A Mother Speaks by Ruth Collie
"A Mother Speaks" is a lyric poem by Ruth Collie cast as a mother's direct address to an unseen listener who has just admired a photograph of her baby. The poem's central conceit is the inadequacy of the still image: the mother concedes the photograph is lovely, then systematically catalogs everything it fails to capture. She contrasts the flat print against the living, animated qualities of her child — the way sunlight turns the child's brown hair to copper, the dimple that plays "hide-and-seek" in the cheek, the star-like shine and wine-red flush of surprise in the hazel eyes, the graceful symmetry of the body in motion, and the peaceful, happy turn of the sleeping face toward the mother herself. The poem moves beyond sight to the other senses: the child's lilting voice with its joy-broken tones that seem to make birds rejoice, the touch of a tiny hand against the cheek, and the feel of a kiss. The refrain-like repetition of "Ah, yes!" conceding the photograph's beauty before immediately undercutting it with "but" builds a rhetorical pattern of concession and rebuttal that drives the poem's argument: no static representation, however skillful, can render the full sensory and emotional reality of a beloved child. The poem closes with a direct, personal claim — "she's lovelier, far, than this!" — asserting that only lived, embodied experience of the child conveys her true loveliness, which the listener could only understand "if you had" felt and heard her directly. In form, the piece functions as a maternal love poem structured around a single extended comparison between artifice (the photograph) and life (the child), using accumulating physical and sensory detail to build emotional intensity toward its closing declaration. The broader theme is the primacy of intimate, embodied maternal love and perception over any representation or record, however faithful in appearance — a mother's testimony that true knowledge of her child comes only through direct relationship, not observation at a remove.
By Ruth Collie · Genre: Poetry, Lyric Poetry, Love Poetry