Angels and Absences: Child Deaths in the Nineteenth Century (17 page)

Read Angels and Absences: Child Deaths in the Nineteenth Century Online

Authors: Laurence Lerner

Tags: #History, #Modern, #19th Century, #Social Science, #Death & Dying, #test

And oh! sometimes in visions blest,
Sweet spirit! visit our repose;
And bear, from thine own world of rest,
Some balm for human woes!
What form more lovely could be given
Than thine to messenger of heaven!
1
 
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Is it not insensitive to insist, with the aid of so many exclamation marks, that the death of a child is not matter for grief but rather of acceptance, even rejoicing? Certainly when Hemans wrote to a bereaved mother in sober prose, she made no mention of rejoicing and gave no hint that the child was better dead:
I can feel deeply for the sorrow you communicate to me; it is one which Heaven has yet graciously spared me; but the imagination has often brought all the sufferings of that particular bereavement before me, with a vividness from which I have shrunk almost in foreboding terror. And I have too (though not through the breaking of
that
tie) those sick and weary yearnings for the dead, that feverish thirst for the sound of a departed voice or step, in which the heart seems to die away, and literally to become a "fountain of tears."
2
There is a difference, evidently, between writing about "the child" and a particular child. Rejoicing belongs to the imagined child death, tears are in order for an actual death. The writing of Hemans's poem is not in itself insensitive, but the act of showing it to a mother who had suffered such a loss might be.
There are many such poems. They all urge the parents not to weep because the dead child is now an angel ("and treads the sapphire floors of Paradise"), has left behind a happy memory ("the shrine of pleasing thoughts, soft as the scent of flowers"), and will through its death have a beneficial effect on the survivors ("They that have seen thy look in death / No more may fear to die").
3
The second and third of these consolations are compatible with Christianity, the first is explicitly Christian.
I propose to use these poems to examine the ways in which Christianity performs the function of consolation for the bereaved parent. What enables a poem to perform this function effectively is not its artistic excellence: so the discussion is not offered as literary criticism in the evaluative senseit is not primarily concerned with distinguishing good poems from bad. The reader who believes that judgment of quality is inescapable, and who therefore finds this omission unpardonable, must be asked to suspend condemnation, since I shall address this point explicitly in the last chapter (and occasionally before). The reader who rejoices in the omission, as freeing us from the ideological bias that disguises itself as aesthetic judgments,, is encouraged to rejoice, but may be in for disappointment later.
Furthermoreand this is trickierthe discussion is about the social and emotional function of religion and attempts to set aside the question
 
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of truth or falsehood. Whatever functions we attribute to religion can always be seen either as evidence that religion is a human invention or that it is a part of God's plan. And the agnosticism from which I have tried to write is not, in this case, simply a methodological strategy: it is a posture from which I do not intend to emerge. I fear that both Christian and atheist readers may find themselves dissatisfied with this, but there is no compensation that can be offered them except the intrinsic interest of the arguments.
Coleridge and the Dead Infant
"Be rather than be called a child of God"
Death whispered. With assenting nod,
Its head upon its mother's breast,
The Baby bowed without demur
Of the kingdom of the Blest
Possessor, not Inheritor
4
If we read this poem as orthodox Christian, which it clearly is, Death is seen as helpful, listening to the words of the baptism service and offering to go one better, and so doing the infant a good turn. But no such poem can protect itself against the defiantly atheist reader, and if we give it an unchristian reading (if we pretend, say, that it was written by Hardy) then Death becomes not helpful but sardonic, and the poem is a chuckle, saying, "If that's what they think, let's act on it." Reverse the interpretative context, in other words, and we can reverse the poem. Our knowledge that Coleridge (who was orthodox enough by 1799, when these lines were written) did not mean it that way, and would no doubt have been indignant at such a reading, is knowledge extrinsic to the text, telling us not that it will not bear this meaning but that responsible historians would not dream (or would only dream) of propounding it.
That this reversal of meaning, if we insisted on imposing it, would not be mere whim is confirmed by the "Epitaph on an Infant" of 1811 (by which time Coleridge was even more orthodox):
Its balmy lips the infant blest
Relaxing from its Mother's breast,
How sweet it heaves the happy sigh
Of innocent satiety!

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