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“Three days before Armistice Sunday”, saying farewell to her son as he leaves to go off to war, becomes the defining moment of this mother’s life. All she was feeling at that moment, all the pride and the sadness, live with her forever after, so powerfully important did that moment become due to the son’s never returning.
The reader, depending on whether or not one has ever experienced what this mother continues to experience, might, while being dutifully sympathetic, find it difficult to see her as anything other than one bereaved mother among so many others – she is not the only mother ever to send her son off to war only for him never to return. It is, after all, a callous fact of life, that one death may be tragic, but a hundred, a thousand deaths are but a normal condition of war and must be gotten used to. 

Weir’s poem, however, challenges us to see how a life might be shaped and determined by a single moment. This impression is brilliantly achieved through the poem seemingly being the narrative of a single day, while actually being the story of a life, moving from that fateful moment at the door to the mother’s visit, however many years later, to her son’s name on the war memorial. This lack of fixedness in time is a curious and essential feature of the poem. This slippage in time is central to a reading of the whole poem and can be seen at other moments – as when the mother  pins the poppy to her son’s lapel. We have already been informed that “poppies had already been placed / on individual graves” so must recognise that the mother’s pinning of the poppy to her son is an act of remembrance not only for the already fallen but, also, for her son. In a Schrödinger’s Cat moment, the son, as his mother pins the poppy to his lapel, is both alive and dead at the same time. 

Time slippage is not merely a matter of events merging, serving to show how the mother, over the years, continues to relive – or live in – the moment she said her farewells to her son; her very identity is subject to the same lack of fixity, so that she too is both herself and other. This poem is about a mother who sends her son off to die in war, to give his life for others. This act of sacrifice forces us to read the opening line of the poem “Three days before Armistice Sunday” in light of that other mother whose heart was to be pierced by a sword, that is the sword of anguish at the loss of the son, a son who lay in the grave three days before Easter Sunday. 

This particular mother, then, is not simply just one among so many others; she is all mothers sending all those sons to death. Despite the enormity of the sacrifice, despite the tragic impact upon a mother, despite the intoxication of the the son in the face of such excitement, despite everything, we cannot help but hear the note of futility. That Easter sacrifice was for all, that Great War was to end all wars, yet, still, mothers must send their sons to their death. 

Sons who will never experience life. As part of her sending off her son, the mother uses Sellotape to brush the white cat hairs from his blazer. White cats have, since ages past, been seen as symbolising love and fertility. The mother is not just saying goodbye to her son – as terrible as that must be for her – she is also saying goodbye to all the grandchildren she will never have. The death of her son is the death of any hope for a future which is precisely why Weir creates this sense of time slipping – future and present blending into one and the same moment. This is the moment when, in effect, time stops, there will be no future for there will be no children, who in turn will produce no children. Little wonder that this mother spends her days in remembrance of things that once were – but will never be again. 

And just as there is no distinction between this moment and that, as there is no distinction between this mother and all mothers, so, we might ask, what is the distinction between mother and son? If we accept the argument put forward so far, then the relationship between mother and son is somewhat complex – how could it be otherwise if (as the pinning of the individual poppy seems to imply) the son is both there and not there, alive and dead, real and remembered. The mother clearly loved (and loves) her son and they seem to have had a close relationship. Playing “at / being Eskimos” and rubbing noses is the kind of image that shows this love and affection. But the brushing off of cat hairs, the smoothing of the upturned collar, the “impulse / to run my fingers through the gelled / blackthorns” of her son’s hair might indicate an over attachment, a smothering mother’s love, leaving us unsurprised at the son’s eagerness to be away, out into the “the world overflowing / like a treasure chest”. There is no hesitation from the son, which one might expect if this were a mutual relationship. Mother is walking bravely to the door, dreading what is to come, whereas the son is gone in “[a] split second” Not wishing to impugn this mother’s love for her son, Weir has nevertheless given us enough to see that this is not a one-dimensional relationship, as no relationship should ever be. However genuine the mother’s love for her son, yet he is intoxicated at the thought of freedom and adventure. It is just unfortunate for him that his freedom led so quickly to the battlefield. 

The poem then is rife with these slips between presence and absence, life and death, real and remembered. The final stanza is yet another example of slippage, that between images we encountered when acknowledging the significance of those three days in the opening line. The image of the mother “reaching the top of the hill” where she traces the “inscriptions on the war memorial” can’t help but put us in mind of that other mother who witnessed the death of a son atop the hill of Golgotha. This is a poem about both the individual sacrifice of this mother and this son as well as being, at one and the same time, being a poem about every sacrifice of every mother and every son lost to the futility of war.