Celebrate a Mother’s Love with 5 Good Mother’s Day Poems!

What better way to say “I love you” this Mother’s Day than with a poem? Whether you need good Mother’s Day poems to frame as a gift or write in a card, or whether you’re honoring your mother’s memory and reading these inspirational mother poems with her in spirit, you’ll find the best poems about moms, all right here.

Best of all?

These poems about mothers are all in the public domain, meaning you get good Mother’s Day poems without copyright worries.

So give the gift of poetry and share these poems with the important woman in your life however you like: cross-stitch them, cricut them onto a mug, hire a singing telegram to read them at her door… the only limit is your imagination!^{*(And your mom’s openness to costumed strangers singing on her doorstep.)}

Plus, this Mother’s Day only, each cute Mother’s Day poem comes complete with a brief introduction to the poet… and the poet’s mom! You’ll meet every poet’s first muse and first love: the woman who gave them the gift of life.

So let’s celebrate Mother’s Day the best way — with poetry! Sit back, relax, and let’s read:

Good Mother’s Day Poem #1:
“To My Mother”

As far as cute Mother’s Day poems go, “To My Mother” by Robert Louis Stevenson is about as short and sweet as they come.

Even if you don’t read a ton of poetry, you’re probably familiar with some of our boy Bobby’s works; Robert Louis Stevenson is best known for novels like Treasure Island and The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.

And we have two women to thank for that:

Margaret Isabella Balfour and Alice Cunningham

Born a member of the gentry, Margaret Isabella Balfour inherited a tendency towards illness from her minister father; her son, Robert, was equally unhealthy; doctors at the time thought he had tuberculosis.

Because of his frequently sickness, Robert Louis Stevenson missed a ton of school as a kid. And he wasn’t really a fan of it when he was there.

Little Robert was even a late reader, not learning how to make sense of the letters that would become his life’s work until he was 7 or 8 years old.

But he was always writing!

Like me, Stevenson was blessed with a mother who knew anyone who can talk can write through the power of dictation; Margaret Isabella Balfour penned the words her young son spoke aloud, giving him access to the wonderful world of writing before he could even read!

Stevenson’s other amanuensis and mother figure was his nurse, Allison Cunningham, who he called “Cummy.” She was intensely religious — and gave little Robert nightmares with her terrifying Calvinist talks — but loved the boy tenderly. Dedicating his 1885 work A Child’s Garden of Verses to Alice, he calls her “My second mother, my first wife. The angel of my infant life.”

“To My Mother” was one of the poems included in this book:

You too, my mother, read my rhymes
For love of unforgotten times,
And you may chance to hear once more
The little feet along the floor.

Good Mother’s Day Poem #2:
“Mother o’ Mine”

Our next poet is another name that you’re more likely to recognize for his fiction: Rudyard Kipling, author of The Jungle Book.

Kipling spent the first 5 years of his life in British-controlled India, and would go on to call Bombay his “mother of cities.” But he also had a human mother:

Alice Kipling

Alice Kipling was one of the MacDonald sisters — four women noted for their contributions to the arts. In addition to her talents, friends and family also admired her wit, her shrewd eye in social situations, and her vivacity; “dullness and Mrs. Kipling cannot exist in the same room,” said one prominent lord.

But Rudyard’s time with his mother was limited; when Rudyard was only 5, his parents sent him and his younger sister to Britain to attend school.

Unfortunately, the siblings boarded with a woman nothing like their beloved mother Alice. She neglected and abused Rudyard; he’d later point to the stories he’d concocted to avoid her wrath as his “foundation of literary effort.”

His only escape was the month he spent each Christmas at his maternal Aunt Georgy’s.

Thankfully, Rudyard Kipling reunited with his mother after a long 6 years, when she returned from India and retrieved her children from the brutal boarding house. He published his ode to his mother’s enduring love, “Mother o’ Mine,” in 1892, as the dedication to his first novel, The Light That Failed.

If I were hanged on the highest hill,
Mother o' mine, O mother o' mine!
I know whose love would follow me still,
Mother o' mine, O mother o' mine!

If I were drowned in the deepest sea,
Mother o' mine, O mother o' mine!
I know whose tears would come down to me,
Mother o' mine, O mother o' mine!

If I were damned of body and soul,
I know whose prayers would make me whole,
Mother o' mine, O mother o' mine!

Good Mother’s Day Poem #3:
The courage that my mother had

We’ve met Edna St. Vincent Millay before here at the Wordsmithy. As you may remember from our exploration of “Spring” by Edna St. Vincent Millay, our girl Vincent really loved her mother!

So what woman do we have to thank for setting one of the greatest writers of the 20th century on her path to greatness?

Cora Lounella Buzelle

Cora Lounella Buzelle worked as a nurse and wrote children’s stories and sonnets, but still managed to raise three girls as a single mom; she separated from an abusive husband when the girls were little, officially divorcing him when Edna, the eldest, was 12.

Cora and her daughters — Edna, Norma, and Kathleen — lived in poverty, forced to move town to town. But Cora always made the girls’ education a priority; she traveled with a trunk full of books.

Even when Edna grew up into an openly bisexual and outspokenly feminist woman, Cora never stopped supporting her daughter; she even helped Edna induce an abortion after she became pregnant by a man in Paris. When she died in 1931, she’d been working on biography of her daughters.

“The courage that my mother had” reflects Edna St. Vincent Millay’s continued longing for her mother, almost two decades after Cora passed. She wrote the poem in 1949; it was published posthumously after her death a year later.

The courage that my mother had
Went with her, and is with her still:
Rock from New England quarried;
Now granite in a granite hill.

The golden brooch my mother wore
She left behind for me to wear;
I have no thing I treasure more:
Yet, it is something I could spare.

Oh, if instead she’d left to me
The thing she took into the grave!—
That courage like a rock, which she
Has no more need of, and I have.

Good Mother’s Day Poem #4:
“Sonnets are full of love,
and this my tome”

I’ll be honest, dear readers: this is my least favorite poem of the bunch.

Not because it’s bad, by any means; its author, Christina Rossetti, wrote masterfully in the Romantic style, and this is arguably the most sentimental of the bunch.

I’m just not the touchiest feeliest sentamentaliest person.

So while it’s not to my personal tastes, I know a lot of people — and a lot of moms — out there will love it. Plus, Rossetti wrote one of my favorite Christmas carols (“In the Bleak Midwinter.”) And she really loved her mama:

Frances Mary Lavinia Polidori

Frances Polidori had received an excellent education from her own parents, and she became governess of her daughters while her sons attended boarding school. Her youngest, Christina, wrote her first poem when she was just a little girl by — you guessed it — dictating aloud to mom!

(Are you getting the point? If you have kids, no matter how young, help them write!)

Not only did Christina go onto to become a famous writer, the other three Rossetti siblings were famous artists and authors in their own right; the most noteworthy was her brother, Dante, founder of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, but all four made mom proud!

Christina never married; she lived with her mother for most of her life. She published the poem we’re about to read in 1881, 5 years before her mother’s passing.

As you may have guessed from the title, “Sonnets are full of love” is… a sonnet!

Michaelina Fun Fact:

I went through a Petrarchan sonnet phase in high school.
Mine were horrifically more hipster than this, though.
You will never read them.

Specifically, it’s a variation on a Petrarchan sonnet.

Want to see something cool?

As you’re reading, pay attention to where the poem varies from standard Petrarchan sonnet form. Our girl Christina 100% knew how to write strictly according to form, so if she’s breaking from tradition, we should be looking closely at how and why.

If you have no idea what I’m talking about, don’t worry. Just read for enjoyment right now, and we’ll touch base after the poem.

Sonnets are full of love, and this my tome
Has many sonnets: so here now shall be
One sonnet more, a love sonnet, from me
To her whose heart is my heart’s quiet home,
To my first Love, my Mother, on whose knee
I learnt love-lore that is not troublesome;
Whose service is my special dignity,
And she my loadstar while I go and come
And so because you love me, and because
I love you, Mother, I have woven a wreath
Of rhymes wherewith to crown your honored name:
In you not fourscore years can dim the flame
Of love, whose blessed glow transcends the laws
Of time and change and mortal life and death.

Time for a Tech Talk!

We can see the rhyme scheme in the first quatrain follows the expected Petrarchan sonnet form: ABBA. So we’ve got “tome/be/me/home.” Nice and normal.

Rossetti doesn’t switch it up until the second quatrain, where she moves from the expected ABBA rhyme scheme to an alternating BABA rhyme: “knee/some/dignity/come.”

Why is this so cool?

We’ve got to remember that this was 1881.

Pretentious high school poets weren’t writing Petrarchan sonnets about ancient courtesans whose names they couldn’t even pronounce after Googling them on the family computer yet.

Back then, Petrarchan sonnets were very much part of the courtly process of, well, courting. They were lovey dovey poems to woo your intended according to socially sanctioned norms.

So what our girl Christina does here is spend a quatrain tricking us into thinking this is your typical lovey dovey Petrarchan sonnet, then break out of that form in the exact moment she reveals the plot twist: this is a love poem… for her mom!

Basically, the entire sonnet is secretly an early draft of the best movie ever made about familial love:

Frozen!

…well. I mean.

Not technically, I guess.

(If you want technically correct, you can find it in the section of the Wordsmithy aptly named Technically Correct!)

But it does trick you into thinking it’s a perfectly typical lovey dovey Petrarchan sonnet and that True Love’s Kiss^tm is going to be between Anna and Hans until it’s all:

Pretty neat, huh?

Which brings us to our last poem for Mother’s Day, what I consider the best poem about mothers of all time:

Good Mother’s Day Poem #5:
“Rock Me To Sleep, Mother”

This one’s going to be a little longer than the rest, but trust me: it reads like a lullaby, rocking you with its rhythm.

Longer doesn’t mean harder in poetry. And sometimes a poem uses a longer form to build up a really powerful punch.

Because.

Ya know.

I like my lullabies with a side of deep existential mourning.

Stevenson’s quick little quatrain we started with was a cute Mother’s Day poem, 100%.

(Assuming by “inspirational mother poems” you mean “poems about mothers inspiring the deepest forms of grief and nostalgia.”)

But it’s got nothing on Elizabeth Akers Allen’s “Rock Me To Sleep, Mother” as far as inspirational mother poems go.

Unfortunately, we’ll be skipping pretty quickly to the poem; Elizabeth Akers Allen’s mother died when Elizabeth was an infant, and I did not find as much as her mom’s name in any of the sources I checked.

While her name may be lost to time, her memory and legacy live on in this poem about mothers’ love:

Backward, turn backward, O Time, in your flight,
Make me a child again just for tonight!
Mother, come back from the echoless shore,
Take me again to your heart as of yore;
Kiss from my forehead the furrows of care,
Smooth the few silver threads out of my hair;
Over my slumbers your loving watch keep;—      
Rock me to sleep, mother, — rock me to sleep!

Backward, flow backward, O tide of the years!
I am so weary of toil and of tears,—      
Toil without recompense, tears all in vain,—   
Take them, and give me my childhood again!
I have grown weary of dust and decay,—   
Weary of flinging my soul-wealth away;
Weary of sowing for others to reap;—   
Rock me to sleep, mother — rock me to sleep!

Tired of the hollow, the base, the untrue,
Mother, O mother, my heart calls for you!
Many a summer the grass has grown green,
Blossomed and faded, our faces between:
Yet, with strong yearning and passionate pain,
Long I tonight for your presence again.
Come from the silence so long and so deep;—   
Rock me to sleep, mother, — rock me to sleep!

Over my heart, in the days that are flown,
No love like mother-love ever has shone;
No other worship abides and endures,—      
Faithful, unselfish, and patient like yours:
None like a mother can charm away pain
From the sick soul and the world-weary brain.
Slumber’s soft calms o’er my heavy lids creep;—      
Rock me to sleep, mother, — rock me to sleep!

Come, let your brown hair, just lighted with gold,
Fall on your shoulders again as of old;
Let it drop over my forehead tonight,
Shading my faint eyes away from the light;
For with its sunny-edged shadows once more
Haply will throng the sweet visions of yore;
Lovingly, softly, its bright billows sweep;—   
Rock me to sleep, mother, — rock me to sleep!

Mother, dear mother, the years have been long
Since I last listened your lullaby song:
Sing, then, and unto my soul it shall seem
Womanhood’s years have been only a dream.
Clasped to your heart in a loving embrace,
With your light lashes just sweeping my face,
Never hereafter to wake or to weep;—      
Rock me to sleep, mother, — rock me to sleep!

And with that, we wrap up today’s exploration of

5 Good Mother’s Day Poems!

I’d like to dedicate this batch of poems about mothers’ love and poems to mothers from their sons and daughters to the most important mom in my life…

My Mom!

(If you skipped the link about moms dictating for their baby writers and have no idea what I’m talking about, you can find the whole Michaelina story by clicking: Who Is Michaelina Deneka?)

I’ve already bragged about my super intelligent and amazing mom.

But it’s Mother’s day, so I’ll say it again:

My mom was the #1 reason I became a writer.

So the Writer’s Wisdom I want to leave you with today is:

Mothers who guide their children to write…
get writers for children!

(I help each of my baby unicorns write their first poem at birth!)

It’s never too early to start… or too late!

Have a Happy Mother’s Day, and I hope you had fun celebrating with these Happy Mother’s Day poems!

Let me know in the comments which of these good Mother’s Day poems was your favorite… or if I skipped what you consider the best Mother’s Day poem ever (I did leave out a lot!)

Familialy,

Lover of Learning. Queen of Quirky.

Wordsmith of Wonderlands.