Angels and Absences: Child Deaths in the Nineteenth Century (25 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 62
Morn camea blight had found
The crimson velvet of the unfolding bud,
The harp-strings rang a thrilling strain, and broke
And that young mother lay upon the earth
In childless agony. Again the voice
That stirred her vision:
"He who asked of thee,
Loveth a cheerful giver." So she raised
Her gushing eyes, and, ere the tear-drop dried
Upon its fringes, smiledand that meek smile
Like Abraham's faith, was counted righteousness.
26
God asks a mother to give up her child. This was not an unfamiliar idea among actual mothers: when Josephine Butler's son Stanley fell ill with diphtheria shortly after the death of her daughter, she "wondered whether God meant to ask us to give up another child so soon."
27
But when the idea is worked out as fully as it is in this poem, the result is startling: for something very like malice is being attributed to God. The mother asks what she can render God to show her gratitude for blessings; and the answer comes as if from the Spirit Ironicto render the blessing itself, the one gift that would remove the original motive of gratitude. There could even be a wordplay here on
render
; used by the mother in its common meaning of
hand over
; but picked up by God in its more basic etymological meaning of
give back
.
But not only malice: there is also bad faith in this God, as emerges in the use of the verbs: "send," "yield" and "give'' (implied by "giver"). The death of the child is brought about by God, not by the mother: God is not persuading her to kill the child; he is telling her that the child will die, and "giving" is precisely what she is not doing. Sigourney did not, of course, intend to write an indignantly anti-Christian poem; her God is orthodox, and the episode has a happy ending, as the mother smiles and is forgiven by God for any untoward thoughts she has had. And the last line points out the parallel with Abraham's sacrifice of Isaac. But this makes the poem more, not less, interesting as a cultural document. A poem which raises and then resolves a moral issue can never be in complete control of the reader's response. To raise a protest and then reply to it presents the author with an obvious dilemma: if the protest is not strong enough, the whole thing will look like a put-up job, but if it is strong and effective we may not be satisfied
 
Page 63
by the reply. Such dissatisfaction can come primarily from the reader, who may not share the poet's orthodoxy and is therefore harder to convince, or from the text itself, which may offer a more disturbing version of the protest than the poet had intended.
So this poem too can be read as a duck-rabbit. It is completely orthodox, but, if we read it while blinking at certain elements of familiarity, we can see it as subversive, leaving us with a malicious and tricky God, and silencing protest. The parallel with Abraham will, to the orthodox reader, remove all doubts; but to the skeptical or still grieving reader, it may suggest that the story of Abraham is yet another example of God's trickery.
William Shelley
My lost William, thou in whom
Some bright spirit lived, and did
That decaying robe consume
Which its lustre faintly hid,
Here its ashes find a tomb,
But beneath this pyramid
Thou art notif a thing divine
Like thee can die, thy funeral shrine
Is thy mother's grief and mine
Where art thou, my gentle child?
Let me think thy spirit feeds,
With its life intense and mild,
The love of living leaves and weeds
Among these tombs and ruins wild;
Let me think that through low seeds
Of sweet flowers and sunny grass
Into their hues and scents may pass
A portion.
28
"Where art thou?" Shelley here addresses the question to which the Hemans and the Sigourney poems answer, "He is an angel." Angels are important in this connexion and will be discussed at length in the next chapter. For the moment, I remark that this child, who when alive was a bright spirit in a decaying robe, can be seen in either Christian or Platonist

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