The language of this poem is totally commonplace: virtually every adjective is predictable: God's gifts are "rich," the mother watches "fondly," the babe is a ''tender" flower. It is written in the stock poetic diction of the nineteenth century, which is based mainly on archaism. The use of "thee" and "thou" in the opening sentence is defensible as the usual language of prayer; God's use of "thou hast" is perhaps defensible as the language God spoke in Victorian times. But for the baby to become a "babe" takes us into the unacknowledged poetic diction of the age, as, in a slightly different way, does the image of the heart "cleft" by a sword, which owes nothing to experience and derives unmodified from older poems. The babe as flower we met with in Theodora's poem and before that in Hemans's: there cannot be many nineteenth century poems of child pathos in which the child is not a flower. All these poems are totally uninteresting poeticallyas we can see if we put them next to Wordsworth:
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 | | She dwelt among th' untrodden ways
Besides the springs of Dove,
A maid whom there were none to praise
And very few to love.
A violet by a mossy stone
Half hidden from the eye
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where the simple language conceals very precise discriminations (none to praise/few to love: there is no flattery, no writing of complimentary verses, in that rural culture, but there is family affection, though circumscribed) and precise observation (that violet has been seen, as Sigourney never saw her flower). This contrast shows us how totally uninteresting "The Mother's Sacrifice" is as a poem.
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The preceding can be regarded as an optional first paragraph of our discussion of the poem. It is openly evaluative, and I believe it is a typical piece of New Criticism or of the
Scrutiny
schoolas stock an example of that as the poem is of Victorian pathos. An attempt to rehabilitate the poems of Sigourney (or Hemans) would have to take one of two forms: either disputing the accuracy of this analysis or claiming that though the poem is correctly described, these attributes can be seen as virtues because they place the poem so firmly in the feminine tradition. The preferred strategy of Ross, and the only strategy of Tompkins, is the second: this then shifts the debate from the particular qualities of that poem to the ideological function of such poems. Evaluation is no longer a filter.
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