12 Analytical Essay Prompts for Maggie Smith's Goldenrod

This page offers 12 essay prompts for Goldenrod by Maggie Smith. Each prompt includes a rationale, a defensible thesis direction, and evidence leads from the collection. Prompts avoid generic topics and focus on the collection’s specific language, structure, and themes such as survival and resilience after loss, motherhood and parental love, memory and the past, nature as mirror and metaphor, and language, naming, and perception. For character-focused essays, see pages on the speaker, the daughter, the son, the husband, the speaker's mother, and the grandfather.

1. The Backyard as an Unspoken Divorce Agreement

Why this prompt matters: This prompt examines how a single domestic space can become a metaphor for a failing marriage without any direct confrontation. The poem “At the End of Our Marriage, in the Backyard” uses the passive neglect of a lawn to represent the speaker’s unspoken agreement to let the marriage fade.

Sample thesis direction: In “At the End of Our Marriage, in the Backyard,” Smith argues that the most profound emotional truths are often communicated through inaction rather than speech, and she uses the wilding of a yard to expose the paradox of passive choice.

Evidence leads:

The speaker “do[es] nothing” yet pretends the neglect is intentional (chapter 13). The phrase “We do nothing and call it something” establishes the central irony.
The children must wear shoes because the clover bends under bees, symbolising the risks that are ignored by the adults.
The final line “In weeds we call flowers” reframes the decay as beauty, mirroring how the couple reframes their own decline.

2. The Child’s Voice as a Lens for Irreversible Loss

Why this prompt matters: Throughout Goldenrod, the speaker’s daughter and son articulate truths about loss that the mother herself cannot say directly. This prompt focuses on how the child’s perspective transforms abstract grief into concrete metaphor.

Sample thesis direction: Smith uses the daughter’s matter-of-fact statements about science and nature—such as Mars’s gravity or trees and sky—to frame divorce as a natural law, stripping it of melodrama and making acceptance inevitable.

Evidence leads:

In “After the Divorce, I Think of Something My Daughter Said About Mars,” the daughter explains that traveling to Mars would reduce bones to “noodles,” a metaphor for the permanent change of divorce (chapter 37).
In “At the End of My Marriage, I Think of Something My Daughter Said About Trees,” the daughter’s observation about the sky rushing into the space of a cut-down tree reframes emptiness as opportunity (chapter 31).
The children’s metaphysical debate in “Lacrimae” (“Everything is true” vs. “Do you mean real?”) shows their natural engagement with questions of existence that mirror the mother’s (chapter 7).

3. Naming, Misnaming, and the Autonomy of the Natural World

Why this prompt matters: The collection repeatedly questions the power and failure of human language to capture nature. The poem “Goldenrod” explicitly asks the flower for forgiveness for a possible misidentification, while later poems like “Junk trees,” explore the gap between a name and the thing itself.

Sample thesis direction: Smith challenges the assumption that naming grants control over the world; instead, she portrays names as provisional and flawed, and she ultimately offers the speaker as the one who can be named by nature.

Evidence leads:

In “Goldenrod,” the speaker admits “I’m no botanist” and calls the flower by its color, but then offers to let the flower name her (chapter 3).
In “Junk trees,” the Bradford pear is called “bed wetters,” “semen trees,” and “junk trees,” yet the speaker acknowledges it “smelled of home” (chapter 41).
In “This Sort of Thing Happens All the Time,” the speaker imagines hovering a cursor over greens to see color names like “juniper” and “celadon,” showing the desire for linguistic precision in a disorienting scene (chapter 2).

4. The Cento Form as a Metaphor for Fragmented Selfhood

Why this prompt matters: Smith includes three “Ohio Cento” poems that stitch together borrowed lines from other poets. This prompt explores how the collage form mirrors the speaker’s fragmented identity after loss and divorce.

Sample thesis direction: The cento form allows Smith to articulate a self that is assembled from external voices, suggesting that identity after trauma is not original but rather a patchwork of inherited and borrowed language.

Evidence leads:

The first “Ohio Cento” speaks of compressing remembering into an anniversary and sinking feet into the Olentangy River (chapter 6).
The second “Ohio Cento” describes the body as “hard” and filled with “expenditure, loss, collateral, gift” yet containing stillness (chapter 23).
The third “Ohio Cento” recalls “the girl, a bird almost” who disappears, suggesting the speaker’s earlier self has been erased (chapter 43).

5. Maternal Protection in the Face of Racial Violence

Why this prompt matters: Several poems place the speaker’s white children inside a context of national violence, particularly against Black children. This prompt examines how the speaker negotiates her role as a protector while acknowledging her privilege.

Sample thesis direction: Smith uses the image of a mother shielding her son’s eyes and later proofreading the Constitution to argue that maternal love cannot be separated from political awareness, and that silence about injustice is a form of complicity.

Evidence leads:

In “Airplanes,” the speaker shields her son’s eyes “whenever another mother’s Black son was shot,” and notes that his white body only needs protection for his eyes (chapter 24).
In “Tender Age,” the speaker directly addresses America about caging babies and separating children from mothers (chapter 26).
In “Animals,” the speaker juxtaposes a fairy tern sitting on a broken egg with family-separation policies (chapter 4).

6. The Talisman as a Narrative Device for Hope

Why this prompt matters: “Talisman” and “Small Shoes” both use small, physical objects to contain emotional weight. This prompt focuses on how the speaker creates belief through storytelling and touch.

Sample thesis direction: Smith treats everyday objects—an acorn, a stone, a Mr. Potato Head ear—as talismans that the speaker uses to “tell herself a story” about her life, demonstrating that hope is a deliberate act of narrative construction.

Evidence leads:

In “Talisman,” the speaker fingers the objects until they warm in her palm and she tells a story that “might end well if I tell it right” (chapter 53).
In “Small Shoes,” the speaker asks that the image of stars wearing small shoes be added to an official report, using a surreal detail to document loss (chapter 35).
In “Not Everything Is a Poem,” the speaker finds an acorn and rocks in her son’s pockets and questions whether these can become art (chapter 32).

7. Light and Darkness as Opposing Modes of Perception

Why this prompt matters: Smith’s poem “How Dark the Beginning” openly criticises the cultural preference for light and argues for the value of darkness. This prompt explores how the collection uses light and dark imagery to reframe grief.

Sample thesis direction: Smith rejects the cinematic equation of sunrise with safety, instead advocating for “the good dark” as a space of honesty and rest.

Evidence leads:

“How Dark the Beginning” states that light is not protective, as “hearts are flayed” and “bodies broken” every day (chapter 53).
In “Planetarium in January,” the speaker escapes into a star-house, finding an imaginative refuge that is dark and private (chapter 36).
In “Small Blue Town,” the speaker builds an internal landscape of “perpetual shade” where the sun never rises (chapter 22).

8. The River as a Figure for the Illusion of the Past

Why this prompt matters: “Joke” explicitly addresses the philosophical problem of the past. The poem uses a river joke to argue that the past does not exist except as a present construct.

Sample thesis direction: Through the metaphor of a river whose water is never the same, Smith dismantles the idea of a retrievable past and insists that the present is the only reality.

Evidence leads:

In “Joke,” the speaker tells a shape-shifting manifestation of the past that it is not real, then wakes at seven o’clock into the present (chapter 47).
The poem includes the line “the river’s current—now that’s a joke— / is always flowing now, now, now.”
This non-linear understanding of time contrasts with the memory fragments in “Talk of Horses,” where the speaker wonders if the pieces are clues in a mystery (chapter 15).

9. The Human Body as a House or Container

Why this prompt matters: Smith repeatedly uses architectural metaphors for the body—a house unaware of its own rooms, a scale model of a town, a room without walls. This prompt examines how these metaphors express the speaker’s search for self-knowledge.

Sample thesis direction: Smith uses the image of a body as a house to suggest that self-knowledge is incomplete and that the speaker must learn to inhabit her own interior.

Evidence leads:

In “December 18, 2008,” the newborn’s body is a “house / [un]aware of its own rooms,” implying lifelong confusion (chapter 21).
In “Threshold,” the speaker desires a door that allows being on both sides at once, reframing any open field as an arch of entering and leaving (chapter 18).
In “Woman, 41, with a History of Alzheimer’s,” the speaker forgets the word “keys” and mistakes her own breathing for footsteps, showing the body’s betrayal of memory (chapter 44).

10. The Ending Poems and the Movement Toward Self-Marriage

Why this prompt matters: The final poems of the collection—especially “Bride,” “Talisman,” and “How Dark the Beginning”—chart a movement from loss to a self-sustaining autonomy. This prompt focuses on how the speaker reclaims wholeness without reconciliation with the ex.

Sample thesis direction: The collection’s arc culminates in the speaker’s declaration that she has been “long wed to herself,” transforming marriage from an external relationship into an internal commitment.

Evidence leads:

In “Bride,” the speaker lifts her own veil and addresses herself as “my lifelong beloved” (chapter 51).
In “Talisman,” the speaker walks alone at night and tells a story that “might end well” (chapter 53).
In “How Dark the Beginning,” the speaker speaks on behalf of “the good dark,” suggesting comfort with uncertainty (chapter 54).
The penultimate poem “Verse Chorus Verse Chorus Bridge” ends with the expectation of reaching the chorus, implying artistic and emotional resolution (chapter 55).

11. The Grandfather and Grandmother as Figures of Memory’s Unreliability

Why this prompt matters: “Talk of Horses” presents two grandparents—one who lost everything in divorce, another who lost everything to dementia. This prompt examines how these figures represent the instability of memory and the mystery of family history.

Sample thesis direction: Smith uses the grandfather’s talk of unseen horses and the grandmother’s flickering memories to suggest that family history is not a record of facts but a collection of fragments that resist interpretation.

Evidence leads:

The speaker recalls “talk of horses / I don’t think I saw,” indicating the gap between story and reality (chapter 15).
The grandfather’s third wife is nicknamed “The Spun Pheasant,” a detail that highlights objectification and mystery.
The grandmother’s dementia allows only “a few memories [to] swim up now and then,” underscoring the fragility of the past.

12. The Use of the Conditional Mood to Express Ambivalence

Why this prompt matters: Several poems employ “if” and “could” clauses to create a mood of longing without certainty. “If I Could Set This to Music,” “For My Next Trick,” and “Verse Chorus Verse Chorus Bridge” all use conditionals to explore desire and doubt.

Sample thesis direction: Smith’s repeated use of the conditional mood—especially in poems about art and love—reveals a speaker who holds hope tentatively, aware that fulfillment is not guaranteed.

Evidence leads:

“If I Could Set This to Music” begins with the speaker imagining a folk song that would let her words “slip inside the listener’s ribs” (chapter 14).
“For My Next Trick” opens with the daughter’s question about where she was before birth, and ends with the mother pointing to burned-out stars—a conditional comfort (chapter 20).
“Verse Chorus Verse Chorus Bridge” uses the conditional “Until we find the right chord” to describe the creative process as a waiting game (chapter 55).

For more general discussion of themes, see the questions and answers page, and for an overview of the book, return to the main page.