Anna Wickham, an early twentieth-century poet who refused to sweeten domestic life, first published “The Mother-in-law” in her 1916 collection *The Man with a Hammer*. She was writing in a Britain shaken by the First World War and by suffrage campaigns that challenged old ideas about women’s roles. Wickham’s own marriage was strained, and much of her poetry examines the cost of being a wife and mother. Here she turns a small domestic scene into a confession of possessive love.
The poem opens with a lover’s voice, quoting a man who has kissed a hat because it touched the beloved’s head, kissed her shiny shoes, promised to kiss her wall, and wished he could kiss the burning coal inside her fire. These are not ordinary romantic objects; they are extensions of the woman herself. The second stanza then delivers the shock: “My little Son is my fond lover.” The speaker is a mother, and the extravagant devotion belongs to her young son. Already she imagines the future: he will “be quick and happy to discover / The world of other women, and leave me forlorn.” The central idea is the possessiveness that can hide inside maternal love. The speaker sees herself becoming the title figure, the mother-in-law, and she doubts she can tolerate “his chosen woman.” The poem does not mock her jealousy; it traces where that jealousy begins.
Wickham’s construction sharpens the contrast between innocence and unease. The first stanza moves through three firm rhyming couplets—said/head, all/wall, coal/soul—giving the lover’s speech a childlike, chant-like quality. The repeated word “kiss” turns the mother’s whole household into a body to be adored. When the voice wishes to kiss a burning coal, the devotion tips from affectionate into impossible, even painful. The second stanza changes rhythm and rhyme, shifting into alternating lines: lover/discover, born/forlorn. That pairing quietly makes the son’s sexual awakening and the mother’s abandonment part of the same event. The final couplet, “scarcely human / If I can brook his chosen woman,” closes with two identities—human and woman—pressed together, as if accepting the girl might cost the mother her own humanity.
Wickham’s word choices are deliberately uncomfortable. The word “lover” appears in both stanzas, first apparently for a man, then for the son, blurring the line between childlike affection and adult romance. The phrase “dear Soul” turns the mother into a spiritual beloved, while “brook” is harsh and old-fashioned, meaning to endure. The future wife is never named; she is only “chosen woman,” already a rival in the mother’s mind. The title itself defines the speaker by the younger woman she has not even met. Domestic images—hat, shoes, wall, fire—are warm and ordinary, but a love that must kiss them all is a love that does not respect boundaries.
The significance of the poem lies in its refusal to sentimentalise motherhood. Wickham gives the stock figure of the jealous mother-in-law a psychological origin. She asks what happens to a woman whose deepest emotional life has been her son’s adoration, and the answer is not comfortable. The speaker can see the future clearly, yet she is still not sure she can share him without becoming “scarcely human.” That honesty makes the poem feel startlingly modern.