God's Early Blossoms: November Poetry
Victorians are famous for their mourning customs and rituals, many of which seem morbid and macabre today. We perceive them as ghoulish, even. Today, death has been called “the last taboo,” and many feel extremely uncomfortable discussing it at all. Death was an everyday, public affair for our ancestors. There were many common customs that let everyone know a family was in mourning. They included draping one’s house in black, the use of special mourning stationery and wearing mourning clothing and jewelry for months and years. In contrast, it is a private affair today, even as more of our life details are shared on social media.
“Very numerous are the little mounds in most of our churchyards and burial places,” an anonymous author wrote in an 1863 book for bereaved mothers. “They tell of mortality and death, but also of immortality and life.”
The author wrote of the deaths of three of her children before the age of five, a daughter and two sons. Her book was a “comfort book,” a unique genre in Victorian times, filled with poetry, the descriptions of the author’s children and their deaths, and promises of Christian reunion. They were also known as consolation literature. What family did not know of what she wrote?
One in four children died before the age of five in the late nineteenth century. An examination of nearly any family tree reveals the deaths of children, but long gaps between births often means stillborns or the birth of babies who went unnamed before their deaths. By way of context, prior to 1900, infant mortality was 200 to 300 deaths per 1,000 live births. In 2020, there were seven deaths per 1,000 live births.
Today we are shocked to hear of a baby or preschool-aged child’s death, but our ancestors were resigned to the possibility of imminent death, and to the fact that there was little they could do to prevent it. Scholar Mary Gryctko writes that, “Childhood death was not only common but fundamental to the Victorian understanding of childhood.” [emphasis mine]
Beliefs and attitudes about childhood evolved from seeing children as miniature adults who helped the family economically as soon as possible, to a special developmental stage, a time of innocence, purity and helplessness, free of responsibilities and travails. There was a shift in the value of the child from laborer to "useless" but emotionally precious luxury item.
Of course, this idealization was a fantasy. Real, living children aren’t perfect models of innocence. They are usually noisy, boisterous, demanding, and don’t always do what they are told. Then too, the majority of Victorian children were not free of responsibility or sheltered from problems. They were economically productive. Most of them worked: in factories, on farms, as servants, and at least in their own homes.
But for Victorians, children took on angelic perfection in death. Death preserved children in perfect incorruption, such that British essayist Leigh Hunt, in a widely printed essay from the 1840s to the 1870s, told parents it was a blessing to lose a child. All children must die – either by growing up, or actual death. Death was the only way to preserve childhood. We still hear echoes of these beliefs in the words of “comfort” in those who say, “She was too good for this world,” or, “God needed an angel.” White middle- and upper-class children were the ones seen as exemplifying this perfection, and angelic, dead children were almost always described and depicted as blonde and blue-eyed.
There was also a Victorian viewpoint that the death of a child indicated a “providential dispensation” that could purify the parents’ souls. Children’s deaths were also a test of parents’ faith. Pass the test, and be reunited in heavenly paradise someday.
“Dead Baby Poems”
From 1872 to 1914, women in Utah edited and published The Women’s Exponent, a semi-official Mormon newspaper. Like nearly every newspaper of the day, it included poetry. It’s not surprising that in a quasi-official church publication, the most common poetry topics were religion and exhortations to morality. In a study of its poetry in its first ten years, Maureen Ursenbach Beecher found that the second most common topic was death, especially the death of loved ones and specifically children. It was common for friends to write poems to memorialize the death of the deceased. For decades newspapers featured enough memorial poetry to fill volumes. In the Catholic Church November is the Month of Remembrance. Accordingly, this month we feature a sample of children’s memorial poems.
The Empty Cradle
In the still quiet chamber
There’s an empty cradle bed,
With a print upon the pillow
Of a baby’s shining head.
‘Tis a fair and dainty cradle;
Downy soft, the pillows white
But within the blankets folded
Lie no little form tonight.
There were a total of four stanzas. As was not uncommon, this poem reappeared in other newspapers for years, presented as an original poem written for a specific child. One example of this is in the Perrysville, Ohio Journal in 1867 in which the poem is titled “Little Carrie,” and dedicated “To H.L. and M.C.,” signed by F.V.Y. The next poem is very typical.
In Memory of Little Clifford Hunt
By Mrs. E.B. Hunt
Go put the little clothes away.
The cradle where our darling lay.
The toys with which he used to play.
For baby’s dead.
Within our home no baby fair
With laughing eyes and sunny hair
And tender ways to soothe our cares,
For baby’s dead.
Ah no! Safe from the world’s alarms,
Sweetly sleep in Jesus arms
Living with more than mortal charms
He is not dead.
In Loving Remembrance of Little Lewie
[The following lines are from the pen of Mrs. Arlina Quinn, and are published by special request. –ED.]
Little Lewie, thou hast left us
For the bright and shining shore,
And our hearts are sore with anguish,
For thy presence never more.
But we know in realms of beauty,
Guided by a Father’s hand,
Jesus’ loving arms enfold thee,
Thou hast joined the angel band.
Farewell then, sweet little Lewie,
Just a little while farewell.
Soon we too shall cross the Jordan,
And with thee forever dwell.
Lewie was the son of Samuel and Maggie Cokely of Burlington, Kansas. He died on 12 Aug 1892 at the age of two. “All that loving hands could do were of no avail,” a newspaper item says, using a term that appeared in obituary after obituary for decades.
Gertrude Blanche Rickets
A dear little baby was buried today –
The little white casket to the grave has passed by.
And over the house once smiling and gay,
A shadow has passed to dim the sky.
A dear little baby was laid out to rest,
White as a snowdrop and dear to behold;
And the cheeks and the lips, and the
Eyebrows were pressed
With kisses as hot as the loved one was cold.
Sorrowful mother, do not weep,
Let hope’s whisperings quiet your cry;
Your sweet little baby is only asleep
In the little white casket that just passed by.
Gertrude was one year, seven months and 25 days old. Victorian obituaries usually counted the precise length of children’s lives to the day. She was the daughter of Leander and Sarah Rickets of Colby, Kansas.
In Loving Remembrance of Little Johnnie
The little crib is empty now,
The little clothes laid by,
A mother’s hope, a father’s joy,
In Death’s cold arms doth lie,
Go, little pilgrim to thy home on
Yonder blissful shore.
We miss thee here, but soon will come
Where thou hast gone before.
Johnnie was the son of J.P. and Fannie Greany of Cincinnati, who died 8 Sept 1886 at age nine months and four days. This was a stanza from an often-used poem. The family of little Harry Larkins of Lanark, Illinois used the entire poem when he died in October 1890 of cholera infantum, “terminating in spinal meningitis,” at age 20 months. The opening stanza is:
One less at home,
The charmed circle broken – a dear face,
Missed day by day from its usual place,
But cleansed, saved, perfected by grace,
One more in heaven.
In Loving Remembrance of Little Eddie Parker
Weep not, papa, mama, though I leave you,
Dry each tear, repress each sigh;
We will meet and love each other
In the fadeless by and by.
I’ll beg the keys of the warden,
And watch at the portal door,
I’ll be the first to meet you,
When you reach the golden shore.
Eddie “brightened the home with his sweet and loving ways,” for nine months, “entwining himself around the fond parents’ hearts.” His parents were Mr. and Mrs. J.S. Parker of Jacksonville, Alabama.
Sources:
Newspapers:
“The Empty Cradle,” Plymouth Democrat (Plymouth, Indiana), 21 Nov 1861, p. 1.
“In Loving Remembrance,” The Cincinnati Enquirer, 19 Sept 1886, p. 4.
“In Loving Remembrance of Eddie Parker,” Jacksonville Republican (Jacksonville Alabama), 26 Jan 1889, p. 1.
Gertrude Blanche: Thomas County Cat (Colby, Kansas), 13 Match 1890, p. 5.
“In Memory of Little Clifford Hunt,” Morristown Republican (Morristown, Tennessee), 28 May 1909, p. 1.
Other:
Beecher, Maureen Ursenbach. “Poetry and the Private Lives: Newspaper Verse on the Mormon Frontier,” Brigham Young University Studies, Vol. 25 No. 3 (Summer 1985), pp. 55-65.
“Infant Mortality and Life Expectancy,” The First Measured Century, PBS , https://www.pbs.org/fmc/timeline/dmortality.htm
Our Children’s Rest; Or, Comfort For Bereaved Mothers, London: James Nisbit & Co., 1863.
Gryctko, Mary. “Eternal Innocence: The Victorian Cult of the Dead Child,” (Doctoral dissertation), University of Pittsburgh, 2020, https://d-scholarship.pitt.edu/38875/19/Gryctko%20Final%20ETD.pdf
Hoffert, Sylvia D. “A Very Peculiar Sorrow”: Attitudes Toward Infant Death in the Urban Northeast, 1800-1860,” American Quarterly, Vol. 39, No. 4 (Winter 1987), pp. 601-616.
Pasulka, Diana Walsh. “A Communion of Little Saints: Nineteenth-Century American Child Hagiographies,” Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion, Vol. 23, No. 2 (Fall 2007), pp. 51-67.
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