Angels and Absences: Child Deaths in the Nineteenth Century (29 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 71
Catharine
A balladeven perhaps a lyrical balladimplies no personal involvement by the poet. It is a story which is allowed to tell itself. The Wordsworth of
Lyrical Ballads
is not the self-centered lyrical and introspective poet who cast such a long shadow over the ensuing century, and these poems invite no biographical context. But one poem does.
The Wordsworths had five children, who in effect had three parents, since William's sister Dorothy lived with them all through their married life. In 1812 the third and fourth children died within a few months of each other, Catharine (aged four) in June, and Thomas (aged six and a half) in December. There is no reason to doubt that all three parents were heartbroken, but their sorrow is very differently documented. Mary has left no written statements, but according to Dorothy she was plunged into depression by the loss. For four days after learning of Catharine's death (she was not present when it happened) she did not eat a quarter of a pound of food; after Thomas's death she seemed almost to give herself up to sadness:
She is as thin as it is possible to be except when the body is worn out by slow disease, and the dejection of her countenance is afflicting; I feel that it knits about the heart strings and will wear her away if there is not a turn in her feelings. The day through she is dejectedweeps bitterly at times, and at night and morning sheds floods of tears. All this I could bear to see in another I should trust to time, but in her case it must be struggled against or it will destroy her.
35
As we read of this mute despair, unable to get behind Dorothy's letters and listen to Mary's own voice, we seem to be in the same position as Dorothy herself, struggling to penetrate the veil of depression and make contact with the person. Dorothy herself, the energetic correspondent of the family, is eloquent and moving. She loved both children, especially Thomas, of whom she wrote:
Thomas was a darling in a garden, our best helper, steady to his work, always pleased. God bless his memory. I see him wherever I turn, beautiful innocent that he was. He had a slow heavenly up-turning of his large blue eyes that is never to be forgotten.
36
 
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She has no hesitation about accepting childhood innocence, and if Thomas is now an angel, she believes that is simple fulfillment of his angelic nature: "he was destined for a better world; that divine sweetness in his countenance marked him our as a chosen Spirit." Sitting down to write about him was, at times, too much for her:
Forgive me my dear Friend, for having been so long silent. My spirits have at times been weak, and I shrank from the thoughts of writing, persuading myself that tomorrow or the next day I should be more fit for it. The image of him, his very self, is so vivid in my mindit is with me like a perpetual presence; and at certain moments the anguish of tender recollections is more than I can bearfollowed by that one thoughtI shall never see him more"!
37
As with Catherine Tait, as with all the bereaved parents, we have only Dorothy's words: we can only pursue the elusive signified of her suffering through our knowledge that texts refer to experience (though of course they can refer to fictions too). Even her statements that she has had to put down her pen and pause before she could go on writing are statements from her pen. Until, that is, we come upon:
I have laid down the pen for some minutes, and I can write upon other matters less deeply interesting. Yet once moreblessings be on his gravethat turf upon which his pure feet so oft have trodOh!
38
and the editor adds a footnote telling us, "The MS is here blotted with a tear stain." With a shock we seem to confront the grief itself, free from all words.
But of course we do not. The blot on the page needs interpreting, just as words do: even assuming that de Selincourt is right, that it was a tear stain and not a drop of water, there is the possibility that Dorothy held the letter so that it would fall just at the right spot, or at least did not brush it away The blot, like words, is writing: moving as it is, it requires the same act of faith in the reality of the signified on our part. The whole of this book is such an act of faith.
And William? Placed next to Dorothy's, his references to the deaths are brief and formal. Apologizing to Samuel Rogers for putting off a business matter he writes, "I am obliged to defer it, and by a cause which you will be most sorry to hear, viz., the recent death of my dear and amiable son,
 
Page 73
Thomas."
39
To Basil Montagu he writes "two or three words onlybut words of the heaviest sorrow. My sweet little Thomas is no more."
40
Reading these laconic statements next to Dorothy's outpourings (far more extensive than I have quoted), we see afresh that there are two ways of deriving emotions from texts. As fellow human beings, we know that genuineness of feeling does not depend on eloquence, that Wordsworth's tight reticence may conceal a grief as strong as Dorothy's moving prose reveals. But for us as literary readers, language is the expression of emotion, and where the language is barren the reader will be less moved. Dorothy's letters
contain
a grief that William's only refer to. We respect him but we weep with her.
As literary readers? Not Dorothy but William is the poet. That more delayed, oblique, and, finally, more profound form of expression that is a poem came not from the effusive sister but from the reticent brother. But only once: Wordsworth who wrote so much, and so much about himself, left only one poem on the deaths of his children.
Surprised by joyimpatient as the Wind
I turned to share the transportOh! with whom
But Thee, deep buried in the silent tomb,
That spot which no vicissitude can find?
Love, faithful love, recalled thee to my mind
But how could I forget thee? Through what power
Even for the least division of an hour,
Have I been so beguiled as to be blind
To my most grievous loss!That thought's return
Was the worst pang that sorrow ever bore,
Save one, one only, when I stood forlorn,
Knowing my heart's best treasure was no more;
That neither present time, nor years unborn
Could to my sight that heavenly face restore.
41
So there are not two ways of deriving emotion from words, but three: the dutiful admission that the (male) writer of a stiff letter may be deeply moved; the immediacy with which the female's emotion rises from her intense and moving letters; and a different way in which emotion rises from a poem like this. We can even entertain the thought that little Catharine's death was worth while if it produced so splendid a poem as this (after all, we can add limply, she would by now be dead anyway).

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