Four single words organise Sompsin's "Mother & Son": Baby, Toddler, Teen, Adult. Each stands alone above its stanza like a caption under a photograph in a family album, and together they cover a whole life in a few short lines. What changes from stanza to stanza is the son. What never changes is the sentence his mother answers with: "I love you, my son." The central idea is that a mother's love is not a reward for good behaviour or a reply to affection returned. It is a fixed point the child can move away from without ever losing it.
The poem measures the son's growing up by what he says to her. The baby says nothing; he is "Crawling and crying and cradling," three c-words strung together with "and," like the tumbling, unfinished world of an infant. The toddler speaks for the first time, and what he asks for is distance: "Mother, please don't hold my hand." Notice the "please." Even his first act of independence is still polite. By the teenage stanza the politeness has gone. The hissing "Screaming, Shouting" is loud on the page, and "I hate you" arrives bare, with no softening. Even the verb "running" has changed sides. The toddler ran because he was "Full of energy," while the teenager runs away from Mother. It is the same action in the opposite direction.
The poem has no regular rhyme or metre. It is free verse built on short lines and repetition, and the refrain "And Mother said" works like a hinge. Each time, the poem pauses on that phrase and then delivers the same words. The reader starts to expect them, and each return carries more weight, because the line before it grows harder to answer. Set the tender "Born to be held" beside the flat "I hate you" and you see that the reply is identical while what it has to withstand is not. The capital letter on "Mother" makes her more a role than a named individual, and the son is never named either. That anonymity makes the poem easy for any reader to step into.
The final stanza is the only one that breaks the pattern. It is longer, the refrain gains the words "once more," and the mother's sentence stretches from "I love you" to "I will always love you." The son is now "Standing tall in suit and tie," and for the first time he says the words himself: "Thank you mother I love you he said." The mood is harder to pin down. "Final goodbyes are said and done" and the "Budded roses" suggest a funeral or some formal farewell, though the poem never says whose, and the mother still speaks. It could be a last goodbye in which her love is promised to outlast it, or the parting of a grown son leaving home. Either way, "always" answers the question that "I hate you" put to her. Roses still in bud, not yet open, are a delicate image to set against all this. They hint at something still to unfold, or cut short.
What makes the poem worth reading is how little it needs. It has no plot beyond growing up, no difficult vocabulary and no cleverness for its own sake. It trusts a pattern of four stages and one refrain. Anyone who has slammed a door, or had one slammed at them, will recognise the teenage stanza at once. The poem is also quietly unfair, and that is its point. The son gets to change, to be rude, to mature, while the mother's one line stays exactly as it was. By the time he says thank you, the reader sees how long it has been owed.