Angels and Absences: Child Deaths in the Nineteenth Century (26 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

 
Page 64
terms. This intense conviction of the life of the spirit, along with a refusal to tie this to theological or philosophical terminology, is very Shelleyan; and when the second stanza provides some sort of answer, this is in pantheistic terms. The child is now a portion of the loveliness which Shelley has made more lovely.
Since I have suggested that Christian consolation may be glib (don't grieve, the child is better dead), I will here add that there is pantheistic glibness too:
What do you think has become of the young and old men
And what do you think has become of the women and children?
They are alive and well somewhere,
The smallest sprout shows there is really no death.
29
Whitman's
Song of Myself
is not about the death of anyone in particular, so the assertion "there is really no death" can be taken as delighted acceptance, not as insensitive denial; but the possibility of parody is looming. In Shelley's poem it could be argued that the repeated use of "let me" expresses doubt, or at least reveals how urgent is the poet's
need
to accept this pantheistic vision; but here the vision is complacently asserted.
Pantheism has no theology: trinity, grace, atonement, judgmentthese concepts are far too specific for an inarticulate world-spirit to concern itself with. Hence its poetic appealat any rate, its appeal to Romantic poetry, where a resistance to conceptualizing is central to the poetic enterprise. Christianity provides for the dead child a category into which it can be fitted and which serves as assurance that it is now better off; but categories and assurances do not belong with the direct expression of emotion, and a Romantic poem on a dead child may therefore convey the urgency of the question, Where and what are you now? without providing an answer. Indeed, the absence of an answer may be a way of insisting that any answer would be false to experience. That, I believe, is what Shelley does.
Shelley wrote another, even shorter poem to William:
Thy little footsteps on the sands
Of a remote and lonely shore;
The twinkling of thine infant hands,
Where now the worm will feed no more;
Thy mingled look of love and glee
When we returned to gaze on thee
 
Page 65
These images hover between literal and metaphoric. Is this a memory of William playing on the beach, or an image of William confronting eternity? (The latter would be common enough in Romantic poetry, Wordsworth's
Immortality
ode providing the best known example). The fourth line seems to make it clear that William is now dead. Referring to the present and future, it acts as a corrective to those living twinkling hands, which belong to the past, when William was still alive. The final couplet too could describe the dead infant but sounds much more like a living child, delighted to see its parents. We cannot settle any of this because the sentence is never finished, and this uncertainty fits with the absence of any clear structure of belief.
Both these poems are fragments; and Shelley has left us more fragments than any of the other Romantics. This may be due in part to the thoroughness with which his widow published his work or, in part, to his restless and impatient fluency in composing, but it is possible to see the
List der Vernunft
, the Hegelian cunning of history, at work here. His poems hover between Christian, Platonic, pantheistic, and atheistic thought, exploiting, sometimes to rich effect, the uncertainty of their conceptual status: their unfinished nature enables them to hover and provides an appropriate form for their intellectual indecisiveness.
Shelley was writing about his own children. William died on 7 June 1819, less than a year after the Shelleys' daughter Clara had died. Shelley's letters tell of his distress and make it even more clear that Mary was reduced to something like despair. If we now read the poems with a biographer's eye, especially a feminist biographer's, we can hardly avoid comparing Mary Shelley and Sara Coleridge, the wives who sat at home and watched their children die while their husbands traveled, in body and in spirit, leaving them at home or dragging them round Italy (which was worse?), assuring the world, and themselves, that though the death was cause for grief, grief could be comforted. Can Shelley's restless traveling and restless questioning be seen as an evasion of despairand did Mary feel that it was easy enough for him to cope? When Coleridge sent Sara his beautiful piece of wordplay, "Be rather than be called a child of God," did she find comfort in it? How did she feel when told that it was not even about Berkeley? "A few weeks ago," Coleridge wrote, ''an Englishman desired me to write an epitaph on an infant who had died before its Christening. While I wrote it, my heart with a deep misgiving turned my thoughts homeward."
30
 
Page 66
With Shelley as with Coleridge, turning to consider the poet's own children changes the contextand once again requires us to ask about relating poem to poet. Is such biographical criticism a healthy reminder of the human situation, or is it merely a way of being Philistine and dismissing the poetry? Coleridge's epitaph, once written, is "about" whatever grief the reader applies it to. Whether it is evidence that he did or did not feel grief about his own child (a question that is probably unanswerable) is a biographer's question, not a question about poetry.
Another Shelley fragment addresses these questions almost explicitly, especially if we hinge our reading of it on a single, crucial line.
My dearest Mary, wherefore hast thou gone,
And left me in this dreary world alone?
Thy form is here indeeda lovely one
But thou art fled, gone down the dreary road,
That leads to Sorrow's most obscure abode;
Thou sittest on the hearth of pale despair,
Where
For thine own sake I cannot follow thee.
This appears to start like a poem to the dead: leaving him in the dreary world alone, being separated from one's outward formthese sound like circumlocutions for dying. Even the last line could describe the survivor's feeling that he needs to live on, to protect the interests or the children or the reputation of the deceased. The only line that clearly indicates that Mary is alive is "Thou sittest on the hearth of pale despair." Not only does this seem to me the most powerful line in the poem, it transforms the lines around it. The hearth is a commonplace enough metaphor, but it gains a shock value from its function: instead of a lament for the dead under the guise of reproacha rhetorical strategy that goes back at least to Shakespeare ("noblest of men, woo't die?")it turns out to be an actual reproach, or at least a struggle not to reproach her for surrendering to grief. The last line, then, could be read as an attempt to convince himself that not following her into despair is a sign of his concern for her, not an inability to feel so deeply. This in turn could be related to gender: either "women indulge in the luxury of grief, men have to keep the world going," or "women grieve, men tell them to snap out of it."

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