Part 1

FLOWERS OF PARNASSUS—XXI

A LITTLE CHILD’S WREATH

A LITTLE CHILD’S WREATH BY ELIZABETH RACHEL CHAPMAN. WITH ILLUSTRATIONS BY W. GRAHAM ROBERTSON ❧ ☙︎ ❧ ☙︎

JOHN LANE: PUBLISHER LONDON AND NEW YORK

MDCCCCIV

Wm. Clowes & Sons, Limited, Printers, London.

TO THE HOLY MEMORY OF A LITTLE CHILD AND TO ALL WHO HAVE MOURNED ONE

Introductory Note

Elizabeth Rachel Chapman, whose sonnets are now republished as a memorial volume, was born at Woodford, Essex, in February, 1850. She was descended through her father from a Yorkshire family associated, in many of its generations, with Whitby, and was connected through both father and mother with the Gurneys of Earlham. She was a great-grand-daughter of Elizabeth Fry, and was said to bear her a noticeable resemblance. That this likeness was also in her mind is attested by the “genius for benevolence” which she inherited from her ancestress, and by the tenderness of her affection and pity for all sufferers. In her _Book of Sibyls_ Mrs. Ritchie (Miss Thackeray) describes the Gurneys of Earlham as ordained to “a sort of natural priesthood.” Elizabeth Chapman was of that company of devoted spirits. Her love for children was boundless; and the _Wreath_ was consecrated to the memory of a little nephew, tenderly loved, in whose grave she now lies.

Miss Chapman’s writings were published between the years 1881 and 1897; at earlier date appeared her first work, _Master of All_, and at the later her last, _Marriage Questions in Modern Fiction_. Meanwhile she wrote what was perhaps her best-known work, _A Companion to “In Memoriam,”_ which drew from Tennyson the letter published in the _Life_: “I am grateful to you,” he says, “for your book ... excellent in taste and judgment. I like, too, what you say about Comtism. I really could almost fancy that page 95 was written by myself. I have been saying the same thing for years in all but the same words.” The passage treats of her perfect belief in immortality, and her sense of the mockery of life without a future. Again, he said that her commentary on his poem was “the best ever done.” _A Tourist Idyll and other Stories_, _The New Godiva and other Studies_, and _A Comtist Lover and other Studies_ had followed each other at intervals of a year or two, and in 1887 appeared a volume of verse, _The New Purgatory and other Poems_. _A Little Child’s Wreath_ was published in 1894 and reprinted in the year following.

There is a sense in which the simplest things of literature are the most difficult. The primary and original griefs and felicities of the heart need to-day something more than the original emotion, if poetry is to re-tell them. We know too well the formula in literature, whereas in the heart there is no formula; and thus the simple and primitive passion inclines to be more silent now than at any earlier day. Women no longer cry out at a funeral, and they say little when a child dies. The outcry has ceased to reach the sensibility of the hearer, and the phrase of grief has grown relaxed and dull by custom. Therefore it is with some of the courage of unconsciousness, and of a grief secluded in its own completeness, that a writer takes up the old history of the loss of a beloved child. For this sorrow is so constantly with us—with mankind—as to have become the ready subject of another kind of literature. The sentimentalist has used it, and the sincere mourner, who had at hand only a sentimentalist’s diction, has vainly essayed to convey the true feeling in the strained and depreciated phrase. When Elizabeth Rachel Chapman undertook her _Little Child’s Wreath_, she must have been well aware that two kinds of insincerity—the insincerity of the sentimentalist, which is insincerity of character, and that other sort which is merely insincerity of literature, and may be the disabled utterance of a true heart—had made much, especially in the course of the nineteenth century, of the death of children. But she forgot or disregarded all this unworthiness, for it can always be put aside; and freshly and tenderly arranged her thoughts and rhymed her phrases, writing out of a heart doubly sincere.

Obviously her work must have been done in the after-time of grief. Her sorrow for the little boy, which no mother could have excelled, had grown, when she began to write, not gentler—for we can hardly imagine it anything but gentle even in the first speechless hours—but more able to endure. She had the literary sincerity which led her to this expression, and made the craftsmanship of verse a natural exercise in the leisure of her loss. There is no rhetoric, no mere borrowing of excessive language, no violence of feeling or of diction. The laws of poetry, spiritual as well as metrical, control, or rather direct, the writer’s statement of love and loss, and she has given the right of this discipline to a form of verse—the Shakespearian sonnet—long neglected, but better fitted than the Petrarchan to the quantity and quality of English rhyme. The poems do not profess despair or revolt; they have the dignity of another spirit, older, newer, and doubtless more perdurable. Miss Chapman’s studies of _In Memoriam_ had instructed her in the responsibilities of a profound affliction.

Slightly, with the slightness of tenderness, she reveals the portrait of a wonderful child, one of whom the world was not worthy. His death at seven years old silenced the doubts, not whether he would be good, but whether he would be strong, whether he would have the force, the enterprise to face the strife, to grapple with the ill. The imminence of death was evidently visible in him as it has been in so many children who have died, as it is visible even in an infant who is not to survive infancy—a greater sweetness, a lovelier smile, not imagined by a mother’s memory after the child’s death, but noted during his life and during his health, and confessed then as the inevitable sign of near mortality. The portrait in _A Little Child’s Wreath_ is an exquisite one of an exquisite subject; and unconsciously the author—now that she too has passed from this world we may say it—has shown her own beautiful and noble soul to have been marked for a too early, though a later, passage.

ALICE MEYNELL.

_Our darling loved the meadows and the trees; Great London jarred him ; he was ill at ease And alien in the stir, the noise, the press; The city vexed his perfect gentleness._

_So, loving him, we sent him from the town To where the autumn leaves were falling brown, And the November primrose, pale and dim, In his own garden-plot delighted him._

_There, like his flowers, he would thrive and grow, We in our fondness thought. But God said: No, Your way is loving, but not wholly wise; My way is best—to give him Paradise._

Illustrations

“Content I leave with God what once I missed” _Frontispiece_ “Round me the city looms, void, waste and wild” _Page_ 23 “The jocund dance of wind-swept daffodils” „ 29 “From heaven to heaven, along an azure sea” „ 35 “O’er hill and dale, through waste and wood” „ 47 “Or heaven reflected in the serious face” „ 61

A LITTLE CHILD’S WREATH

I.

If, where thou walkest, dear, we too could walk, Close in the footsteps of our little saint, Now, on this earth ; and hear the angels talk, Living this very life (without life’s taint);

If, where thou goest, we could also go, Calm in the heavenly places, waiting not For death’s enfranchisement to overthrow The world in us, with every flaw and blot;

If thy small hands, that late were clasped in pain, Could clasp us every day to God and thee, Drawing us childwards, heavenwards again By their mere whiteness, everlastingly—

Then, humbled and consoled by so much grace, We might less hungrily desire thy face.

II.

Turn where I will, I miss, I miss my sweet; By my lone fire, or in the crowded way Once so familiar to his joyous feet, I miss, I hunger for him all the day.

This is the house wherefrom his welcome rang; These are the wintry walks where he and I Would pause to mark if a stray robin sang, Or some new sunset-flame enriched the sky.

Here, where we crossed the dangerous road, and where Unutterably desolate I stand, How often, peering through the sombre air, I felt the sudden tightening of his hand!

Round me the city looms, void, waste and wild, Wanting the presence of one little child.

III.

They bid me go forget my grief in Art; But, dear, what art is so aloof and so Distinct from thee that it can bring my heart The balm less all-embracing sorrows know?

Most surely not the painter’s; he, alas! With all the cunning of his craft divine, But disappoints my sight with what might pass For beauty—had I never looked on thine.

And music, what can music do but fill The trembling cup of longing to the brim? There is no music—save a child’s voice still Soft singing in the dusk the evening hymn.

My very art, my art of song—ah me! What is it now but one long sob for thee?

IV.

Move through the flames with us, transcendent form, As of the Son of God, in splendour move! Divide the anguish, breast with us the storm, Companion perfect grief with perfect love.

Shine through the burning, more refulgent thou Than fire with will subdued and mastered pain; Unharmed sustain us in the furnace now, And unconsumèd lead us forth again.

Word of the Highest! Mystic effluence Of That which calms us most, which helps us best! Compose our hearts, control our shattered sense, And, in our tribulation, give us rest.

Nerve us to watch the night of weeping through, Wisely to bear and nobly still to do.

V.

When spring comes and the long, unwonted snows Fade from the shrouded parks, and little green Adventurous points show where the crocus grows, And soon the dazzling phalanx will be seen—

Then, in your favourite “flower-walk,” my dear, Will troops of happy, living children play; But I the shouts, the laughter shall not hear, For I, dear heart, I shall not pass that way.

Was it not there that, bounding at my side, Last year in glorious sympathy with spring, You the first crocus suddenly espied With musical sweet cries of welcoming?

In less frequented spots, observed of none, My steps will stray, bereaved, forlorn, alone.

VI.

Our woodland poet who on Nature’s breast Lay wisely passive through the tranquil years, Wrote of the comrade whom he loved the best This praise: She gave me eyes, she gave me ears.

The jocund dance of wind-swept daffodils; The marvel of the nest the sparrows made; The secrets of the vales and of the hills The child had slowlier learned without her aid.

For me, my best instructor in the spells And wiles of Nature was a seven-years’ boy, To whom she had revealed the soul that dwells Beneath her careless outward robe of joy.

She knew him true; she made him one with her, Her little prophet and interpreter.

VII.

Deep-curving lashes, long and soft and dark; Deep gentle eyes that late were lit in heaven With God’s most sacred, most immaculate spark, To His elect among the children given;

Dark hair, where wistful hands laid on to bless Might pause, blest rather, overshadowèd By wings of angels and the blamelessness That crowned the innocent brow, the gracious head;

A cheek, where tremulous colour came and went, Transparent, sensitive, and smooth and fine; Well-chiselled features, mutely eloquent Of the great Master-workman’s touch divine—

These were the parts that made a perfect whole, The faultless temple of a spotless soul.

VIII.

More than the faith of childhood’s years he had; He did not doubt the depth of our desire That he should be perpetually glad, Nor dream our joy in him could ever tire.

He trusted all the world; the world was kind, And men and women loving; so he went To dwell with strangers undismayed in mind, And smiled, and did not deem it banishment.

In every heart he knew he found a home, A sanctuary in every human face; And when God, missing him in heaven, said: Come! It did not seem a solitary place.

I think he only flushed in sweet surprise To see the golden floor beneath his eyes.

IX.

So docile was my dear, so wise to know And love the tender rule he should obey, So childly tractable, withal so slow To childish wrath, so clean from passion’s sway,

The momentary doubt would sometimes rise If in the patient child reposed the will The man would need, the force, the enterprise To face the strife, to grapple with the ill.

I know not, but I know that manhood’s crown Was ever meekness, since the children’s friend Rode humbly royal through the palm-strewn town Unto a stern retributory end.

I see foreshadowed in that seven-years’ span The fulness of the stature of a man.

X.

From heaven to heaven[1], along an azure sea, Fanned by light airs, his little sail was set; Young angels went with him for company, And smiles and sunshine all the way he met.

His pretty mates and he had communings So fair, he could possess his soul in peace, And scorn to be disturbed by earthly things And chafed by trivial jars that soon must cease.

Why should he fret who was in sight of port Before almost he left his native shore, And did but change a well-beloved resort For one that would content and charm him more?

His great serenity to him was given Because his conversation was in heaven.

Footnote 1:

“Heaven lies about us in our infancy.”—_Wordsworth._

XI.

“Flowers in my garden! Flowers!” Love’s willing thrall, Responsive ever to her tyrant’s will, Sped through the house, nor heeded other call, To where, without, he stood and claimed her still.

“My garden” in the town required the grace He had to call it such—a dust-grimed square— But his content emparadised the place, And made it bud and blossom everywhere.

“Where are your flowers?” I mocked, for all around, Under the dismal walls, smoke-tainted green, Dim laurel, sad spent crocus on the ground, Sad ivy-tendrils, could alone be seen.

But while I mocked, laughing and kissing too— Lo! three small stems of scylla frail and blue.

XII.

Under the flowers he loved my flower lies, Pansy, and primrose pale, and violet, And in my heart the season’s sweetness dies, And all my joy is faded to regret.

My garden, mine, is his new-planted grave, Beneath the elm where birds, new-mated, sing, Whose green-tipped branches in the west-wind wave, And make their glad obeisance to the spring.

Tell me not spring is fair and fraught with hope, Bid me not go seek solace at her hands! Spring is my autumn, my year’s downward slope, And he is lying where the tall elm stands.

My only spring, my only hope is this— Soon, soon to follow where my treasure is.

XIII.

I know not by what sorcery of sleep Last night I held him radiant in my arms, Yet knew him soon to die, but did not weep, That he might think death blesses us, not harms.

In health, in love, in life, it seemed my lot To tell my lovely dear that he must go Where we who were so one with him could not, But needs must linger, if we would or no.

And musing how I best could keep him brave, And knowing well the hopes and fears of seven, And well the liveliest joy his heart could have, I smiled and told him flowers grew in heaven.

But while to his, athirst, my lips I pressed, The bright face fell; he thought to stay was best.

XIV.

“Ill-placed my heart; I love another’s child,”[2] Sings wistfully, and sighs, a bard of France; And ah! the hunger in the accents mild, The pain behind the smiling countenance!

Vexed with the ache of uncompanioned souls, His playmate at his mother’s side he sees, And scarce his tender jealousy controls When swift he springs upon his father’s knees.

Nay, poet, sing for joy, exult and sing! Thy dear one lives, though not for thee his heart; He lives, he breathes, he ails not anything; Watch him and love, and, praising God, depart.

’Tis but his father sweetly rivals thee, While death, alas! requires my love of me.

Footnote 2:

“J’ai mal placé mon cœur—j’aime l’enfant d’un autre.”—_Sully Prudhomme._

XV.

When in the twilight, round my lonely room, Leaving the pictured features that I love, My sad eyes, aching in the childless gloom, From one mute image to the other rove,

They dwell with most repose, most solacement On the fair stripling, strong, erect and calm, Of Andrea’s dream, from whose sweet lips “Repent!” Fell soft, I think, like odoriferous balm.

Deep, gentle eyes; pure, finely-moulded mouth, Like his but now I looked my last upon; He seems my angel grown to god-like youth, And my belovèd seems the young St. John.

With even such loveliness of soul and limb Time and God’s grace would have anointed him.

XVI.

Within a petal of the blessed Rose, Of Dante’s blessed Rose of Paradise, Sits my belovèd, radiant in repose, Love on his lips, and laughter in his eyes.

There, with the tender jocund company Of little hurrying folk[3] that haste to heaven, To him the sunshine of the life to be, To him the perfectness of joy is given.

Above the Flower’s mystic heart of light His rose-leaf curls, a perfumed, delicate nest, And whitely folds around his raiment white, Encircling him in beauty and in rest.

And in and out, like bees, the angels flit, With stores of bliss that he may feed on it.

Footnote 3:

“Questa festinata gente a vera vita.”—_Dante._

XVII.

If haply, dear, I may to thee attain, And be, I too, a child in heaven with thee,[4] Let me for evermore a child remain, And where thou dwellest, let my dwelling be.

A childish-lowly seat, but next thine own; If this, through perfect grace, should be my lot, I would not climb to any loftier throne, And loftier hopes I would remember not.

The elder life brought strife, not peace, on earth, The growing years dismay and hate and feud; To share for ever thy unconscious mirth— This were my heaven and my beatitude;

And all the lore that saints and sages teach Were foolishness beside thy prattling speech.

Footnote 4:

“I think we shall all be children to begin with, when we get to heaven.”—_Tennyson._

XVIII.

Like Mary’s mother, moving not her gaze, For all her singing, from her daughter’s smile, I would give endless thanks, give endless praise, And look on thee, thee only, all the while.

Close to thy side, my wound made whole again, I would not raise my eyes to where, serene, With Rachel, Ruth, and Beatrice, freed from pain, Sits regal, crowned with angels, heaven’s queen.

I would not even glance to where he stands, Proud at her feet, while loud his _Aves_ swell, With wings outspread, intent on her commands, The mighty Love[5], God’s herald, Gabriel.

How could I choose but ever feast on this, To see my heart’s delight again in bliss?

Footnote 5:

“Quell’ amor che primo li discese.”—_Dante._

XIX.

Where jaded London pauses, climbing north, For very weariness, and leaves large room For May in magic vesture to come forth And spread the hills with fern and yellow broom,

I go to breathe; I go, without my dear, And think how he, with ball or mimic bow, Danced up and down the happy slopes last year, His eye joy-kindled and his cheek aglow.

I hear him call my name; I see the far Blue distance shine beyond the hawthorn-flowers; I cry to God to give me back my star, My sweet, to give me back those golden hours.

How cool upon the heights the breezes blew! How swift into the air his arrow flew!

XX.

At midnight, in my dream, a cry was heard, As of the bridegroom’s coming. Through the black And solitary void no echo stirred Sounded this melody: He has come back!

A little moment, and behold once more I saw him, as he lived, before me stand, But to a deeper hue than erst it wore By largesse of the sun his cheek was tanned.

They said that gipsies had decoyed my love, And he, o’er hill and dale, through waste and wood, Where’er such pensioners of nature rove, Had shared their wandering life and found it good.

In careless joy glad day had followed day; And that was why he was so long away.

XXI.

And wilt thou never feel the hurrying tide Of virile blood pulse quick along thy veins, And stand magnificent in manly pride, And know a man’s fierce joys and glorious pains?

Strong vital thrills that lift the human up, Transfigured, rapt, to mix with the divine; Beats of the music, foamings of the cup, Filled to the splendid brim with youth’s new wine—

These wilt thou never taste—not taste the bliss Of our mere being, mere recurrent breath, Mere oneness with the life in all that is, The cosmic energies that laugh at death—

Not know the moments when some god in us Seems to exalt and crown our manhood thus?

XXII.

And when the god speaks, when potential force Springs into actual, as the bud to flower, And, like a storm-fed stream along its course, Rush the first promptings of creative power;

When from mere man we grow to maker, bard, Sage, prophet, scholar, artist; scale the heights; Assume the sceptre; drink the whole unmarred, Completed draught of richest life’s delights;

When we control and rule, inspire and lead, Mould laws for men, bid empires feel our sway, Probe nature’s secrets, wrest them to our need, Live glorious years in one heroic day—

This full fruition of our human lot Wilt thou for evermore inherit not?

XXIII.

Dying a child, thou wilt not see the birth Of beauty from the blossom-foam of May Again at all, or June enchant the earth With scent of hedge-rose and of new-mown hay.

No more the pageant of October woods Wilt thou behold, nor feel the mystical Hushed charm of Nature in her wintry moods Of weird white silence any more at all.