Angels and Absences: Child Deaths in the Nineteenth Century (77 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 214
instance) pause after the sixth syllable, for regularity, whereas line 1 pauses after the second, to single out the opening word, "Farewell," and lines 2, 5 and 8 after the eighth, to highlight the two concluding monosyllables. The only slight technical imperfections are the two elisions in line 3, and the omission of definite articles in line 7, in both cases to keep the number of syllables down to ten. (The apparent awkwardness of the last line disappears when we realise that "like" is used in the sense of "please": may no earthly love-object mean too much to me.)
Twenty-two years later, Milton wrote an elegy "On the Death of a Fair Infant Dying of a Cough." Its stanzas are even more impeccable:
O fairest flower no sooner blown but blasted,
Soft silken primrose fading timelessly,
Summer's chief honour if thou hadst outlasted
Bleak winter's force that made thy blossom dry;
For he being amorous on that lovely dye
That did thy cheek envermeil, thought to kiss
But killed alas, and then bewailed his fatal bliss.
2
I omit the rest of the poem, whose complicated playing with classical mythology is of great interest to the student of Milton but seems frigidly ingenious in a poem on his dead niece. But the technical mastery is unquestionable and impressive: the difficult ABABBCC rhyme-scheme is adhered to faultlessly over eleven stanzas. This decorum is a kind of respect for the dead, like turning up carefully dressed for the funeral. The alliteration so carefully deployed in the first stanza is like a touch of extra elegance in the dress; once it is noticed, there is no need to insist on it, and it is much less prominent in the later stanzas.
We now have quite a number of poems on dead children from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, written by mothers, for the most part women of no great literary skill or aspirations, now unearthed and published by feminist scholars. Here for instance are two of the halting couplets of Mary Carey, who lost all but three of her many children:
In that then; this now; both good God most mild,
His will's more dear to me, than any child:
I also joy, that God hath gained one more;
To praise him in the heavens, than was before.
3
 
Page 215
Ann Bradstreet's poems are better known, and more competent. They include several on the death of grandchildren, such as these lines "In memory of my dear grand-child Elizabeth Bradstreet, who deceased August, 1665, being a year and a half old":
Farewell dear babe, my heart's too much content,
Farewell sweet babe, the pleasure of mine eye,
Farewell fair flower that for a space was lent,
Then ta'en away unto eternity.
Blest babe why should I once bewail thy fate,
Or sigh thy days so soon were terminate;
Sith thou art settled in an Everlasting state.
4
As a postscript to this book, I offer this short glimpse of earlier poetry on the death of children for several reasons. First, to qualify the assertion made in chapter 4 that the theme of child death does not appear in literature before the nineteenth century. This is true of fiction, but not altogether true of poetry, a fact that should not surprise us. Lyric poetry has always dealt with a subject matter both wider and narrower than narrative fiction: narrower in that it tends to deal in crises, wider in that it deals with every kind of crisis. We would therefore expect children to appear in poetry when they form a crisis in the lives of adultsthat is, when they are born and when they die. There may not be many poems on child death before the nineteenth century, but those that there are do not seem anomalous.
Second, this enables us to look again at cultural change. Why is it so clear that these poems belong to an earlier age? They do, after all, contain many of the ingredients of Victorian consolatory poems:
Think what a present thou to God hast sent,
And render him with patience what he lent.
Here is Milton telling the mother that she has suffered no real loss. Bradstreet expresses the same sentimentand so, as we saw in chapter 2, do Sigourney and "Theodora." Jonson's poem makes the claim, now familiar to us from Hemans, that it is better to die young and escape the snares of the world and the flesh. Yet we could not mistake the poems of Jonson or Milton or Bradstreet for post-Romantic poems.
Partly the reason lies in the technical accomplishment I have already commented on. The nineteenth century was not yet an age of free verse,

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