Kelly is an instructor of creative writing and composition at two colleges in Illinois. In the following essay, he looks at several of the poems from Mistral's book Ternura and how they successfully capture the idea of motherhood.

The poems in Gabriela Mistral's second collection, Ternura, are supposed to be about mothers and their relationships with their children. The author called them "colloquies the mother holds with her own soul, with her child, and with the Earth Spirit around her, visible by day and audible by night." Addressing the wide, emotion-laden subject of motherhood is an ambitious thing to try, ten times so because Mistral was not a mother herself. Like Emily Dickinson, she knew that she knew what she knew about her subject and did not feel the need to justify herself with the weak excuse of experience, which proves nothing (you can't, for instance, expect...