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Womanliness, above all, and sympathy, poets ascribe to their mothers.
[Footnote: See Beattie, _The Minstrel_; Wordsworth, _The Prelude_;
Cowper, _Lines on his Mother's Picture_; Swinburne, _Ode to his Mother_;
J. G. Holland, _Kathrina_; William Vaughan Moody, _The Daguerreotype_;
Anna Hempstead Branch, _Her Words_.] A little poem by Sara Teasdale,
_The Mother of a Poet_, gives a poetical explanation of this type of
woman, in whom all the turbulence of the poet's spiritual inheritance is
hushed before it is transmitted to him. Such a mother as Byron's, while
she appeals to certain novelists as a means of intensifying the poet's
adversities, [Footnote: See H. E. Rives, _The Castaway_ (1904); J. D.
Bacon, _A Family Affair_ (1900).] is not found in verse. One might
almost conclude that poets consider their maternal heritage
indispensable. Very seldom is there such a departure from tradition as
making the father bequeather of the poet's sensitiveness. [Footnote: _A
Ballad in Blank Verse_, by John Davidson, is a rare exception.


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