use in a joke or a simple experiment, may suggest triviality, but it is so apt that I offer it, quite seriously, as an image for this reversal of meaning. Here, for instance, is a simple example, unfictitious, blunt and moving:
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 | | "I have none but God left now!" said a poor widow, who had been freely pouring out her troubles to an aged friend. By the poor widow's account, she had passed through deep waters of affliction, and endured, as she said, more than her "share of trouble." One of her two children had been drowned, and the other was then in a lunatic asylum. She had lost her brother and sister, and only three weeks before had buried her husband, being left alone, and in poverty. ''All the day long," said she, "I am grieving; and when I wake in the morning, my pillow is wet with tears. Everything seems to have melted away, and I have none but God left now."
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The author of this improving anecdote in
The Young People's Treasury
of 1896 points out to her (or, more probably, his?) readers that the poor widow could have no greater blessing than the Lord, who is her strength and shield, and urges her:
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| | Up and be doing, broken hearted pilgrim. Onward and upward, desolate widow. If thou hast God left, then hast thou more need to praise Him on an instrument of ten strings, than to hang thy harp on the willows.
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We are listening here to an exhortation that must have been delivered innumerable times in the cottages of the poor by well-meaning Christian comforters. The comforter in this case has seen that the duck of despair can be made a rabbit of consolation, and his hectoring tone is designed to produce this reversal. But the shift can run in either direction; and the old widow's remark, if we hear it as a response to the comforter, turns the rabbit into a duck, pointing out that God is a concept offered to those who have lost everything else.
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The old widow spoke with the inadvertent accuracy of despair. There must have been thousands of occasions when her remark would have sounded to the "broken hearted pilgrim" like a palpable hit. Since we have not many records of such actual visits, I will turn to a poem (anonymous, dating from the mid-century) that is clearly intended to serve the same function:
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