The Symbolism of Stones in Maggie Smith's Goldenrod
Introduction
Stones appear throughout Maggie Smith’s 2021 collection Goldenrod as a recurring concrete image that accumulates meaning across multiple poems. In one context they are patient teachers; in another they become protective talismans carried in a coat pocket. By following the stone motif from poem to poem, readers can trace how the speaker uses an ordinary, durable object to explore themes of survival, transformation, motherhood, memory, and the slow work of grief.
Literal Appearances of Stones
Stones in Goldenrod are never merely decorative. They are smooth stones warmed in a hand, rough stones flecked with pink, glassy black stones found by children, and stones broken against each other. The poems describe them with physical precision:
- In the poem “Stone,” the speaker imagines a stone that learns from rain, sunlight, and violence. It is “sun-warmed, dry and smooth / as a cheek” and can be “broken against its brother” until the two produce a spark of fire (evidence chapter-0018-chunk-0001).
- In “Talisman,” the speaker carries in her left pocket “a scuffed acorn, a glassy black stone, / one pink Mr. Potato Head ear” (evidence chapter-0053-chunk-0001).
- In “Not Everything Is a Poem,” the speaker finds in her son’s laundry “one acorn, two rocks / (one smooth and gray, one rough / and glittering, flecked pink)” (evidence chapter-0033-chunk-0001).
- In “Wife for Scale,” stone appears as a geological metaphor: the speaker compares a layer of rock to the compressed years of her marriage and asks what salt (tears or sadness) does to stone (evidence chapter-0051-chunk-0001).
These literal stones are always handheld objects or natural formations encountered in the landscape. Their materiality—weight, texture, temperature—anchors the speaker’s abstractions.
How the Meaning of Stones Changes
Stone as Teacher of Patience and Transformation (Poem “Stone”)
In the poem “Stone,” the stone is an unwilling student of time. The rain drilling a pinhole over years teaches patience, but the poem insists that violence, too, is a lesson: the shoe scuffing the stone, the stone broken against its brother until together they “dazzle with fire” (evidence chapter-0018-chunk-0001). This transformation from a passive object to a source of light mirrors the speaker’s own learning. The speaker’s eyelids “glow” and are “learning, together, to be stones.” Here stones represent endurance through hardship and the possibility of creating something luminous from suffering.
Stone as Protective Talisman (Poem “Talisman”)
In “Talisman,” the stone shifts from teacher to charm. The items in the left pocket—including a “glassy black stone”—are described as gifts “a crow might bring / a human girl.” Touching them allows the speaker to “believe / almost anything” and to tell herself a story that “might end well if I tell it right” (evidence chapter-0053-chunk-0001). The stone’s protective power is psychological: it is not magical in itself but becomes a focus for hope and self-narration. The speaker walks alone at night, pockets her hand, and uses the stone to conjure safety.
Stone as Evidence of Time and Grief (Poem “Wife for Scale”)
In “Wife for Scale,” stone stands for geological permanence against human transience. The speaker recalls a professor who placed his wife in photos of rock formations as a scale bar, and she reinterprets the image through grief: “what salt does to stone” becomes a question about the corrosive effect of sadness (evidence chapter-0051-chunk-0001). The rock strata that will someday hold the speaker’s own age are “paper-thin,” suggesting that even the most solid matter can be compressed by time. Here stone symbolizes both the weight of loss and the promise of eventual solidification—the soil “gives and cannot hold me” yet “will be rock.”
Stone as Childhood Treasure (Poem “Not Everything Is a Poem”)
In “Not Everything Is a Poem,” stones appear as objects a boy collects and carries. The rocks in the son’s pockets—one smooth gray, one rough glittering pink—are juxtaposed with the memory of his severe illness. “Two springs ago, my son / was so ill, he smelled bad-sweet,” and now his pockets are “full of petals and stones” (evidence chapter-0033-chunk-0001). The stones become markers of survival: the mundane act of doing laundry reveals that the child lives, that he is healthy enough to collect treasures again. They represent innocent delight, but for the mother they also hold the weight of relief and memory.
Character Connections
The Speaker
The speaker is the primary consciousness through which stones are perceived. She handles a sun-warmed stone in “Stone,” puts a glassy black stone in her pocket in “Talisman,” and contemplates rock strata in “Wife for Scale.” Her relationship to stones evolves: she learns from them, uses them to manage anxiety, and projects her grief onto their durability.
The Son
The speaker’s son appears as the collector of stones. In “Not Everything Is a Poem,” his pockets yield smooth and rough rocks that the mother finds while doing laundry. These stones are evidence of his vitality after a near-fatal illness. The poem underscores that no poem saved him, but he lives, and the stones are daily tokens of that fact. In “Talisman,” it is the son who “shows / his love like a creature that clever, / leaving treasures for my fingers / to worry against” (evidence chapter-0053-chunk-0001). The son’s gift of stones deepens the maternal bond and transforms the ordinary into the talismanic.
The Speaker’s Mother and Grandfather (Peripheral)
Stones are not directly associated with the speaker’s mother or grandfather in the provided evidence, but the poem “Talk of Horses” (chapter 16) mentions the grandfather’s country house and the grandmother’s dementia—no stones appear. The stone motif is most closely tied to the speaker and her children.
Theme Connections
Survival and Resilience After Loss
Stones in “Stone” survive breakage and produce fire; in “Wife for Scale” they outlast the speaker’s marriage and personal sadness. The motif reinforces the collection’s central theme of outliving one’s former life, as signaled by the epigraph’s paradox: “. . . and then I outlived my life.” Stones endure, and the speaker learns to do the same.
Motherhood and Parental Love
The stones in the son’s pockets bridge the poems “Not Everything Is a Poem” and “Talisman.” They are offered as love tokens, and the mother carries them as she carries the worry for her child. The act of pocketing a stone becomes a ritual of maternal care and hope.
Nature as Mirror and Metaphor
While stones are not living nature like goldenrod or starlings, they belong to the natural world. In “Stone,” the stone’s experience of rain and sunlight mirrors how the speaker’s eyelids “learn” to be stones. Nature provides a model for transformation: the stone accepts erosion and still produces fire.
Memory and the Past
In “Wife for Scale,” the rock strata are a “scientific / shorthand” for the years of a marriage—a memory compressed into matter. The stone holds the past without changing, even as the speaker’s grief erodes her. The motif suggests that the past, like a stone, can be held in the hand, turned over, and finally transformed.
Language, Naming, and Perception
Stones exist without human language. The stone in “Stone” does not name its experiences; it knows only through sensation. This parallels the poem “Goldenrod,” where the flower does not care about its name. Stones resist the speaker’s need to label, offering instead a wordless form of knowing tied to touch and time.
Four Study Questions and Answers
1. In the poem “Stone,” what does the stone learn from violence, and how does that lesson apply to the speaker?
The stone learns patience from rain drilling a pinhole, but it also learns transformation from violence: being scuffed down the pavement and broken against another stone until together they produce fire (evidence chapter-0018-chunk-0001). The speaker’s eyelids “learn to be stones,” suggesting she, too, must absorb the lessons of hardship and find the capacity to create light out of breaking.
2. Why does the speaker in “Talisman” call the stone a talisman, and what does it protect her from?
The stone is part of a collection of small objects that the speaker touches while walking alone at night. She calls it a talisman because handling it lets her “believe / almost anything” and to tell herself a story that “might end well” (evidence chapter-0053-chunk-0001). It protects her from fear, loneliness, and the uncertainty of her future after loss.
3. How does the image of stone in “Wife for Scale” relate to the speaker’s experience of grief?
The poem asks “what salt does to stone,” linking the corrosive effect of tears (salt) to the erosion of rock. The speaker suggests that grief acts like time on stone—slowly wearing it down, but also making it into a kind of record. The rock strata that “will not be the first / to reveal” the damage of sadness become a metaphor for how loss permanently marks a person (evidence chapter-0051-chunk-0001).
4. In “Not Everything Is a Poem,” what do the stones in the son’s pockets represent for the mother?
The stones are everyday objects that become symbols of survival. Two years earlier, the son was gravely ill; now he is healthy enough to collect rocks and petals. When the mother finds the stones in his laundry, they are proof that he lives. She acknowledges that “no poem kept his body from bruising,” but the stones are not poetic—they are real evidence of his continued presence (evidence chapter-0033-chunk-0001).
Conclusion
From patient teacher to protective talisman, from geological metaphor to childhood treasure, stones in Goldenrod are never static. They hold the speaker’s grief, her hope, and her daily labor of caring for her children. By tracking this single motif across the collection, readers can see how Maggie Smith uses an object of the natural world to express the slow, sometimes violent process of learning to live after loss. Stones may be silent, but in these poems they speak eloquently of endurance, transformation, and the ordinary magic of being alive.