The Mothers Return - Analysis

Waiting as a lesson in time

This poem’s central work is to show how a mother’s absence teaches everyone else what time really feels like: not a neat measurement, but an emotional substance that children either fight, ignore, or fall asleep inside. The speaker (likely the father) keeps trying to translate distance into terms the children can bear: hills, far-off town, a long, long vale. Yet the poem keeps proving that the mind doesn’t accept geography as comfort. What matters is the stubborn fact of tomorrow, a word that sounds simple but becomes, for the children, an entire landscape they cannot cross.

The boy who tries to shout tomorrow closer

The eldest child reacts like someone who believes desire can change physics. He hears the news with steady glee, then erupts—he laughed amain and shouts Mother, come to me! The line is touching because it’s both triumphant and helpless: he speaks as if calling across a field, not across a day. His witless hope is not stupidity but innocence—he hasn’t yet learned that love doesn’t make sound travel farther, and that longing doesn’t make time run faster. The speaker’s correction—patience!—is gentle, but it also shows the adult’s burden: knowing exactly why the boy’s strategy cannot work.

The girl’s joy without an object

The sister offers the poem’s clearest contrast. She does not war with the mystery of time and distance; her happiness behaves less like thought than like reflex. The speaker describes it as instinct, like kitten or summer fly. That comparison is affectionate, but it’s also slightly unsettling: her joy is pure because it is almost non-human, not yet yoked to the concepts that make absence painful. She dances and runs without an aim, as if the announcement has released energy rather than delivered information. The tension here is quietly sharp: is her freedom a kind of wisdom, or merely a lack that will later be filled with loss?

Family storytelling as a bridge to the missing person

As the evening settles, the family creates a substitute for the mother’s presence: narrative. They sit in the garden bower while the sun shines in his departing hour, and they rehearse their days—rambles by the swift brook, the willow-skirted pool, and two fair swans. These details are not random nature-noticing; they are future gifts, meant to be told To her. Even the new animals—gosling’s green, ass’s colt, lambs—become evidence the household has been living and growing in her absence. The poem’s tenderness is in how it imagines reunion not just as hugging, but as reporting: love expressed through shared observation.

The evening star and the turn into sadness

The poem turns decisively at the evening star. Up to this point, the children’s excitement seems continuous, contagious—so strong that the speaker says he could have joined their chase. But bedtime forces a small grief into view: A moment’s heaviness, A sadness at the heart. It’s brief, but important. The day itself has been a rehearsal for waiting, and night is the sharpest form of waiting because it is enforced separation. That sadness is not explained away; it simply passes through them like weather, then is replaced by games and motion.

Five minutes: the shock of how quickly life goes still

The final surprise is how abruptly all that energy collapses. Five minutes past, and there is O the change!: the children lie Asleep upon their beds, with perfect rest and closed eyes. The phrase buy limbs (likely meaning busy) underscores the transformation—limbs that were recently racing now belong to another world. This ending is more than cute domestic observation. It suggests that sleep is the child’s true answer to time: not understanding it, not conquering it, but skipping it. Adults must stay awake inside the hours; children, mercifully, can vanish from them.

A sharper question hiding in the calm

When the poem insists the sadness is ’Tis gone, it sounds comforting—yet it also hints at how fleeting children’s feelings can be, and how lonely that can make the adult witness. The speaker is infected by their mood, but he cannot follow them into sleep with the same ease. If the mother’s return is tomorrow, the children can simply leap over the night; the person who waits most fully may be the one left awake to measure every minute.