The Lanyard Theme

The speaker mreflects on a lanyard , a simple woven bracelet, he made for his mother at summer camp. He stumbled upon the word "lanyard" while going thourgh a dictionary. He was "ricocheting" off the "blue walls," showed that the speaker was happy of what he found. Thinking about the lanyard, the speaker seems upset for not ever being able to truly repay his mother for the sacrifices she makes for the speaker. He lists a litany of maternal gestures from being milked from the breast to being fully fed, clothed, and educated all at her expense. "And I gave her a lanyard," the narrator notes, indicating that nothing he can do could ever repay his mother for her work. Yet any guilt the narrator feels over giving his mother such a simple gift as a lanyard is quickly mitigated by the wisdom that a mother's love is pure and unconditional.

As the narrator states, the small gift "would be enough to make us even," (7th stanza). A free verse lyrical poem, "The Lanyard" relies on rich imagery, diction, and rhythm to convey a theme of gratitude and love for one's mother. The tone of this poem did start off fairly humorous, through the author's extreme comparisions which I thought had the similar extremities to that of a hyperbole. At the final stanza, the tone shifts to a more serious tone because the author is exposing how he really feels about his own gift in comparision to his mother's gifts. I think that when you are young (like pre teens), you think that things that you create on your own volition are completely sublime. However, when you are older, you realize that sometimes just making things won't be enough to impress your loved