Few poems announce their subject as plainly as "Mother's Soliloquy." An ageing mother, once "happy and gay," sits alone and talks to herself about a small loss that has become a large one: her grown son no longer kisses her at the door. The whole poem is a mind turning over a single hurt, first with bewilderment, then with pride, and finally with a resignation that reaches toward heaven. Its central idea is that love can be wounded most deeply by the withdrawal of its simplest, most habitual gesture, and that acceptance, though painful, may be the only dignified answer.
The first stanza sets up a quiet irony. The word "soliloquized" is grand, borrowed from the stage, yet the occasion is a domestic one: a mother wondering about a kiss. That gap between lofty diction and humble subject gives the poem its charm and its pathos. The grief is small in the eyes of the world and enormous in hers. Her first theory is almost comically practical: "Is it just because I am old?" She runs through a checklist, "My health is good, my teeth are sound," as if affection were something that could be withdrawn for a physical defect. The detail about her teeth is touching precisely because it is so unglamorous. She is searching for a reason the way a person searches a house for something lost, opening every drawer.
The poem's memory is built on repetition and number. "For twenty years and even more / We've enjoyed our kiss at the door" turns the kiss into a ritual with a place and a duration, a threshold ceremony between inside and outside, home and the world. The son is "kind and true," and the mother's phrase "this boy and I, my loving son" folds the grown man back into childhood. Because she remembers him as a boy, his change feels less like a decision than a betrayal of the pattern her life was built on. "How this should come so suddenly / Will always be a mystery" carries the real ache: she is denied not only the kiss but any explanation for losing it.
Formally, the poem moves in rhyming couplets (gay/way, withhold/old, sound/found), in lines of roughly four stresses with a light, almost nursery-rhyme bounce. The jingling rhythm has an interesting effect. It sounds cheerful, and that cheerfulness presses against the sadness of the content, much as the mother herself presses down her tears. At moments the meter strains, as in "And though I long for my kisses— / He may wish for those he misses," where the rhyme on "kisses" and "misses" is forced and slightly awkward. One can read this as a flaw, but it also suggests a mind reaching for composure and not quite managing it. The dash before the final line breaks the smooth flow, as if she has to stop herself.
The emotional pivot comes in the sixth stanza. "A grudging kiss I would not have / Merely bestowed as balm or salve" is the proudest moment in the poem. She refuses affection given out of duty, a pitying, medicinal kiss. She would rather have none than a counterfeit. Her self-portrait that follows, a woman who "tried to be brave," who gave "my time, and of my life the best," establishes her as someone who has always given without keeping accounts, and who now, for once, wants something back.
The resolution is quietly generous. Rather than accuse, she guesses that her son "may wish for those he misses," perhaps another woman's kisses, and the pronoun gives away how much she has thought about it. Then the poem lifts its eyes: when "life is o'er," earthly wants will fade, and "the heavenly touch" will heal what the door-step kiss could not. The final touch answers the earlier kisses, a longing for contact finally satisfied beyond death.
What makes the poem worth reading is its restraint. It could have been bitter, and instead it is wounded, dignified, and tender. It reminds us that ordinary affection is a structure people live inside, and that its absence can be felt as keenly as any dramatic loss.