Grief poems often rush to the loss. Elizabeth von Schonberg's "Mother" spends almost all of its length on presence instead: a woman's laughter, her singing, her steadiness. The loss is stated only at the edges, in the first and last stanzas, so that the poem works like a frame around a portrait. Everything in between is the speaker trying to prove, to herself as much as to us, how much this woman left behind.
That frame is built from a single repeated question. The opening, "My gracious, gentle mother / I wonder if she knew / How much was taken from us," shifts at the close into direct address: "I wonder if you know / How much you left here with us?" Two small changes do the work. "She" becomes "you," as if the speaker has stopped describing her mother and started speaking to her. And "taken" becomes "left." The poem begins by counting what death subtracted and ends by counting what remains. Only the final line, "But, oh, I miss you so!", breaks the composure, and it lands harder because the preceding lines have been so affectionate and controlled.
The portrait itself rests on a pairing the speaker finds remarkable: gaiety and wisdom. "One marveled that a heart so gay / Could also be so wise." The mother's characteristic reply to disappointment, "What does it matter, child? ... The best is yet to come," is optimism, but it is not naive. The same stanza admits that "bitter disappointments / Would come all thru the years." Her laughter doesn't deny hardship; it "banished all our tears," which implies the tears were there to be banished. The later stanza makes the same point physically: "When pain's grim hand descended / Or problems were in sight / Her dauntless courage towered, / And made the load seem light." Courage here is not loud. It works by making burdens feel lighter for others.
Music runs through the poem as its richest image. The mother's voice is all "lilting cadences," and the word "lilting" cleverly describes the poem's own rhythm, which moves in short, lightly stressed lines. Her singing is tied to an "inner spring" that "would vibrate as to music," a nice double sense, since spring is both a season and a source of water or energy. Her rapture is set off not by "obvious magnificence" but by small things: the first twilight when winter ends, daisies in dewy grass. This is a quiet claim about character. She was moved by modest, real beauty rather than display, and the poem's own imagery stays similarly small and domestic: a lullaby, a simple task, a firelit morning.
The one image that seems to reach beyond the home is "violets of Kerry / Were blooming in her eyes." Kerry is a county in Ireland, so the line suggests an Irish connection, though the poem never explains it, and it would be a guess to say more. What the image does clearly is turn her eyes into a garden, putting her in the same natural world of spring and flowers that moved her.
Formally, the poem is made of rhymed quatrains and couplet-like pairs, mostly in an ABCB pattern, with a plain, speech-like vocabulary. The rhymes are sometimes loose or slightly forced ("poem" with "come," for instance), and the stanza breaks are uneven, with some stanzas running on past their expected length. This looseness suits the subject. It reads like someone talking from memory rather than polishing, and the occasional ellipses ("Dear memory in our hearts!") let feeling interrupt the meter.
Its significance lies in this unembarrassed warmth. The poem makes no argument about death and offers no consolation beyond memory, and the memory it chooses is a household one: six children "singing—all six in lusty parts" on Christmas morning. In that image the mother's gift is revealed as something that outlived her. She taught her children to sing, and the poem is, in its way, one more voice joining the chorus.