a panel in a triptych rather than a stage on a road. The substitutions across stanzas do the emotional work: "singing" becomes "moaning," "rapture" becomes "anguish," and the grammar holds steady while the feeling inverts. Joy and grief, the form claims, share the same shape, only inverted.

Stanza three is where the poem makes its move. "There will be" gives way to "There will come," trading mere state for arrival. The closing chiasmus then trades heart and eyes between the refrain's two lines, and what had been parallel becomes integrated. The poem risks sentimentality at every turn; its formal discipline is what keeps it honest.

Key themes

• Maternal love across a lifetime
• The cyclical structure of joy and grief
• Sacrifice as defining act
• Endurance of love beyond loss
• The sacralization of motherhood

Notable craft elements

• Envelope-refrain octave: each stanza framed by a returning couplet
• ABABABAB rhyme scheme; iambic tetrameter base
• Anaphoric scaffolding ("There will be... You will be...")
• Chiastic third-stanza inversion of heart and eyes

Reread prompt

The third stanza opens with "There will come" rather than the "There will be" of stanzas one and two. Reread with that single verb-change in mind: what does the poem now do that it could not do before?

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