The Courage That My Mother Had

Edna St. Vincent Millay’s “The courage that my mother had” is a three-stanza poem in rhymed iambic tetrameter (or lines of four metric feet, with each metric foot consisting of two syllables: one unstressed, one stressed), with each stanza forming a quatrain. The poem uses metaphors and similes to express the speaker’s grief in the wake of her mother’s death and to bemoan her lack of courage in the face of this grief. While she believes her mother was a strong, resilient figure, full of courage, the speaker cannot feel the same courage, and wishes she could have inherited this trait from her mother in the way one might a piece of jewelry, or other physical object.

Millay’s “The courage that my mother had” was written in the final years of the poet’s life, and appeared in her last collection Mine the Harvest, which was published four years after her death, in 1954. Millay consistently wrote in formal meter and often examined themes of human love and loss; this poem fits neatly within her canon.

Poet Biography

Edna St. Vincent Millay was born in 1892 in Rockland Maine, the child of a nurse and a schoolteacher who divorced in Millay’s youth. Millay’s mother fostered a love of art, culture, and literature in her three daughters, and Millay began writing and publishing poetry at a young age in children’s magazines like St. Nicholas. As a young woman, she earned praise for her poem “Renascence,” which appeared in the poetry magazine The Lyric Year in 1912. The 20-year-old Millay submitted a set of poems as part of a poetry contest, and while she did not win the top prize, the publication brought her a great deal of attention, including that of Caroline B. Dow, who offered to sponsor Millay’s education at Vassar College. The following year, she enrolled at Vassar, where she continued her education in literature and poetry, and pursued poetry writing. After college, Millay moved to New York and devoted herself to the writing scene, producing plays and poetry, as well as short stories under the pseudonym Nancy Boyd.

In the late teens and twenties, she engaged in love affairs with men and women, many of which informed her writing and her poetics; while she came to believe that poetry provided more lasting spiritual nourishment than human romantic love, her poetry often focused on her myriad romantic relationships and entanglements over the next decades. One of her lovers, the poet Arthur Davison Ficke, proved a strong influence on Millay’s writing. Despite the brevity of their liaison, Millay wrote a number of sonnets about the affair, publishing some in magazines before collecting them in the book Second April in 1921.

Millay had relationships with two editors at Vanity Fair, John Peal Bishop and Edmund Wilson; the latter of whom proposed marriage, which Millay declined. Over the course of 1920, she experienced exhaustion and illness, experiencing a small nervous breakdown. Frank Crowninshield, another Vanity Fair editor, helped her secure a writing salary in 1921, allowing her to travel to Europe, where she wrote pieces under the nom de plume Nancy Boyd and produced The Lamp and the Bell, a play on the occasion of Vassar’s 50th anniversary. Her works from the 1920s evidence her growing belief in feminism and rebellion; they also frequently feature satire, which is particularly visible in collections like Figs from Thistles, which uses humor and playfulness to establish a new female voice in literature, one that has a feminist take on women’s sexuality and agency. In 1923, she won the Pulitzer Prize for her collection The Ballad of the Harp-Weaver, a book dedicated to her mother that includes many sonnets that would later become some of her most anthologized works.

While Millay wrote in many forms, including free verse, she is perhaps best known for her sonnets and other poems in rhymed, metrical verse. While modernist poets like T.S. Eliot and Wallace Stevens were increasingly respected for breaking with traditional forms, Millay’s mastery of sonnets in particular set her apart from her contemporaries.

In 1923, Millay married Eugene Jan Boissevain, a businessman who had little experience in literature, but who respected Millay’s talent and ambitions, and was willing to care for her as she suffered from an onslaught of illness. Two years later, they purchased an old farm in the Berkshires, dubbing it Steepletop, and relocated. Millay’s health continued to decline, but despite this, she produced the libretto for The King’s Henchmen, an opera by Deems Taylor. At the onset of World War II, Millay gave up her pacifist convictions, publishing propaganda in support of American intervention, some of it in poetic form.

Millay published poetry collections and other writing, and gave popular readings throughout the 1940s. In 1943, she won the Frost Medal, an annual poetry award, recognizing her lifetime achievement. As the decade wore on, her health worsened and her reputation as a writer suffered, especially as her work seemed increasingly at odds with that of modernist writers; her government propaganda work, like The Murder of Lidice, came across as trite.

After Boissevain died of a stroke in 1949, Millay plunged into despair, drinking to excess and eventually landing in the hospital. Upon her discharge, she returned to Steepletop, where she wrote her final collection, Mine the Harvest, in which “The courage that my mother had” appeared. In 1950, she died of a heart attack. Mine the Harvest was published posthumously four years later, in 1954.

Poem Text

Edna St. Vincent, Millay. “The Courage That My Mother Had.” 1954. Poets.org.

Summary

“The courage that my mother had” is a simple poem that begins with a description of loss. The speaker tells the reader that her mother’s courage has left, and emphasizes that it remains far away and inaccessible. She uses a metaphor to elicit a sense of her mother’s strength, comparing her to “rock from New England” (Line 3) before once more stressing her death and distance, claiming that she has become “granite in a granite hill” (Line 4)—merging with the landscape rather than being an individual being her daughter could access.

In the second stanza, the speaker describes a golden brooch that had previously belonged to her mother, and that the speaker has inherited. She claims to treasure this brooch more than any other thing in the world, but acknowledges that “it is something I could spare” (Line 8).

In the final stanza, the speaker tells the reader that though she might value the brooch, the item she most desires from her mother is courage. She cannot have it, though, because her mother has taken it with her to the grave. In the final two lines, the speaker reiterates the rock-like quality of her mother’s courage, and despairs that the courage is useless to her dead mother, while she, the speaker, has great need of it.