Anna E. Honig's "Remembrance" begins with a mild, almost offhand sentence: thoughts of mother "often come to me / As the days and years go fleeting by." The speaker is looking back across a long stretch of time, and what she finds there is a mother defined by small, repeated acts of care. The poem's central idea is that a parent's love is made visible in daily routine, and that memory preserves the ordinary more faithfully than the grand. Nothing dramatic happens in these three stanzas. That is exactly the point.
The most vivid image comes first, and it is a surprisingly humble one: kitchen shelves "covered with paper," the edges "scalloped" with "cut designs." The speaker admits she "wondered why" her mother bothered. It is a childlike question, and the poem never answers it directly, which is part of its charm. The reader is left to supply the answer: a woman with limited means decorating a working space simply because she wanted her family to live among pleasant things. The phrase "so pleased the eye" suggests that even as an adult, the speaker is still seeing those shelves the way a child would, with a small thrill at the pattern. The word "fancy," in "In fancy the kitchen shelves I see," reinforces this. Memory here is imagination as much as record.
From that single concrete picture, the poem moves toward the abstract and the devout. The second stanza praises the mother's "ever faithful care" and her anxiety "to prepare / All things needful to keep the home right." The word "anxious" is worth pausing on. Today it suggests worry, but here it more likely means eager or earnest, a mother who wanted everything ready for her children. The stanza ends with prayer, offered "at morning, at noon, and then at night." That list of three times mirrors the rhythm of a household day, so that prayer becomes another chore performed with the same reliability as washing or preparing.
The third stanza adds the most specific detail about the family itself: "the four dear little faces," washed "many times a day with tender love." We learn, quietly, that there were four children, and the repetition of "many times a day" gives a sense of endless, cheerful labor. Then the poem turns to teaching, as the mother "filled up all the extra spaces" with "heavenly things above." There is a lovely double meaning in "spaces." Practically, they are the gaps in a busy day, but they also echo the shelves from the opening, the paper and the scalloped edges. In both cases the mother takes empty space and fills it with something beautiful and meaningful.
The form is plain and tidy, matching the subject. Each stanza has six lines with the rhyme scheme ABABAB, so the sounds alternate steadily, much like the routine being described. Some of the rhymes are gentle ("see" and "artistically," "places" and "faces," "spaces"), and a few feel slightly stretched, as when the poet reaches for a longer word to land the rhyme. That slight awkwardness gives the poem a homemade quality, closer to a tribute written from the heart than a polished performance. The rhythm is a steady, singsong beat that is easy to read aloud, which suits the nursery-like warmth of the content.
What makes the poem worth reading is exactly its modesty. It belongs to a familiar tradition of verse honoring mothers, and it does not try to be surprising. Its strength lies in the choice of the shelf paper, a detail too small to be invented for effect, and in the honest puzzlement of "I wondered why." Because the speaker never tidies that question away, the poem feels truthful. We recognize the way adults remember their parents: not through speeches or events, but through some odd, specific object that has stayed in the mind for decades, quietly carrying the whole weight of love.