Honor Thy Mother

This loving mother and son photograph and a sentimental poem by John Greenleaf Whittier celebrate Mother's Day.

My Trust

A picture memory brings to me;
I look across the years and see
Myself beside my mother's knee.
I feel her gentle hand restrain
My selfish moods, and know again
A child's blind sense of wrong and pain.
But wiser now,
a man gray grown,
My childhood's needs are better known.
My mother's chastening love I own.

—John Greenleaf Whittier (1807–92)

Source: Hyatt H. Waggoner, ed. The Poetical Works of Whittier (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1975).

Pictured: Unidentified artist, active 19th century, Mother and Son, about 1855, daguerreotype with applied color, 5 5/8 x 4 3/8 in., Smithsonian American Art Museum, Museum purchase from the Charles Isaacs Collection made possible in part by the Luisita L. and Franz H. Denghausen Endowment.