The poem centers on the figure of the “fond mother” (Line 1). For Gilded Age America, even as its culture was morphing into a new age fostered as much by the rise in science as industrialization, the home emerged as a stable measure of convention and the reassurance of tradition. Within the home, even as the culture was moving toward addressing the increasing demands for a more developed role for women, the figure of the mother symbolized calmness, continuity, sacrifice, love, and a reliable bond of trust motivated by compassion.

For Longfellow, then, the mother symbolized the ideal vehicle for delivering the harsh news of death’s reality. Gently but resolutely, the mother figure here escorts her reluctant child off to a well-deserved rest. During the time period of the poem, a father figure might be out of place in the ritual of bedtime; he was perceived as a sterner presence and guided by iron imperatives defined by the world outside the home. The mother, by contrast, within Gilded Age culture, spends the day with the child and understands how best to address the child’s perceptions of heading off to the uncertainty of bedtime. In this, the poem cushions the reality of death without negating it.