“A Mother’s Lament” by Robert Burns

Yesterday was Mother’s Day, and whether you were fortunate enough to get to spend time with yours or were perhaps laying flowers on her grave, I hope you took the time to appreciate her somehow. While SevenPonds paid tribute to departed mothers on the holiday, today I’m looking at a poem from a mother’s point of view. As its name implies, “A Mother’s Lament,” by Robert Burns, expresses the sadness of a mother who has just lost her son:

Fate gave the word, the arrow sped,

And pierc’d my darling’s heart;

And with him all the joys are fled

Life can to me impart.

By cruel hands the sapling drops,

In dust dishonour’d laid;

So fell the pride of all my hopes,

My age’s future shade.

The mother-linnet in the brake

Bewails her ravish’d young;

So I, for my lost darling’s sake,

Lament the live-day long.

Death, oft I’ve feared thy fatal blow.

Now, fond, I bare my breast;

O, do thou kindly lay me low

With him I love, at rest!

Robert Burns

The mother acknowledges that death is inevitable by personifying fate (“Fate gave the word…”  [1]), but her sorrow is emphasized by her repeatedly referring to her son as “my darling.” The boy’s mother feels that all happiness has gone out of the world, declaring, “all the joys are fled” (3). In addition to personification, the poem makes use of metaphors, with the next stanza comparing her young son to a “sapling” (5), a young tree. “Cruel” (5) people have cut the tree down, just as fate has taken her son, and the “future shade” (8) that a full-grown tree would provide is taken away from this mother; the love and support her son would have been able to give to her is no longer a possibility.

The next stanza’s metaphor is that of a mother bird, the “mother-linnet” [9], grieving in the wild over the loss of her baby, her “ravish’d young” (10). Like this bird, the mother bemoans the death of her son without pause (“the live-day long” [12]).

In the last stanza, the mother reveals how this incident has changed her feelings about death. She used to fear the “fatal blow” (13), but now, “fond” (14), or willing to die, she desires death in order to be with her son again. Death would be “kind[]” (15) in taking her. Rather than viewing this final stage as a miserable experience, she sees it as “rest” (16). Thus, as tragic as this poem is, it recognizes that death unites us all, and in fact reunites us with those that have gone before us.

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