Somebody's Mother

Start with the basics, because the rest of the poem's meaning rests on them. This chapter is a poem — not a story, not a play, not a biography. That matters, because a poem asks you to notice how something is said as much as what is said. It is credited to Mary Dow Brine. Her name is printed under the poem in the book, and that is the spelling to use in an answer: Mary Dow Brine, three words, no extra initials.

More precisely, it is a narrative poem — a poem that tells a complete story from beginning to end. There is a setting, there are people, something happens, and it closes with a clear result. You could retell the whole thing as one paragraph of prose, which is exactly why it is easy to follow even though a few of its words are old-fashioned.

It is written in couplets. A couplet is a pair of lines whose endings rhyme with each other, so the rhyme scheme is AABB: the first line rhymes with the second, the third with the fourth, and so on all the way down. Each line carries roughly four strong beats, which gives the poem a steady walking rhythm. Read it aloud and you will hear it move at the pace of somebody telling you what happened, not at the pace of somebody stopping to admire the view. Couplets suit a story for a simple reason — each pair closes neatly, like one small step, and then the next pair takes another step.

The setting is a city street on a winter day. You can date it roughly from the traffic: the danger on the road comes from the carriage wheels and the horses' feet, not from cars, buses or autos. Snow has fallen recently, so the road is wet and slippery. The street is busy, and school has just finished, so children are pouring out of the gates into the cold.

One more thing to fix in your mind before you go further. The voice telling us all this belongs to a narrator who is not part of the events. The narrator watches, describes and quietly judges the scene. Only two people in the poem actually open their mouths: the boy, and — right at the end — the old woman. Keeping that straight matters, because it is easy to hand the poem's most famous line to the poet when in fact a character speaks it.

Here is everything that happens, in order, in plain language. This is a paraphrase — the poem's own lines are not copied here, and the few short phrases that do appear are marked with quotation marks because the exact wording is the thing being discussed.

The opening. The narrator introduces an old woman standing on a city street. She is described as “old and ragged and grey”, which means elderly, dressed in worn and torn clothes, and grey-haired. Note that word “ragged”: it has several meanings in English, but here it describes shabby clothing, not a rough edge and not tiredness. She is stooped over from the winter chill. The street has been covered by a recent fall of snow and is now wet. Her feet, the narrator says, are aged and slow.

The waiting. She stands at a crossing and waits a long time. She is not alone in the sense of an empty road — a crowd is flowing past her the whole time. But nobody stops. The narrator says she is alone and uncared for in the middle of that throng, and that the people passing did not heed the look in her anxious eyes. This is the poem's first sharp point, and it is worth remembering: being surrounded by people is not the same as being helped by them.

The schoolboys arrive. School has just ended. A group of boys comes down the street shouting and laughing, thrilled by the snow piled deep and white, and glad to be free for the day. The narrator compares them to a flock of sheep. They hurry straight past the old woman, and not one of them offers a hand.

Why she cannot move. The narrator now explains her fear. She is so meek and timid that she is afraid to move at all, because she dreads being knocked down by the carriage wheels or the horses' hooves on the slippery road. So she is trapped between two things: too frightened to step out, and too easy to overlook to be rescued.

One boy stops. At last one boy from that same cheerful group reaches her. The narrator calls him the merriest of the whole lot. He pauses beside her and quietly offers to take her across if she wishes to go. She places her old hand on his young arm, and he leads her over the road. She reaches the other side without hurt or harm. As he guides her shaky steps, he is proud that his own legs are firm and steady.

He goes back and explains. He rejoins his friends with a happy, contented heart. Then he tells them his reason: she is somebody's mother, for all that she is now old, poor and slow. And he adds a wish — that if his own mother is ever poor and old and grey, with her son far away from her, some other boy will lend her a hand the way he has just helped this stranger.

The ending. That night, at home, the old woman bows her head and prays. She asks God to be kind to the boy, and she describes him as somebody's son, and somebody's pride and joy. The poem stops there. No reward, no reunion, no adult praising him — just a prayer said in private by a woman he will probably never see again.

The old woman does not speak until the final two lines, and even then she is talking to God rather than to anyone in the poem. For almost the whole poem she is completely silent. That silence is itself part of how the poet makes you feel her helplessness — she cannot even ask.

Look at how she is built. She is made out of small physical details rather than explanations. We are told her clothes are worn, her hair is grey, her back is bent from the cold, her feet are aged and slow, her hand is aged, and later, as she crosses, that her feet tremble. The poet never writes a sentence saying she was weak and frightened. She shows you the body of somebody weak and frightened and trusts you to work it out. That is the difference between telling and showing, and naming it is a good way to answer a question about how the poet presents her.

Alongside all that physical detail comes the one that reaches inside her, and it is the strongest of the lot: her “anxious eyes”. She is watching the crowd. She is hoping. That single word “anxious” turns her from a shape on a pavement into a person with an inner life, somebody who wants something and is not getting it. If you need one piece of evidence for her helplessness, use that.

Her fear is completely reasonable, and the poem is careful to say so. The narrator tells us she is “so meek, so timid” and “afraid to stir” because of the traffic. Notice the word “lest”, an old-fashioned conjunction that means for fear that or in case. She will not step forward for fear that the wheels or the hooves will crowd her down on the slippery street. Her stillness is not confusion or stubbornness. It is a sensible judgement made by somebody who knows perfectly well that she cannot move fast enough to get out of the way.

Now the crowd, which is the poem's quiet villain — but notice how carefully the poet handles it. Nobody in that crowd is cruel to her. Nobody pushes her, laughs at her or tells her to move. They simply pass. The narrator's word for what they fail to do is heeded: they did not heed the glance of her anxious eyes. To heed is to pay attention to something and act on it. So the failure here is not wickedness. It is not noticing. That is a far more uncomfortable idea than plain villainy, because almost everybody has done it.

The schoolboys are drawn in exactly the same way. They are not bullies. They are just delighted — the school day is over, the snow is deep, and they are running. The comparison to a flock of sheep is doing careful work here: sheep are not evil, they simply move together and follow one another without looking around. The poet is describing thoughtlessness, not malice. Hold on to that distinction, because it is why the poem is able to end in hope instead of anger, and why an answer that calls the crowd wicked misses what the poem is actually saying.

The most easily missed fact about the boy is this: he is not a different sort of child from the others. He comes out of the same laughing group, and the narrator picks him out as “the gayest laddie of all the group” — that is, the merriest boy of the lot. The poem is not saying that quiet, serious children are kind and cheerful ones are not. It is saying that the happiest boy in the crowd was also the one who looked around. Kindness here is not a personality type you are born with. It is a choice made in a single moment by somebody who was having just as much fun as everybody else.

Notice how he offers. He does not shout across the road or announce his good deed to his friends first. He stops beside her and speaks quietly — the poem says he whispered low. And he asks rather than takes charge: he offers to help her cross if she wishes to go. He does not seize her arm or decide on her behalf. For a woman who has just been ignored by an entire crowd, being asked is itself a form of respect. This small detail is worth pointing to whenever you are asked what sort of person the boy is.

Then comes the loveliest picture in the poem: her aged hand placed on his strong young arm. Two ages touching. The narrator says she gets across without hurt or harm — the plainest possible words, and the right ones.

The line about pride confuses a lot of students, so be careful with it. The narrator says the boy was proud that his own feet were “firm and strong” while hers trembled. This is not boasting, and the poem gives you no reason to read it that way. He is not proud of being better than an old woman; that would be a strange thing to be proud of. He is glad that his strength turned out to be good for something — that being young and steady was useful to somebody. The right word for it is gratitude, not arrogance. The contrast the poet sets up between her trembling feet and his firm ones exists to show how easily strength can be spent on somebody who has none of it left.

Afterwards he goes back to his friends with, as the narrator puts it, “his young heart happy and well content”. Look at what he does not get. No thanks in public, no reward, no teacher or parent watching, no story in the newspaper. His entire payment is how he feels. That is the poem's practical argument about kindness: it pays the person who gives it, immediately, and without anybody else having to know.

Finally, his reason — and this is the part worth getting exactly right. He tells his friends “She's somebody's mother, boys, you know”, for all that she is aged and poor and slow, and then hopes that some fellow will “lend a hand” to his own mother if she is ever poor and old and grey while her son is far away. Look at what kind of thinking that is. It is not a rule he has been taught and is obeying. It is imagination: he pictures his own mother standing where this stranger is standing, and once he has seen that picture, helping is obvious. So if you are ever asked whether his action was a logical decision, the honest answer is no — it was driven by feeling, by empathy, by seeing his own family in a stranger's face.

The title is a phrase, not a name, and that is the entire idea. Nobody in this poem is named. There is a woman, a boy, some children and a crowd, and not one of them is given so much as an initial. The poet keeps everybody anonymous on purpose, so that the poem is not about two particular people on one particular street on one particular afternoon. It is about anybody, anywhere. The old woman you walk past outside a temple or a bus stand is the woman in this poem.

Now watch how the key phrase travels through the poem, because this is the cleverest thing in it and very few students notice it.

First, the boy says it. Explaining himself to his friends after the crossing, he calls her somebody's mother. He is reminding them of something they had not bothered to think about: the shabby old woman they ran past is not an obstacle on the pavement. She is at the centre of somebody's life, in exactly the way their own mothers are at the centre of theirs.

Then the narrator repeats it. Near the end, the narrator stops calling her “the woman” and calls her “somebody's mother” instead, with quotation marks around the phrase — borrowing the boy's own words to name her. That is a small, quiet signal that the narrator agrees with him. His way of seeing her has become the poem's way of seeing her. When you can spot a shift like this, you are reading properly rather than just following the plot.

Finally, the woman turns it around. In her prayer she calls him “somebody's son, and pride and joy”. She hands back the exact gift he gave her. He refused to see her as a nameless old woman; she refuses to see him as a nameless boy. Each of them recognises that the stranger in front of them is somebody else's beloved.

This mirroring — mother answering son, one phrase echoing another — is why the poem does not need a bigger ending. Nothing dramatic has to happen afterwards. The exchange is already complete. Two strangers have each seen the other as a full person, and in this poem that is the whole event and the whole reward.

So if a question asks you to justify the title, you now have a proper answer rather than a vague one. The title is the boy's stated reason for helping. It is what the narrator ends up calling the woman. It is the pattern the woman echoes back in her prayer. And it states the poem's argument in two words: every stranger belongs to somebody. A title naming the kind boy would have pointed at one character and stopped there. “Somebody's Mother” points at the idea, and the idea is what the poem is for.

The book asks you to pick devices out of this poem and give examples for them. Here is each one with a real example, so you never have to guess.

Couplets and rhyme. Every two lines rhyme, giving the AABB pattern. Couplets suit a story because each pair closes off neatly and the next pair takes the story on. The rhymes are simple and mostly on short words, which keeps the poem plain and easy to say aloud. Nothing about the sound is showing off — and that plainness fits a poem about an ordinary good deed done by an ordinary boy.

Simile. A simile compares two things using like or as. The boys pouring out at the end of the school day are compared to a flock of sheep. This one comparison does two jobs at once. It captures how a crowd of excited children actually moves — noisy, bunched together, all pointed the same way. And it hints, without saying so rudely, that they are following one another without stopping to look around.

Alliteration. Alliteration is the repeating of the same opening consonant sound in words that sit close together. This poem uses it lightly rather than heavily. The hissing pair in “slippery street” makes the road sound as treacherous as it is. The soft h sound runs through the kind parts of the poem, in “helping hand” and in “his young heart happy”. And the last idea in the whole poem is stitched together by sound in “somebody's son”.

Repetition. This is the strongest device in the poem. The word somebody's comes back three times, attached to a different person on each occasion — the boy's phrase for her, the narrator's phrase for her, and her phrase for him. The narrator's “so meek, so timid” repeats “so” to press down harder on how small and frightened she is. And words for age circle round again and again — old, aged, grey, slow — until you can feel how heavily her years sit on her.

Contrast. The poem is built out of opposites laid side by side. Her trembling feet against his firm and strong ones. Her aged hand against his strong young arm. Her stillness against a hurrying crowd. Her silence against their laughter and shouting. And, sharpest of all, her being utterly alone in the middle of a throng of people. Any of these will serve as evidence when a question asks how the poet shows her helplessness.

Imagery. Imagery means language that makes you see, hear or feel something rather than merely understand it. Look at how much of this short poem is sensory: a wet street, snow piled white and deep, a winter chill that bends a body, laughter and shouting, wheels and hooves, an old hand placed on a young arm, a head bowed at night. The world outside is cold and loud; the act of kindness inside it is quiet and warm. That is the poem's design in a single sentence.

Quotation marks as a tool. One last thing worth noticing. The narrator puts quotation marks around “school let out” and around “somebody's mother”. In both cases the narrator is borrowing somebody else's words — the children's own name for the end of the school day, and the boy's name for the woman. It is a small trick, but spotting it shows you can tell a narrator's voice apart from a character's, which is exactly the skill this poem rewards.

Empathy. This is the main theme, and it is worth being precise about the word. Empathy is not the same as feeling sorry for somebody. Feeling sorry looks at a person from outside. Empathy means imagining yourself into their position. The boy does exactly the second thing. He does not merely feel sorry for a poor old lady and move on. He thinks about his own mother growing old with her son far away from home, and once he has pictured that clearly, helping stops being a decision at all. It becomes obvious.

Respect for elders. The poem asks you to see an old person as somebody who was, and still is, at the centre of a family — not as a slow obstacle in a street full of people in a hurry. This idea will feel familiar, because it is close to what most of us are taught at home about grandparents and elderly neighbours. The textbook draws the connection further: in the Atharva Veda, the Earth herself is addressed as a mother and we as her children. The poem's move — treating an unknown old woman as a mother — sits comfortably beside that older idea.

Small acts matter. Nothing enormous happens here. A boy takes a woman across a road. It costs him perhaps a minute of a happy afternoon. But the poet gives that minute the entire weight of the ending — a prayer said at night, alone, in a house, by somebody he will never meet again. The message is that kindness does not have to be big to be real, and that you almost never find out how much a small thing mattered.

Indifference is also a choice. Notice that the crowd breaks no rule. Nobody harms her. And that is precisely the problem the poem is pointing at. Not noticing is itself a kind of failure, and a busy society where everybody is rushing somewhere can leave people stranded without a single person meaning any harm.

Kindness comes back round. Not as a reward, but as a circle. He helps a stranger's mother; she prays for a stranger's son. Neither of them receives anything they could hold in their hands, and the poem clearly thinks they both came out ahead.

Three habits for writing answers on this poem. First, always attach a detail from the text to your point. Do not write that the woman was helpless — write that her feet were aged and slow, that her back was bent with the winter chill, and that nobody heeded her anxious eyes. A point with evidence is far more convincing than a point without it. Second, keep straight who is speaking: the line about somebody's mother is spoken by the boy to his friends, and the prayer at the close is spoken by the woman at home. Third, resist the easy label. When asked about the boy's pride, do not call him arrogant — he is grateful. When asked about the crowd, do not call them cruel — they are careless. This poem is more interesting than a simple good-versus-bad reading, and an answer that notices the difference will always read better than one that does not.