The Courage That My Mother Had

The golden brooch represents beauty and the failed communication between the speaker and her mother. Millay introduces the brooch in the second stanza, immediately after lines in which she describes the mother as “now granite in a granite hill” (Line 4). She draws a connection between the granite of the mother, and the more delicate, but still elemental, gold of the brooch, both of which are mined from the earth. The brooch holds a great deal of significance for the speaker as something that her mother intended for the speaker to wear—an attempt at closeness after death. While the speaker treasures this item, it still cannot make up for the mother’s courage, now missing in her daughter’s life. Her mother left the wrong item for her daughter; rather than giving her the courage she needs to face a world without her mother, the mother “took” (Line 10) that courage to the grave. In death, the speaker has no means to communicate with her mother, and can only rue that the mother left the wrong thing for her.