Classic and Contemporary Poetry: Explained

Marie Howe’s "Mother" is a haunting meditation on silence, complicity, and the inherited burdens of trauma. The poem juxtaposes the physical neglect of the aging mother’s body with a past moment in which she remained unmoving, a passive witness to her husband’s violent actions. The mother’s reluctance to care for herself in old age—her unwillingness to "rub moisturizer into [her legs]"—suggests a deep estrangement from her own body, one that is linked to years of standing motionless, failing to intervene in the suffering of her children.

The poem’s opening description of the mother’s toenails—"curl[ing] over her toes so that when she walks across the kitchen floor some click"—establishes an image of decay and disregard. This physical neglect mirrors the emotional detachment that follows in the recollected scene, where she stands "like a statue in the children?s game her children play," immobilized while her husband ascends the stairs in a drunken state. The game reference—possibly a version of Statues or Freeze Tag—reinforces the metaphor of paralysis. The mother’s inaction is not only literal but also symbolic; she becomes a figure who neither intervenes nor protects, embodying a form of passive endurance.

The scene unfolding upstairs is not explicitly described, but the details—"the soft drone of her daughter’s waking voice, reasoning and rising, and the first slap"—strongly imply an act of abuse. The girl’s voice transitions from "reasoning" to "quietly weeping," and the "creak of her bed" signals movement, perhaps struggle or submission. The presence of her son—his "chair pushed back from his desk, the air thick now with their separate listening"—suggests that the entire household is trapped in a state of fearful awareness. The weight of this silence, of knowing yet not acting, permeates the atmosphere.

The mother, positioned "on the landing, in her bathrobe, by the laundry chute, unmoving," is a spectral figure, both there and not there. She is a witness who refuses to witness fully, a mother who is present but absent in the way that matters most. The phrase "like a statue in the children?s game" transforms this moment from a single instance of inaction into a larger, more damning metaphor—one that speaks to cycles of complicity and intergenerational trauma.

The poem’s final lines return to the childhood game: "In the game, someone has to touch you to free you then you’re human again." This line suggests that the mother, like the children in the game, remains frozen, unable to break free from her own paralysis. The implication is devastating: no one has touched her, no one has freed her, and she has not freed herself. Her inaction has defined her, rendering her less than human in her own children?s eyes.

"Mother" is a stark and unsparing examination of silence as a form of violence. Howe does not cast explicit blame but allows the weight of the mother’s inaction to speak for itself. The contrast between the mother’s neglected body in the present and the moment of her stillness in the past suggests a lifetime of detachment, a refusal to fully inhabit her own existence. The poem mourns not only what happened in that house but also what did not—the intervention, the protection, the saving touch that could have broken the spell of silence.

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