Summary Of The Lanyard By Billy Collins

“The Lanyard”, by Billy Collins is a poem about the love of a mother and the love of a child. The main character, presently an adult male, speaks of his mother and his childhood memories of her. The focal memory of the character is a lanyard he made for his mother. Collins explains how the boy's simple gift, the lanyard, which symbolizes love, was enough to recompense her service of motherhood at a young age and presently how his words are enough compensation for her lifelong unconditional love.

The reading of the Lanyard takes place at the mother’s funeral service; the reader is the little boy in the poem. The speaker in first person addresses the crowd and commences to explain just how he came to write these simple words for his mother. Collins

states, in The Lanyard,
“The other day I was ricocheting slowly/ off the blue walls of this room/moving as if underwater from typewriter to piano/from bookshelf to an envelope lying on the floor/ when I found myself in the L section of the dictionary/ where my eyes fell upon the word lanyard/” (1-6).
The speaker goes on to state, that the mere reading of the word lanyard sent him spiraling back into time; he speaks of the summer camp, his camp counselor and his simple endeavor to make an impractical lanyard for his mother.

“I had never seen anyone use a lanyard/ or wear one, if that’s what you did with them/” (Collins 13-14). However, the uselessness of his gift did not deter him from making it; “strand over strand again and again/until I had made a boxy/ red and white lanyard for my mother” (Collins 16-18). Once recollecting the lanyard, the speaker addresses the crowd in the present explaining all his cherished mother had done for him. He spoke of his infant years, his sick days as a young boy, his mile stones, and his daily neediness stating his mother was there at his every life’s breath. “Here are thousands of meals, she said, /and here is clothing and a good education/ And here is your lanyard, I replied” (Collins 27-29). The speaker states, in the third person, that at the moment his mother received his gift with gracious humility, and kindness he knew she was acknowledging his simple gesture of love; his humble gesture was enough repayment for her years of unconditional love. “But the rueful admission that when she took the two-toned lanyard from my hand, I was as sure as a boy could be that this useless, worthless thing I wove/ out of boredom would be enough to make us even” (Collins

34-38).
As the young man speaking in first person addresses the crowd once more he acknowledges that there is indeed a worn truth; that through the prospective of an unprejudiced onlooker one can never truly repay the love of a mother; however, it is not the onlookers prospective that matters. “And here, I wish to say to her now, / is a smaller gift- not the worn truth/ that you can never repay your mother,” (Collins 31-33).
The last gesture the speaker gave his mother was a poem; in his poem, he recognizes the simple and unadulterated truth. That truth is, a gesture received in whatever form no matter how grand or humble is solely enough to a mother, if the gesture is one of innocent love.