Julia Ward Howe opens with a denial that sounds almost like a dare: "I never made a poem, dear friend." Readers who know her as the writer of "Battle Hymn of the Republic" may smile at that, but the line isn't coyness for its own sake. The poem is an argument about what writing actually is. Howe rejects the poet as craftsman, someone who sits down and announces that "This cunning brain and patient hand / Shall fashion something to be read." In its place she offers a different picture: a poem is something that grows inside you, on its own schedule, and arrives only when it is ready.
The first stanza sets up the thing she is refusing. People come asking for verse for "fast, or festival," or for "some stately pageant," as if poetry could be ordered like a speech. Her aside about Balaam is the wittiest moment in the poem. In the biblical story Balaam can speak only the words put into his mouth, so when she says she is not "than Balaam more endowed," she means she has no power to "bless or curse" on demand. Turning the visitors away is awkward for her, and she says so: her heart is "not so churlish" that it doesn't want to give delight. Even her offering is a "poet-mite," a word that suggests something small and humble. Real inspiration comes from elsewhere: "My Master calls, at noon or night, / I know his whisper and his nod." She describes herself as a listening servant, not a manufacturer.
The middle of the poem answers an imagined skeptic. Surely, he asks, all her thoughts run to rhythm and rhyme? She admits she "consume[s]" her life in verse, a verb that means both spending and devouring, and then explains how it happens. The explanation is a pregnancy that the poem never names. A thought is carried "within my breast," it "greatens" (a lovely, slightly strange verb, swelling as she herself grows), and it "waits, and will not be expressed." The word "expressed" quietly means pressed out as well as spoken. When "its hour has come," the thought "sees the light" and not "without pain." The title, "Mother Mind," gives the game away: the mind here is a mother, and a poem is a child.
The form supports this. Most of the poem runs in plain, near-ballad quatrains, mostly iambic tetrameter, where the second and fourth lines rhyme: God/nod, wit/writ, light/quite, see/thee. The opening stanza is different. It sprawls to ten lines and ends a line on a dangling "or in," as if it were stuffed with the commissions it describes. Once she reaches her real subject, the verse settles into neat, steady stanzas. That makes for a pleasing irony. A poem insisting it was never "made" is carefully made, and I read this as Howe's point: craft is real, but it follows what has already grown, and does not replace it.
The ending is the most tender part. Looking at her newborn thought "'twixt smiles and tears," she "dare[s] not deem it perfect, quite," and the hedge of "quite" arrives right at the end of the line. These "children of my soul" are kept "where scarce a mortal man may see," yet they are "not unconsecrate," and so need a blessing. The last line gives the job to the "dear friend" of the first line: "Baptismal rites they claim of thee." The friend becomes a godparent, and by extension so does the reader. The poem doesn't end on the poet's authority but on a request, which suggests that a poem is only finished when someone welcomes it.
That is where the poem's interest lies. It swaps the image of the poet as artisan for the image of the poet as mother and makes a woman's experience the model for creativity. It also holds two claims together without strain: "not a word I breathe is mine," and yet these are "children of my soul." Howe sounds humble and proud in the same breath, and the poem leaves you thinking about where the things we make actually come from.