Angels and Absences: Child Deaths in the Nineteenth Century (19 page)

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Authors: Laurence Lerner

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

BOOK: Angels and Absences: Child Deaths in the Nineteenth Century
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Page 47
And I thought, and still think myself justified in that notion, by the OVER-anxiety you expressed in your former letters concerning the children. Doubtless the affection found to exist between parents and
infant
children is a wise law of nature, a mere instinct to preserve Man in his infant state. But the moment you make this affection the creature of reason, you degrade reason. When the infant becomes a reasonable being, then let the affection be a thing of reason, not before. Brutes can only have an instinctive affection. (15 Mar 1799)
What he regards as ''mere instinct," the brutish element in human feeling, was for Sara the bond of nature. Poole, it is true, also speaks of "nature," but in his usage the term is merely condescending:
You will feel, and lament, the death of your child, but you will only recollect him a baby of fourteen weeks, but I am his Mother, and have carried him in my arms, and have fed him at my bosom, and have watched over him by day and by night for nine months. (24 Mar 1799)
It may be an accident of orthography, but it seems a significant one, that Sara capitalizes the word "Mother," whereas Poole, capitalizing the generic "Man," writes "parents" with a lower case.
A comparison that seems thrust upon us here is that between a mother's experience of losing an infant and a father's. This could easily turn into an unseemly wrangle ("I suffered more than you"), but in this case, as we shall soon see, it is important to pause and think about the question. There are two reasons for expecting a mother's grief to be the more intense. The biological reason, that giving birth and suckling results in an intense physical bond, will presumably be stronger the younger the infant; the social reason, that the mother will have seen much more of the child, will vary according to circumstances, but the facts of parental contact before (and even through) the twentieth century are almost certain to confirm it, and none more so than the case of Berkeley Coleridge.
Poole no doubt wished to pay a compliment to Sara when he assured Coleridge that she had not given way to grief:
Mrs Coleridge felt as a mother and, in an exemplary manner, did all a mother could do.
But she never forgot herself
. She is now perfectly well, and does not make herself miserable by recalling the engaging, though, remember, mere
 
Page 48
instinctive attractions of an infant a few months old. Heaven and Earth! I have myself within the last month experienced disappointments more weighty than the death of ten infants.
Feeling as a mother, we observe, is a feeling to be tolerated rather than admired, and perhaps only tolerated if it does not go too far. It is disappointing that Poole does not tell us what his "weighty" disappointments were, so that we could measure them against "mere instinct." He would no doubt have characterized his attitude as Stoical: orthodox Stoicism regards grief as mere irrationality, a philosophy that can never have had many female adherents.
And Coleridge? Absent during the whole episode, pouring out his loneliness and his solicitude in his letters, desperately worried when he does not hear from his wifeyet constantly postponing his return, not only to continue his researches but to go on a walking tour in the Harz mountains. While there, he wrote in the album at Elbingerode some lines of blank verse about how he longed to be back in England:
Yea, mine eye swam with tears: that all the view
From sovran Brocken, woods and woody hills,
Floated away, like a departing dream,
Feeble and dim! Stranger, these impulses
Blame thou not lightly.
He does not of course believe that a stranger will "blame" this outpouring of sentimental homesickness: blame attaches to acts, not to feelings, and the act he was avoiding in order to indulge these feelings was that of returning to the native land he so much missed, and where his bereaved wife was waiting. No "stranger" would know about that.
The view that to linger on the expression of sad emotions is culpable because it interferes with doing something positive (the view, crudely, that we ought to pull up our socks and stop whining) is hardly one that any reader of poetry can accept; but if we are looking for a case to which it could with some justice apply, we could hardly do better than this one.
On April 6 Coleridge had received the news of the death, and he wrote to Poole about his reaction:
A mass of Pain was brought suddenly and closely within the sphere of my perception. I read your letter in calmness, and walked out into the open fields,

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