Before the poem begins, a question has already been asked. The line in guillemets, «Daughter: is it love, mother?», works like a speaker's label in a script, and the comma turns the question into direct address. The poem that follows is the daughter's attempt to say what lies behind it. Her subject is conditional love: the suspicion that what a parent offers is affection for an idea of a child rather than for the child herself.
The first stanza begins with reassurance. "I knew I was loved" is calm and past tense, and it is a fact she doesn't dispute. Then comes "But doubt came," which makes doubt sound like a visitor arriving unannounced. What brings it is a verb that sounds gentler than it is: "you asked." Nobody is shouting or punishing here, only asking, and the poem suggests that a polite request can still be a heavy one. Notice also what is requested: "To be something I was not." The demand is about identity, not behaviour, and the next line extends it to "everything" she dislikes. The syntax of that line, "everything I liked not", is slightly archaic, an inversion that no one would use in conversation. It places the stiff word order right where the demands are most absolute, and it ends the stanza on a flat, closed "not." The two lines at the end of the stanza rhyme by repeating the same word, "not" with "not". The sound is a little dead, which suits a stanza about being refused.
The stanza also grows as it goes. The lines swell from five syllables to seven or eight, each one a little longer than the last, as though the requests are piling up and the girl is running out of room to be herself.
The second stanza turns from statement to question, from memory to present-tense confrontation. "Is it me then that you love" uses "then" like a conclusion reached through logic, and the daughter sounds as though she has thought this through. The loosest and longest line is the one about "your own imagination", which stretches to ten syllables, nearly three more than its neighbours, so that the mother's inner picture takes up more space than anything else. The word "own" matters too. It makes the imagined daughter the mother's private possession, something built in her head, with no input from the real girl. The phrase "should be" brings in obligation and carries a faint moral pressure with it.
Here the poem finally finds a true rhyme: "be" and "me." The pairing is neat, because the daughter's whole grievance is about the gap between what she is asked to be and who she is. One could even hear a faint echo of "to be or not to be" across the two stanzas, since "not" closes the first and "be" the second, though that is a reader's association rather than anything the poem announces. The last line, "which you would not find in me", also keeps the poem's quiet ambiguity. "Would not" could mean the mother will not find such a daughter, or that she cannot. Either way the poem ends on "me", with the self as the place where the mother searches and comes up short.
The pronouns tell their own story. The first stanza is full of "I", and "you" appears only once, as the person who asks. In the second, "you" and "your" take over the sentences while "me" is the object, sitting at the end of a line. The daughter becomes the thing being looked at and measured. The verbs change as well, from the passive "I was loved", where love is something that happened to her, to the active "you love", where it becomes a matter of the mother's choice and aim.
Part of the poem's force comes from restraint. It never accuses, never raises its voice, and never describes the mother's demands in any detail. We don't learn what the daughter dislikes, and that is deliberate, because anyone who has felt measured against someone else's expectations can fill in their own list. The poem stays small and plain, and it asks a question many readers will recognise: does being loved mean being seen, or only being approved of when you match the picture someone else has drawn? It leaves the question unanswered, which is why it lingers.