The speaker looks back on her mother's life in the voice of a dark fairy tale. Her birth is strange: she was conceived where three roads meet, and her father was only a moon shadow. Her mother, a small and frightened woman, works in the king's kitchen, sleeps by the fire, and is marked by ash and hard labor. The iron key the midwife gave her mother, which the speaker still keeps, hints at some inheritance, though the poem never says what it unlocks.
The speaker's tone is flat and unsparing. She says her mother taught her "nothing but weariness and pain," then adds that she never loved her and never blamed her. That mix of distance and understanding is the emotional center. The ending is bleak: the mother is buried deep in the woods under stones, and "not even a sparrow sang a psalm." The mood is cold, quiet, and sorrowful, with a hint of unspoken pity.