Motherhood Quote by Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Coleridge isn’t praising motherhood as a warm abstraction; he’s consecrating it, turning a domestic role into a moral absolute. “A mother is a mother still” has the bluntness of a proverb: identity here isn’t a mood, a phase, or a social title that can be revoked. It’s durable, almost fated. The insistence matters because it pushes back against the period’s anxieties about “fallen” women, fractured families, and the uneven moral bookkeeping that so often excused men while branding women for life. In that economy, Coleridge draws a line: whatever else happens, the mother remains.

Then comes the dare: “The holiest thing alive.” Not “one of” the holiest, not “among the” most sacred - the holiest. It’s a superlative that elevates motherhood above institutions, above clerical authority, above the officially holy. Coleridge, a poet steeped in Christian language and Romantic reverence, is effectively relocating sanctity from church doctrine to embodied care. Holiness isn’t only in scripture or ceremony; it’s in the labor of keeping someone alive, in intimacy that precedes consent and outlasts approval.

The subtext is political as much as emotional. Romanticism loved to crown the “natural” as a rival to the mechanized, hierarchical modern world. Making the mother the pinnacle of living holiness is a quiet critique of the era’s public values: empire, industry, prestige. Coleridge’s line works because it sounds simple while smuggling in a reordering of what society should worship - not power, but the person who gives and sustains life.