Angels and Absences: Child Deaths in the Nineteenth Century (28 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 69
reading that once, crossing the wild, he chanced (this verb is now important) to see the spirit of the wide moor, a child who died, perhaps, long ago, but whom you "may see" still upon the wild moor if you have good "chance." The best evidence that it is a ghost story is a crucial omission: the Fenwick note has her footsteps disappearing halfway across the bridge (originally the lock of a canal), and then adds that "the body however was found in the canal."
32
Lucy's body is never found: does that mean she died no ordinary death?
Yet what a matter-of-fact ghost story it would be: with no sense of mystery, except what arises, without comment, from the stark narrative details. All these poems have the curious matter-of-factness of
Lyrical Ballads
, retelling in simple language their incidents of common and rustic life and refusing conventional poetic ornament. They avoid all mention of religious belief (perhaps implying that the rural culture they depict is really pagan), and they avoid explicit consolation and abstract nouns. They render acceptance with Wordsworthian quirkiness, by mentioning some detail from everyday life and leaving the reader to draw the conclusion. In comparison with this, the later poets who so admired Wordsworth sound not only sentimental but labored.
Most of these later poets did not derive their Wordsworthian pathos from the
Lyrical Ballads
; one who did, once, was, surprisingly, Shelley. His ballad was written soon after the Peterloo massacre but was never published nor even properly finished, and it has no title; it was not even included by Mary Shelley in the posthumous poems and is still not to be found in his works. Most of the poem consists of an appeal from a starving mother and child for bread, addressed to "Young Parson Richards":
Give me a piece of that fine white bread
I would give you some blood for it
Before I faint and my infant is dead!
O give me a little bit!
Give me breadmy hot bowels gnaw
I'll tear down the garden gate
I'll fight with the dog,I'll tear from his maw
The crust which he just has ate
The "man of God" does not reply and walks on to look at the woman and child:
 
Page 70
The child lay stiff as a frozen straw
In the woman's white cold breast
And the parson in its dead features saw
His own to the truth expressed!
He turned from the bosom whose heart was broke
Once it pillowed him as he slept
He turned from the lips that no longer spoke,
From the eyes that no longer wept.
33
This is quite different from Shelley's poems about his own dead child, and indeed different from most of his poetry. It was written shortly after the Peterloo Massacre and comes from the same heated anger that produced
The Masque of Anarchy
and the song "To the Men of England"; it is in what Mary Shelley called his "popular, rude and unfinished" tone, but even in that tone he produced only this one ballad. Richard Holmes praises the poem for its directness, "as if the message of man's inhumanity to man had become so overwhelming in Shelley's mind that every intervening form politics, satire, even the decorum of poetry, had eventually to fall back before the simple, agonizing, human speech of suffering and need."
34
This description would fit some of the Lyrical Ballads, or the death of Margaret in the first book of
The Excursion
(especially in its earliest and bleakest version), and it seems to belong with the indignant politics of Shelley's
Address to the People on the Death of the Princess Charlotte
, which was quoted in the first chapter. But although the ballad is not only unpolished but also unfinished, it is not true that the decorum of poetry has fallen back before the simple agonizing human speech of suffering and need: the twist by which the dying woman's lament is addressed to her own seducer (a fact of which she seems to be unaware) gives the poem an ironic ending appropriate to a ballad but not to simple agonizing human speech. What was important about the hungry years that led up to Peterloo was that the hunger was a social phenomenon: children suffered not because they were the illegitimate offspring of a callous young gentleman but simply because they were poor. The irony with which the ballad ends singles out that mother and child as exceptional, and their suffering as individually caused, and so gives us a neater ballad by weakening the social statement. Too much plot, even too much irony, can be bad for political poetry.

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