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The poetry of Christina Rossetti: A 19th-century analysis

This appreciation and in-depth analysis of the poetry of Christina Rossetti (1830–1894), the esteemed English romantic poet, is excerpted from Essays by Arthur Christopher Benson, published by William Heinemann (London), 1896.

Rich in insights and references to other poets of the period, this essay and the book from which it came are in the public domain.

 The Poetry of Christina Rossetti

Few poetical writers lived more consistently in the shadow of death than Christina Rossetti. There was a certain taint of doom about her writings from the first, and something of the hollow-eyed listlessness of low vitality, that characterizes the artistic work of the school to which she primarily belonged, is never absent for very long together from her writings.

There is extant a portrait of her at about the age of thirty-six, by her brother, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, which will be familiar to many readers.

After subtracting from it the languorous mannerism of the artist, there remains in the wide, pathetic eyes, the wistful uplifting of the eyebrows and the depressed curves of the stately mouth something dreary and uncomforted about the whole aspect.

And a later photograph has the same regretful patience. For many years she had been an invalid, and lived a life of singular seclusion in Torrington Square, one of the dreariest and least romantic of London thoroughfares. Latterly she had been an acute sufferer from a wearing disease, borne with silent fortitude.

One after another, her mother, and the two aunts to whom she devoted her tenderest care, were taken from her; and her brother William Michael, the critic and editor of Shelley, was the only survivor of the brilliant circle in which her life began.

Her fervent religious faith, inspired and matured by desolate experience, had nothing dreary or undecided about it; it issued in a sedulous dutifulness and a patient devotion that were the best proof of its sincerity.

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Learn more about Christina Rossetti
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Early artistic development

Her artistic nature developed early, and before she was seventeen, a little volume entitled Verses by Christina Rossetti, dedicated to her mother, was printed by her maternal grandfather, Gaetano Polidori, at his private printing-press in Regent’s Park … Here her precise delineation of natural objects, and a certain delicate antique charm, are distinctly observable.

But in 1850, under the nom-de-plume of Ellen Alleyne, she contributed verses to the Germ, that fertile organ of the pre-Raphaelites, Holman Hunt, Thomas Woolner, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, and others.

Of these lyrics we shall presently have occasion to quote one, “Dreamland,” which shows how early her lyrical gift had matured. And indeed it may be said that of the seven poems which she contributed to the Germ, at least five are among her best lyrics.

In 1862 appeared Goblin Market and other Poems; and in this, as is so often the case with the work of poets done before the thirty-fifth year—the year that has so often been fatal to genius—she reached the zenith of her poetical powers.

Not that much of her later work was not excellent, and would have sufficed for a definite reputation; but it may be said that twenty or thirty of these earlier poems are those by which she will be best remembered.

  Words creating vivid scenes

Some writers have the power of creating a species of aerial landscape in the minds of their readers, often vague and shadowy, not obtruding itself strongly upon the consciousness, but forming a quiet background, like the scenery of portraits, in which the action of the lyric or the sonnet seems to lie.<

I am not now speaking of pictorial writing, which definitely aims at producing, with more or less vividness, a house, a park, a valley, but lyrics and poems of pure thought and feeling, which have none the less a haunting sense of locality in which the mood dreams itself out.

Christina Rossetti’s mise-en-scène is a place of gardens, orchards, wooded dingles, with a churchyard in the distance.

The scene shifts a little, but the spirit never wanders far afield; and it is certainly singular that one who lived out almost the whole of her life in a city so majestic, sober, and inspiriting as London, should never bring the consciousness of streets and thoroughfares and populous murmur into her writings.

She, whose heart was so with birds and fruits, cornfields and farmyard sounds, never even revolts against or despairs of the huge desolation, the laborious monotony of a great town. She does not sing as a caged bird, with exotic memories of freedom stirred by the flashing water, the hanging groundsel of her wired prison, but with a wild voice, with visions only limited by the rustic conventionalities of toil and tillage.

The dewy English woodland, the sharp silences of winter, the gloom of low-hung clouds, and the sigh of weeping rain are her backgrounds; and it is strange that one of Italian blood should write with no alien longings for warm and sun-dried lands.

Robert Browning, who brings into sudden being by a word, the whole atmosphere of the fiery Italian summer, the terraced vines, the gnarled olive, the bulging plaster where the scorpion lies folded, still yearned for an English spring morning.

But Christina Rossetti, unlike even her brother, had no leanings to the home of her race.

  An affinity with Elizabeth Barrett Browning

The critic of future ages, if he were confronted with the works of Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Miss Rossetti, and a history of their lives, would, it may be said, acting on internal evidence only, assign such poems as Aurora Leigh and the Casa-Guidi Windows to Miss Rossetti, and trace the natural heart-beats which still thrilled her for the home of her origin, and equally attribute the essentially English character of Miss Rossetti’s feeling to the English poetess.

It is said that Miss Rossetti never visited Italy, and had no wish to do so. It is a strange thing that the two greatest of English poetesses should have, so to speak, so passionately adopted each other’s country as their own.

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Dante Gabriel Rossetti illustration from Goblin Market
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The sensuous imagery of fruit

The only point in which Christina Rossetti’s imagery may be held to be tropical, is in the matters of fruit. In “Goblin Market,” in the “Pageant of the Months,” even in such a poem as the “Apple Gathering,” and in many other poems she seems to revel in descriptions of fruit which the harsh apples and half-baked plums of English gardens can hardly have suggested.

Keats is the only other English poet who had the same sensuous delight in the pulpy juiciness of summer fruit. It will be found, I think, that in the majority of English poets fruit is quite as often typical of immaturity and acidity as of cooling and delight. And even Stevenson couples the onion and the nectarine as the noblest fruits of God’s creation. But the …

Plump unpecked cherries
Bloom down-cheeked peaches,
Wild free-born cranberries,
Pineapples, strawberries,
      All ripe together
      In summer weather.

… are hardly the produce of the rushy glen where the leering goblin merchants tramped and whisked up and down.

  The land of dreams and visions

This leads me to speak of another region which Christina Rossetti trode with an eager familiarity—the land of dreams and visions. With the exception of Coleridge, who, in his three great poems, moved in that difficult and turbid air with so proud a freedom, it may be said that no English poet except Christina, her brother, and James Thomson, have ever successfully attempted such work.

Mr. Yeats, it is true, of younger writers, has passed beyond the threshold of that eerie and unsubstantial land; but with him it is the melancholy Celtic twilight, the home of old earth-spirits, neither high nor hopeful, but with a bewildered sadness, as of discrowned kings and discredited magicians.

To a characteristically English poet such as Wordsworth, such a region, as he betrays in the memorable sonnet, “The world is too much with us,” was a place of desperate soulless horror.

But Christina Rossetti, in “Goblin Market,” and the “Ballad of Boding,” as her brother in “Rose Mary,” and “Sister Helen,” passed successfully along the narrow road of allegory. In English hands such subjects are apt to pass with fatal swiftness into the ludicrous and the grotesque.

Witness the merry horned demons and the cheerful oddities, so far aloof from fantastic horror, of our English gargoyles and stall-work, the straddling and padding forms of Bunyan. What is needed is a sort of twilight of the soul, a simple directness such as children value, a sense of grave verisimilitude, hopelessly alien from the business-like Puritan mind.

  The creation of the modern ballad

Then, too, there is the singular creation of the modern ballad, initiated by Coleridge, and carried to supreme perfection by D. G. Rossetti, and in a less degree by his sister; that vague, dream-laden writing which, using old forms of austere simplicity, charges them with a whole world of modern sicknesses and degenerate dreams.

Matthew Arnold went so passionately in search of in a poem like the “Scholar Gipsy,” and yet could contrive no inner picture of the haunted wanderer’s thoughts, but only touch in the external aspects of the phantom traveller, as seen unexpectedly by human toilers and pleasure-seekers engaged in homely exercises.

But Miss Rossetti, in such poems as “Brandons Both,” and in a supreme degree in the exquisite ballad of “Noble Sisters,” which we will quote in extenso, laid a secure hand on the precise medium required:—

NOBLE SISTERS

“Now did you mark a falcon,
Sister dear, sister dear,
Flying toward my window
In the morning cool and clear?
With jingling bells about her neck.
But what beneath her wing?
It may have been a ribbon,
Or it may have been a ring.”
“I marked a falcon swooping
At the break of day;
And for your love, my sister dove,
I ‘frayed the thief away.”

“Or did you spy a ruddy hound,
Sister fair and tall,
Went snuffing round my garden bound,
Or crouched by my bower wall.
With a silken leash about his neck;
But in his mouth may be
A chain of gold and silver links,
Or a letter writ to me?”
“I heard a hound, highborn sister,
Stood baying at the moon;
I rose and drove him from your wall,
Lest you should wake too soon.”

“Or did you meet a pretty page,
Sat swinging on the gate;
Sat whistling, whistling like a bird—
Or may be slept too late—
With eaglets broidered on his cap,
And eaglets on his glove?
If you had turned his pockets out,
You had found some pledge of love.”
“I met him at this daybreak,
Scarce the east was red;
Lest the creaking gate should anger you,
I packed him off to bed.”

“Oh patience, sister. Did you see
A young man tall and strong,
Swift-footed to uphold the right
And to uproot the wrong,
Come home across the desolate sea
To woo me for his wife?
And in his heart my heart is locked,
And in his life my life.”
“I met a nameless man, sister.
Who loitered round our door;
I said: ‘Her husband loves her much.
And yet she loves him more.'”

“Fie, sister, fie; a wicked lie,
A lie, a wicked lie.
I have none other love but him,
Nor will have till I die;
And you have turned him from our door,
And stabbed him with a lie.
I will go seek him through the world
In sorrow till I die.”
“Go seek in sorrow, sister,
And find in sorrow too;
If thus you shame our father’s name,
My curse go forth with you.”

  The inner life with autobiographical savor

But such writings, exquisite as they are, are but the outworks and bastions of the inner life. One could almost wish that Christina Rossetti were further removed by time and space, and were passed beyond the region of letters, biographies, and personal memoirs, which before long will possibly begin “to tear her heart before the crowd.”

Nowadays, in the excessive zest for personal information, which received such shameful incentives from Carlyle, and still more shameless encouragement from his biographers, we may thank God, as Tennyson did, that there are yet poets of whom we know as little as we know of Shakespeare, about whom even the utmost diligence of researchers has disinterred but a handful of sordid and humiliating facts.

But Miss Rossetti’s poems are so passionately human a document as to set one tracing by a sort of inevitable instinct the secrets of a buoyant and tender soul, sharpened and refined by blow after blow of harsh discipline. The same autobiographical savor haunts all her work as haunted the eager dramas of Charlotte Brontë.

Step by step it reveals itself, the sad and stately development of this august soul. The first tremulous outlook upon the intolerable loveliness of life, the fantastic melancholy of youth, the deep desire of love, the drawing nearer of the veiled star, disappointment, disillusionment, the over-powering rush of the melancholy, that had waited like a beast in ambush for moments of lassitude and reaction.

Then was the crisis: would the wounded life creep on on a broken wing, or would the spiritual vitality suffice to fill the intolerable void? It did suffice; and the strength of the character that thus found repose was attested by the rational and temperate form of faith that ministered to the failing soul.

  Austerity and religious piety

At such a moment the sensuous spirit is apt to slide into the luxurious self-surrender that Roman Catholicism permits. To me, indeed, it is a matter of profound surprise that Miss Rossetti did not fall into this temptation; but just as she had, with instinctive moderation, chosen the cool and temperate landscape of her adopted country, so the National Church of England, with its decorous moderation, its liberal generosity, its refined ardour, was the chosen home of this austere spirit.

The other danger to be feared was that of a bitter renunciation of old delights, a sojourn in the wilderness of some arid and fantastic pietism. An elder sister of Miss Rossetti’s indeed sought the elaborate seclusion of a religious house; and had Dante Gabriel Rossetti—to use the uncouth Puritan phrase — “found religion,”” there is no doubt that he too would have reverted to the Church of his fathers.

But Miss Rossetti became, as Mr. Edmund Gosse has, in a penetrating criticism in the Century Magazine (June 1893) pointed out, the poetess, not of Protestantism, but of Anglicanism.

We must retrace our steps for a moment, and touch first on Miss Rossetti’s love lyrics. Very occasionally she allowed herself, in the early days, to speak of love with the generous abandon of an ardent spirit, as in the exquisite lyric where she still lingers in the pictorial splendor of the pre-Raphaelite school.

A BIRTHDAY

My heart is like a singing bird
Whose nest is in a watered shoot;
My heart is like an apple-tree
Whose boughs are bent with thickset fruit;
My heart is like a rainbow shell
That paddles in a halcyon sea;
My heart is gladder than all these,
Because my love is come to me.

Raise me a daïs of silk and down;
Hang it with vair and purple dyes;
Carve it in doves and pomegranates
And peacocks with a hundred eyes;
Work in it gold and silver grapes,
In leaves and silver fleur-de-lys;
Because the birthday of my life
Is come, my love is come to me.

 

 Sonnets of love clouded by a sense of loss

As a rule, her thoughts of love are clouded by some dark sense of loss, of having missed the satisfaction that the hungering soul might claim. Take two sonnets:

REMEMBER

Remember me when I am gone away,
Gone far away into the silent land,
When you can no more hold me by the hand,
Nor I half turn to go, yet turning stay.
Remember me when no more day by day
You tell me of our future that you planned;
Only remember me. You understand,
It will be late to counsel then or pray.
Yet, if you should forget me for a while,
And afterwards remember, do not grieve;
For if the darkness and corruption leave
A vestige of the thoughts that once I had,
Better by far you should forget and smile,
Than that you should remember and be sad.

AFTER DEATH

The curtains were half-drawn, the floor was swept
And strewn with rushes; rosemary and may
Lay thick upon the bed on which I lay,
Where through the lattice ivy-shadows crept.
He leaned above me, thinking that I slept
And could not hear him; but I heard him say,
“Poor child, poor child!” and as he turned away
Came a deep silence, and I knew he wept.
He did not touch the shroud, or raise the fold
That hid my face, or take my hand in his,
Or ruffle the smooth pillows for my head.
He did not love me living; but once dead
He pitied me; and very sweet it is
To know he still is warm, though I am cold.

In these sonnets the veil of some pathetic possibility unfulfilled is drawn reverently aside, and the soul-history is written in plain characters. But again the poet is more reticent; and only in sad allusions, incessantly recurring, in unhappy hints, she reveals the hunger of the spirit, the hand that was held out in hope for the heavenly bread, and closed upon a stone.

After this the mood becomes one of reluctant certainty, with little bitterness or recrimination; the surrender is accepted, but the thought of what might have been is for ever present.

  A stoic note of pure desolation

Then, as in some desolate estuary, the tide begins to set strongly in from the vast and wholesome sea. Sometimes a stoic note is struck of pure desolation, as in the noble lyric;—

UP-HILL

Does the road wind up-hill all the way?
Yes, to the very end.
Will the day’s journey take the whole long day?
From morn to night, my friend.

But is there for the night a resting-place,
A roof for when the slow dark hours begin?
May not the darkness hide it from my face?
You cannot miss that inn.

Shall I meet other wayfarers at night,
Those who have gone before?
Then must I knock, or call when just in sight?
They will not keep you standing at that door.

Shall I find comfort, travel-sore and weak?
Of labour you shall find the sum.
Will there be beds for me and all who seek?
Yea, beds for all who come.

But this bitterness is not enduring. From the first, even in what we may call her Pagan days, the sense of responsibility and deliberate choice had been hers. We venture to quote the noble allegory, “A Triad,” omitted, in some vigorous revulsion of spirit, from her later writings:

Three sang of love together, one with lips
Crimson, with cheeks and bosom in a glow,
Flushed to the yellow hair and finger tips;
And one there sang who, soft and smooth as snow,
Bloomed like a tinted hyacinth at a show;
And one was blue with famine after love,
Who, like a harpstring snapped, rang harsh and low
The burden of what those were singing of.
One shamed herself in love; one temperately
Grew gross in soulless love, a sluggish wife;
One famished, died for love. Thus two of three
Took death for love, and won him after strife.
One droned in sweetness like a fattened bee;
All on the threshold, yet all short of life.

 

 

In service of passionate religious fervor

Into the service, then, of her religion, Miss Rossetti brought all the passionate fervour of her unsatisfied heart, all her intense enthusiasm after art, and passed steadily, we believe, to the forefront of all English religious poetry.

She had not, perhaps, the curious felicity of George Herbert, but, on the other hand, she had the balanced simplicity that stepped clear of his elaborate conceit, the desperate euphuism of Crashaw, and even the pathetic refinement of Henry Vaughan.

Again, her passionate imagery put her ahead of the soft beauty of Keble, too apt to degenerate into a honied domesticity; above the pensive richness of Charles Wesley, whose Puritan outlook made his hand unsure; above even the divine ardour of Newman, whose technical dogmatism and paucity of human experience limited his range.

With Miss Rossetti it was as the strong man armed, in the Gospel parable. When the stronger victor came, the spoil was annexed, and the ancient pride of defense was applied by a more dexterous hand. Can there be found in the rank of English religious poetry two more majestic lyrics than …

A BETTER RESURRECTION

I have no wit, no words, no tears;
My heart within me like a stone
Is numbed too much for hopes or fears.
Look right, look left, I dwell alone;
I lift mine eyes, but, dimmed with grief,
No everlasting hills I see;
My life is in the falling leaf.
O Jesus, quicken me.

My life is like a faded leaf,
My harvest dwindled to a husk;
Truly my life is void and brief
And tedious in the barren dusk.
My life is like a frozen thing,
No bud nor greenness can I see.
Yet rise it shall—the sap of spring.
O Jesus, rise in me.

My life is like a broken bowl,
A broken bowl that cannot hold
One drop of water for my soul
Or cordial in the searching cold.
Cast in the fire the perished thing;
Melt and remould it, till it be
A royal cup for Him, my King.
O Jesus, drink of me.

Or the third of the “Old and New Year Ditties?”

Passing away, saith the World, passing away;
Chances, beauty, and youth sapped day by day;
Thy life never continueth in one stay,
Is the eye waxen dim, is the dark hair changing to grey
That hath won neither laurel nor bay?
I shall clothe myself in Spring and bud in May;
Thou, root-stricken, shall not rebuild thy decay
On my bosom for aye.
Then I answered, Yea.

Passing away, saith my Soul, passing away,
With its burden of fear and hope, of labour and play.
Hearken what the past doth witness and say:
Rust in thy gold, a moth is in thine array,
A canker is in thy bud, thy leaf must decay.
At midnight, at cockcrow, at morning, one certain day,
Lo! the Bridegroom shall come and shall not delay;
Watch, thou, and pray.
Then I answered, Yea.

Passing away, saith my God, passing away;
Winter passeth after the long delay;
New grapes on the vine, new figs on the tender spray,
Turtle calleth turtle in Heaven’s May.
Though I tarry, wait for Me, trust Me, watch and pray,
Arise, come away, night is past, and lo! it is day,
My love, My sister, My spouse, thou shalt hear Me say.
Then I answered, Yea.

The last-mentioned poem is indeed worthy of a technical remark. It is written in an irregular dactylic metre, the longer lines having a beat of five accents, the shorter of three or two; but the whole scheme of rhyme, all three stanzas—a common form with Miss Rossetti—is actually built upon one single rhyme throughout.

  “Christmas Carol”

For such a conception one would be inclined to predicate certain failure; the simplicity is too rude and daring; but consider the result. For sheer simplicity again note her “Christmas Carol”:

In the bleak mid-winter
Frosty wind made moan,
Earth stood hard as iron,
Water like a stone;
Snow had fallen, snow on snow,
Snow on snow,
In the bleak mid-winter,
Long ago.

Our God, Heaven cannot hold Him,
Nor earth sustain;
Heaven and earth shall flee away,
When He comes to reign.
In the bleak mid-winter
A stable-place sufficed
The Lord God Almighty,
Jesus Christ.

Enough for Him whom cherubim
Worship night and day,
A breastful of milk
And a mangerful of hay.
Enough for Him whom angels
Fall down before,
The ox and ass and camel
Which adore.

Angels and archangels
May have gathered there,
Cherubim and seraphim
Throng’d the air,
But only His mother,
In her maiden bliss.
Worshipped the Beloved
With a kiss.

What can I give Him,
Poor as I am?
If I were a shepherd,
I would bring a lamb.
If I were a wise man,
I would do my part;
Yet what can I give Him?
Give my heart.

… which, from beginning to end, has the very note of a Tuscan Adoration.

This exquisite felicity did not continue. It could not be expected that it should. Miss Rossetti had always been capable in her writings of complete and unexpected failures; in many of her lyrics everything is there—style, feeling, harmony, but somehow the mood does not quicken into poetry.

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12 Poems by Christina Rossetti, Victorian Poet
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The Face of the Deep

In later life she published an immense volume, the Face of the Deep, extending to over 550 pages, a devotional commentary on the “Apocalypse.” This is written in uncouth and shapeless prose, as a rule; and though it has many suggestive and striking thoughts, and some images of exquisite beauty, yet it is a singular monument of failure.

Scattered up and down in it are several hundred religious lyrics, which are never exactly commonplace, but seldom satisfactory. I venture to quote one, which may serve as a fair sample, p. 119, chap. iii. v. 10:

Wisest of sparrows, that sparrow which sitteth alone
Perched on the housetop, its own upper chamber, for nest.
Wisest of swallows, that swallow which timely hath flown
Over the turbulent sea to the land of its rest;
Wisest of sparrows and swallows, if I were as wise!

Wisest of spirits, that spirit which dwelleth apart,
Hid in the Presence of God for a chapel and nest,
Sending a wish and a will and a passionate heart
Over the eddy of life to that Presence in rest,
Seated alone and in peace till God bids it arise.

One word must, perhaps, be said here on the question of her technical skill and metrical handling. With characteristic humility, she was herself of opinion, as appears from a letter to Mr. Gosse, that the inspiration of her sonnets was wholly derived from her brother. That was an entire, if affectionate, mistake.

There is no real or even apparent connection. There is none of the intricate scheming, the subtle inter-weaving of tremulous tones which make D. G. Rossetti’s sonnets the most musical of English sonnets. But the consequence is that Dante Gabriel’s sonnets are not in the least characteristically English.

The sonnets of Milton and Wordsworth may be regarded as the true examples of English sonnet-writing, stiff, grave, sober, drawing through precise and even stilted metres to a sonorous and rhetorical close. D. G. Rossetti’s are exotic work essentially.

But that is not true of Miss Rossetti’s. They are simple and severe. In such a sequence as “Monna Innominata,” there is not a trace of the luscious and labyrinthine ecstasies of her brother’s work; they are indeed far more like Mrs. Browning’s Sonnets from the Portuguese.

Trust me, I have not earned your dear rebuke;
I love, as you would have me, God the most;
Would lose not Him, but you, must one be lost;
Nor with Lot’s wife cast back a faithless look,
Unready to forego what I forsook.

This say I, having counted up the cost.
This, though I be the feeblest of God’s host,
The sorriest sheep Christ shepherds with His crook.
Yet while I love my God the most, I deem
That I can never love you overmuch;
I love Him more, so let me love you too;
Yea, as I apprehend it, love is such,
I cannot love you if I love not Him,
I cannot love Him if I love not you.

This severity is not the same in her lyrics; it will be obvious from the specimens already quoted, that, if anything, the metrical scheme is not strict enough. In many lines will be found a deficiency of syllables, musically compensated for by variety of accent; many of her rhymes are almost licentious in their vagueness.

For some reason I have found that they do not offend the critical judgment, as Mrs. Browning’s do. Whether it is that the directness and simplicity of the feeling overpowers all minute fastidiousness, or whether they are all part of the careful artlessness of the mood, is hard to determine.

But the fact remains, that none but the most inquisitive of critics would be likely to hold that the art is thereby vitiated.

 

 

The “singer of Death”

Lastly, of all the great themes with which Miss Rossetti deals, she is, above all writers, the singer of Death. Whether as the eternal home-coming, or the quiet relief after the intolerable restlessness of the world, or as the deep reality in which the fretful vanities of life are merged, it is always in view, as the dark majestic portal to which the weary road winds at last.

True, in one of the earliest and most beautiful of all her lyrics, the sense of dissatisfied loneliness is carried on beyond the gate of Death.

AT HOME

When I was dead, my spirit turned
To seek the much-frequented house;
I passed the door, and saw my friends
Feasting beneath green orange boughs;
From hand to hand they pushed the wine,
They sucked the pulp of plum and peach;
They sang, they jested, and they laughed,
For each was loved of each.

I listened to their honest chat.
Said one: “To-morrow we shall be
Plod, plod along the featureless sands,
And coasting miles and miles of sea.”
Said one: “Before the turn of tide,
We will achieve the eyrie-seat.”
Said one; “To-morrow shall be like
To-day, but much more sweet.”

“To-morrow,” said they, strong with hope.
And dwelt upon the pleasant way.
“To-morrow,” cried they one and all,
While no one spoke of yesterday.
Their life stood full at blessed noon;
I, only I, had passed away.
“To-morrow and to-day,” they cried;
I was of yesterday.

I shivered comfortless, but cast
No chill across the tablecloth;
I all-forgotten shivered, sad
To stay and yet to part how loth.
I passed from the familiar room,
I, who from love had passed away.
Like the remembrance of a guest
That tarrieth but a day.

If we can but read into it the hallowing radiance of a tremulous hope, the poem, which as Ellen Alleyne she contributed to the Germ in the days of her unregenerate energies, may be her requiem now:

DREAM LAND

Where sunless rivers weep
Their waves into the deep,
She sleeps a charmed sleep
Awake her not.
Led by a single star.
She came from very far
To seek where shadows are
Her pleasant lot.

She left the rosy morn,
She left the fields of corn.
For twilight cold and lorn
And water springs.
Through sleep, as through a veil,
She sees the sky look pale,
And hears the nightingale
That sadly sings.

Rest, rest, a perfect rest
Shed over brow and breast;
Her face is toward the west,
The purple land.
She cannot see the grain
Ripening on hill and plain;
She cannot feel the rain
Upon her hand.

Rest, rest, for evermore
Upon a mossy shore;
Rest, rest, at the heart’s core
Till time shall cease.
Sleep that no pain shall wake;
Night that no morn shall break
Till joy shall overtake
Her perfect peace.

 

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“A Death in the Desert” — a short story by Willa Cather

Originally published in Scribner’s Magazine in 1903, “A Death in the Desert” is a widely anthologized short story by Willa Cather. The full text of its final, 1920 version is presented here.

Cather had two occasions to self-edit the story. It appeared in her first collection of stories, The Troll Garden (1905), and then in Youth and the Bright Medusa (1920). All told, she edited it down from about ten thousand words to seven thousand, polishing it to its essence.

“A Death in the Desert” tells of a man named Everett who, at the start of the story, is on a train from Holdrege, Nebraska to Cheyenne, Wyoming. Bearing a strong resemblance to his older brother Adriance, a well-known musician, he is forever burdened by the comparison.

Story of the Week (Library of America) relates a bit of the history of how Cather came to write the story, and her real-life inspirations. 

The Jumping Off Place: Facing Death in “A Death in the Desert” by Kari A. Running is one of the most thorough analyses you’ll find. It begins:

… “A Death in the Desert,” like the Browning poem from which it takes its title, raises the question of how to respond to death and thus, how to live. This story, especially in The Troll Garden (1905) text, on which I will draw, is one of Cather’s most densely allusive, crowded with references to art, literature, music, architecture, philosophy, and, as William James would put it, the “varieties of religious experience.” 

Make sure to follow the link above if you’re studying this story or wish to delve deeply into its meanings. Here are full texts of two more short stories from Youth and the Bright Medusa you can link to: 

“ Paul’s Case: A Study in Temperament ” (plus an analysis )“ A Wagner Matinee ”

The following full text of “A Death in the Desert” (which is in the public domain) is the final, 1920 version. Long paragraphs have been broken up to improve the readability, especially on small screens and devices.

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Learn more about Willa Cather
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“A Death in the Desert” by Willa Cather

Everett Hilgarde was conscious that the man in the seat across the aisle was looking at him intently. He was a large, florid man, wore a conspicuous diamond solitaire upon his third finger, and Everett judged him to be a traveling salesman of some sort. He had the air of an adaptable fellow who had been about the world and who could keep cool and clean under almost any circumstances.

The “High Line Flyer,” as this train was derisively called among railroad men, was jerking along through the hot afternoon over the monotonous country between Holdredge and Cheyenne. 

Besides the blond man and himself the only occupants of the car were two dusty, bedraggled-looking girls who had been to the Exposition at Chicago, and who were earnestly discussing the cost of their first trip out of Colorado. 

The four uncomfortable passengers were covered with a sediment of fine, yellow dust which clung to their hair and eyebrows like gold powder. It blew up in clouds from the bleak, lifeless country through which they passed, until they were one color with the sage-brush and sand-hills. 

The grey and yellow desert was varied only by occasional ruins of deserted towns, and the little red boxes of station-houses, where the spindling trees and sickly vines in the blue-grass yards made little green reserves fenced off in that confusing wilderness of sand.

As the slanting rays of the sun beat in stronger and stronger through the car-windows, the blond gentleman asked the ladies’ permission to remove his coat, and sat in his lavender striped shirtsleeves, with a black silk handkerchief tucked about his collar. He had seemed interested in Everett since they had boarded the train at Holdredge; kept glancing at him curiously and then looking reflectively out of the window, as though he were trying to recall something. 

But wherever Everett went, some one was almost sure to look at him with that curious interest, and it had ceased to embarrass or annoy him. Presently the stranger, seeming satisfied with his observation, leaned back in his seat, half closed his eyes, and began softly to whistle the Spring Song from Proserpine, the cantata that a dozen years before had made its young composer famous in a night. 

Everett had heard that air on guitars in Old Mexico, on mandolins at college glees, on cottage organs in New England hamlets, and only two weeks ago he had heard it played on sleigh-bells at a variety theatre in Denver. There was literally no way of escaping his brother’s precocity. 

Adriance could live on the other side of the Atlantic, where his youthful indiscretions were forgotten in his mature achievements, but his brother had never been able to outrun Proserpine,—and here he found it again, in the Colorado sand-hills. 

Not that Everett was exactly ashamed of Proserpine; only a man of genius could have written it, but it was the sort of thing that a man of genius outgrows as soon as he can.

Everett unbent a trifle, and smiled at his neighbor across the aisle. Immediately the large man rose and coming over dropped into the seat facing Hilgarde, extending his card.

“Dusty ride, isn’t it? I don’t mind it myself; I’m used to it. Born and bred in de briar patch, like Br’er Rabbit. I’ve been trying to place you for a long time; I think I must have met you before.”

“Thank you,” said Everett, taking the card; “my name is Hilgarde. You’ve probably met my brother, Adriance; people often mistake me for him.”

The traveling-man brought his hand down upon his knee with such vehemence that the solitaire blazed.

“So I was right after all, and if you’re not Adriance Hilgarde you’re his double. I thought I couldn’t be mistaken. Seen him? Well, I guess! I never missed one of his recitals at the Auditorium, and he played the piano score of Proserpine through to us once at the Chicago Press Club. I used to be on the Commercial there before I began to travel for the publishing department of the concern. So you’re Hilgarde’s brother, and here I’ve run into you at the jumping-off place. Sounds like a newspaper yarn, doesn’t it?”

The traveling-man laughed and offering Everett a cigar plied him with questions on the only subject that people ever seemed to care to talk to him about. At length the salesman and the two girls alighted at a Colorado way station, and Everett went on to Cheyenne alone.

The train pulled into Cheyenne at nine o’clock, late by a matter of four hours or so; but no one seemed particularly concerned at its tardiness except the station agent, who grumbled at being kept in the office over time on a summer night. 

When Everett alighted from the train he walked down the platform and stopped at the track crossing, uncertain as to what direction he should take to reach a hotel. A phaeton stood near the crossing and a woman held the reins. She was dressed in white, and her figure was clearly silhouetted against the cushions, though it was too dark to see her face. 

Everett had scarcely noticed her, when the switch-engine came puffing up from the opposite direction, and the head-light threw a strong glare of light on his face. The woman in the phaeton uttered a low cry and dropped the reins. Everett started forward and caught the horse’s head, but the animal only lifted its ears and whisked its tail in impatient surprise. 

The woman sat perfectly still, her head sunk between her shoulders and her handkerchief pressed to her face. Another woman came out of the depot and hurried toward the phaeton, crying, “Katharine, dear, what is the matter?”

Everett hesitated a moment in painful embarrassment, then lifted his hat and passed on. He was accustomed to sudden recognitions in the most impossible places, especially from women.

While he was breakfasting the next morning, the head waiter leaned over his chair to murmur that there was a gentleman waiting to see him in the parlor. Everett finished his coffee, and went in the direction indicated, where he found his visitor restlessly pacing the floor. His whole manner betrayed a high degree of agitation, though his physique was not that of a man whose nerves lie near the surface. 

He was something below medium height, square-shouldered and solidly built. His thick, closely cut hair was beginning to show grey about the ears, and his bronzed face was heavily lined. His square brown hands were locked behind him, and he held his shoulders like a man conscious of responsibilities, yet, as he turned to greet Everett, there was an incongruous diffidence in his address.

“Good-morning, Mr. Hilgarde,” he said, extending his hand; “I found your name on the hotel register. My name is Gaylord. I’m afraid my sister startled you at the station last night, and I’ve come around to explain.”

“Ah! the young lady in the phaeton? I’m sure I didn’t know whether I had anything to do with her alarm or not. If I did, it is I who owe an apology.”

The man colored a little under the dark brown of his face.

“Oh, it’s nothing you could help, sir, I fully understand that. You see, my sister used to be a pupil of your brother’s, and it seems you favor him; when the switch-engine threw a light on your face, it startled her.”

Everett wheeled about in his chair. “Oh! Katharine Gaylord! Is it possible! Why, I used to know her when I was a boy. What on earth —“

“Is she doing here?” Gaylord grimly filled out the pause. “You’ve got at the heart of the matter. You know my sister had been in bad health for a long time?”

“No. The last I knew of her she was singing in London. My brother and I correspond infrequently, and seldom get beyond family matters. I am deeply sorry to hear this.”

The lines in Charley Gaylord’s brow relaxed a little.

“What I’m trying to say, Mr. Hilgarde, is that she wants to see you. She’s set on it. We live several miles out of town, but my rig’s below, and I can take you out any time you can go.”

“At once, then. I’ll get my hat and be with you in a moment.”

When he came downstairs Everett found a cart at the door, and Charley Gaylord drew a long sigh of relief as he gathered up the reins and settled back into his own element.

“I think I’d better tell you something about my sister before you see her, and I don’t know just where to begin. She travelled in Europe with your brother and his wife, and sang at a lot of his concerts; but I don’t know just how much you know about her.”

“Very little, except that my brother always thought her the most gifted of his pupils. When I knew her she was very young and very beautiful, and quite turned my head for a while.”

Everett saw that Gaylord’s mind was entirely taken up by his grief. “That’s the whole thing,” he went on, flecking his horses with the whip.

“She was a great woman, as you say, and she didn’t come of a great family. She had to fight her own way from the first. She got to Chicago, and then to New York, and then to Europe, and got a taste for it all; and now she’s dying here like a rat in a hole, out of her own world, and she can’t fall back into ours. We’ve grown apart, some way—miles and miles apart—and I’m afraid she’s fearfully unhappy.”

“It’s a tragic story you’re telling me, Gaylord,” said Everett. They were well out into the country now, spinning along over the dusty plains of red grass, with the ragged blue outline of the mountains before them.

“Tragic!” cried Gaylord, starting up in his seat, “my God, nobody will ever know how tragic! It’s a tragedy I live with and eat with and sleep with, until I’ve lost my grip on everything. You see she had made a good bit of money, but she spent it all going to health resorts. It’s her lungs. I’ve got money enough to send her anywhere, but the doctors all say it’s no use. 

She hasn’t the ghost of a chance. It’s just getting through the days now. I had no notion she was half so bad before she came to me. She just wrote that she was run down. Now that she’s here, I think she’d be happier anywhere under the sun, but she won’t leave. 

She says it’s easier to let go of life here. There was a time when I was a brakeman with a run out of Bird City, Iowa, and she was a little thing I could carry on my shoulder, when I could get her everything on earth she wanted, and she hadn’t a wish my $80 a month didn’t cover; and now, when I’ve got a little property together, I can’t buy her a night’s sleep!”

Everett saw that, whatever Charley Gaylord’s present status in the world might be, he had brought the brakeman’s heart up the ladder with him.

The reins slackened in Gaylord’s hand as they drew up before a showily painted house with many gables and a round tower. “Here we are,” he said, turning to Everett, “and I guess we understand each other.”

They were met at the door by a thin, colorless woman, whom Gaylord introduced as “My sister, Maggie.” She asked her brother to show Mr. Hilgarde into the music-room, where Katharine would join him.

When Everett entered the music-room he gave a little start of surprise, feeling that he had stepped from the glaring Wyoming sunlight into some New York studio that he had always known. He looked incredulously out of the window at the grey plain that ended in the great upheaval of the Rockies.

The haunting air of familiarity perplexed him. Suddenly his eye fell upon a large photograph of his brother above the piano. Then it all became clear enough: this was veritably his brother’s room. 

If it were not an exact copy of one of the many studios that Adriance had fitted up in various parts of the world, wearying of them and leaving almost before the renovator’s varnish had dried, it was at least in the same tone. In every detail Adriance’s taste was so manifest that the room seemed to exhale his personality.

Among the photographs on the wall there was one of Katharine Gaylord, taken in the days when Everett had known her, and when the flash of her eye or the flutter of her skirt was enough to set his boyish heart in a tumult. Even now, he stood before the portrait with a certain degree of embarrassment. 

It was the face of a woman already old in her first youth, a trifle hard, and it told of what her brother had called her fight. The camaraderie of her frank, confident eyes was qualified by the deep lines about her mouth and the curve of the lips, which was both sad and cynical. Certainly she had more good-will than confidence toward the world. 

The chief charm of the woman, as Everett had known her, lay in her superb figure and in her eyes, which possessed a warm, life-giving quality like the sunlight; eyes which glowed with a perpetual salutat to the world.

Everett was still standing before the picture, his hands behind him and his head inclined, when he heard the door open. A tall woman advanced toward him, holding out her hand. As she started to speak she coughed slightly, then, laughing, said, in a low, rich voice, a trifle husky: “You see I make the traditional Camille entrance. How good of you to come, Mr. Hilgarde.”

Everett was acutely conscious that while addressing him she was not looking at him at all, and, as he assured her of his pleasure in coming, he was glad to have an opportunity to collect himself. He had not reckoned upon the ravages of a long illness. 

The long, loose folds of her white gown had been especially designed to conceal the sharp outlines of her body, but the stamp of her disease was there; simple and ugly and obtrusive, a pitiless fact that could not be disguised or evaded. 

The splendid shoulders were stooped, there was a swaying unevenness in her gait, her arms seemed disproportionately long, and her hands were transparently white, and cold to the touch. The changes in her face were less obvious; the proud carriage of the head, the warm, clear eyes, even the delicate flush of color in her cheeks, all defiantly remained, though they were all in a lower key—older, sadder, softer.

She sat down upon the divan and began nervously to arrange the pillows. “Of course I’m ill, and I look it, but you must be quite frank and sensible about that and get used to it at once, for we’ve no time to lose. And if I’m a trifle irritable you won’t mind?—for I’m more than usually nervous.”

“Don’t bother with me this morning, if you are tired,” urged Everett. “I can come quite as well tomorrow.”

“Gracious, no!” she protested, with a flash of that quick, keen humour that he remembered as a part of her. 

“It’s solitude that I’m tired to death of—solitude and the wrong kind of people. You see, the minister called on me this morning. He happened to be riding by on his bicycle and felt it his duty to stop. 

The funniest feature of his conversation is that he is always excusing my own profession to me. But how we are losing time! Do tell me about New York; Charley says you’re just on from there. How does it look and taste and smell just now? I think a whiff of the Jersey ferry would be as flagons of cod-liver oil to me. Are the trees still green in Madison Square, or have they grown brown and dusty? 

Does the chaste Diana still keep her vows through all the exasperating changes of weather? Who has your brother’s old studio now, and what misguided aspirants practice their scales in the rookeries about Carnegie Hall? What do people go to see at the theatres, and what do they eat and drink in the world nowadays? Oh, let me die in Harlem!” 

She was interrupted by a violent attack of coughing, and Everett, embarrassed by her discomfort, plunged into gossip about the professional people he had met in town during the summer, and the musical outlook for the winter. 

He was diagramming with his pencil some new mechanical device to be used at the Metropolitan in the production of the Rheingold, when he became conscious that she was looking at him intently, and that he was talking to the four walls.

Katharine was lying back among the pillows, watching him through half-closed eyes, as a painter looks at a picture. He finished his explanation vaguely enough and put the pencil back in his pocket. As he did so, she said, quietly: “How wonderfully like Adriance you are!”

He laughed, looking up at her with a touch of pride in his eyes that made them seem quite boyish. “Yes, isn’t it absurd? It’s almost as awkward as looking like Napoleon—But, after all, there are some advantages. It has made some of his friends like me, and I hope it will make you.”

Katharine gave him a quick, meaning glance from under her lashes. “Oh, it did that long ago. What a haughty, reserved youth you were then, and how you used to stare at people, and then blush and look cross. Do you remember that night you took me home from a rehearsal, and scarcely spoke a word to me?”

“It was the silence of admiration,” protested Everett, “very crude and boyish, but certainly sincere. Perhaps you suspected something of the sort?”

“I believe I suspected a pose; the one that boys often affect with singers. But it rather surprised me in you, for you must have seen a good deal of your brother’s pupils.” 

Everett shook his head. “I saw my brother’s pupils come and go. Sometimes I was called on to play accompaniments, or to fill out a vacancy at a rehearsal, or to order a carriage for an infuriated soprano who had thrown up her part. But they never spent any time on me, unless it was to notice the resemblance you speak of.”

“Yes,” observed Katharine, thoughtfully, “I noticed it then, too; but it has grown as you have grown older. That is rather strange, when you have lived such different lives. It’s not merely an ordinary family likeness of features, you know, but the suggestion of the other man’s personality in your face—like an air transposed to another key. But I’m not attempting to define it; it’s beyond me; something altogether unusual and a trifle—well, uncanny,” she finished, laughing.

Everett sat looking out under the red window-blind which was raised just a little. As it swung back and forth in the wind it revealed the glaring panorama of the desert—a blinding stretch of yellow, flat as the sea in dead calm, splotched here and there with deep purple shadows; and, beyond, the ragged blue outline of the mountains and the peaks of snow, white as the white clouds.

 “I remember, when I was a child I used to be very sensitive about it. I don’t think it exactly displeased me, or that I would have had it otherwise, but it seemed like a birthmark, or something not to be lightly spoken of. It came into even my relations with my mother. 

Ad went abroad to study when he was very young, and mother was all broken up over it. She did her whole duty by each of us, but it was generally understood among us that she’d have made burnt-offerings of us all for him any day. 

I was a little fellow then, and when she sat alone on the porch on summer evenings, she used sometimes to call me to her and turn my face up in the light that streamed out through the shutters and kiss me, and then I always knew she was thinking of Adriance.”

“Poor little chap,” said Katharine, in her husky voice. “How fond people have always been of Adriance! Tell me the latest news of him. I haven’t heard, except through the press, for a year or more. 

He was in Algiers then, in the valley of the Chelif, riding horseback, and he had quite made up his mind to adopt the Mahometan faith and become an Arab. How many countries and faiths has he adopted, I wonder?”

“Oh, that’s Adriance,” chuckled Everett. “He is himself barely long enough to write checks and be measured for his clothes. I didn’t hear from him while he was an Arab; I missed that.”

“He was writing an Algerian suite for the piano then; it must be in the publisher’s hands by this time. I have been too ill to answer his letter, and have lost touch with him.”

Everett drew an envelope from his pocket. “This came a month ago. Read it at your leisure.”

“Thanks. I shall keep it as a hostage. Now I want you to play for me. Whatever you like; but if there is anything new in the world, in mercy let me hear it.”

He sat down at the piano, and Katharine sat near him, absorbed in his remarkable physical likeness to his brother, and trying to discover in just what it consisted. He was of a larger build than Adriance, and much heavier. 

His face was of the same oval mould, but it was grey, and darkened about the mouth by continual shaving. His eyes were of the same inconstant April colour, but they were reflective and rather dull; while Adriance’s were always points of high light, and always meaning another thing than the thing they meant yesterday. 

It was hard to see why this earnest man should so continually suggest that lyric, youthful face, as gay as his was grave. For Adriance, though he was ten years the elder, and though his hair was streaked with silver, had the face of a boy of twenty, so mobile that it told his thoughts before he could put them into words. A contralto, famous for the extravagance of her vocal methods and of her affections, once said that the shepherd-boys who sang in the Vale of Tempe must certainly have looked like young Hilgarde.

Everett sat smoking on the veranda of the Inter-Ocean House that night, the victim of mournful recollections. His infatuation for Katharine Gaylord, visionary as it was, had been the most serious of his boyish love-affairs. The fact that it was all so done and dead and far behind him, and that the woman had lived her life out since then, gave him an oppressive sense of age and loss.

He remembered how bitter and morose he had grown during his stay at his brother’s studio when Katharine Gaylord was working there, and how he had wounded Adriance on the night of his last concert in New York. He had sat there in the box—while his brother and Katherine were called back again and again, and the flowers went up over the footlights until they were stacked half as high as the piano—brooding in his sullen boy’s heart upon the pride those two felt in each other’s work—spurring each other to their best and beautifully contending in song. The footlights had seemed a hard, glittering line drawn sharply between their life and his. He walked back to his hotel alone, and sat in his window staring out on Madison Square until long after midnight, resolved to beat no more at doors that he could never enter.

******

Everett’s week in Cheyenne stretched to three, and he saw no prospect of release except through the thing he dreaded. The bright, windy days of the Wyoming autumn passed swiftly. Letters and telegrams came urging him to hasten his trip to the coast, but he resolutely postponed his business engagements. The mornings he spent on one of Charley Gaylord’s ponies, or fishing in the mountains. In the afternoon he was usually at his post of duty. Destiny, he reflected, seems to have very positive notions about the sort of parts we are fitted to play. The scene changes and the compensation varies, but in the end we usually find that we have played the same class of business from first to last. Everett had been a stop-gap all his life. He remembered going through a looking-glass labyrinth when he was a boy, and trying gallery after gallery, only at every turn to bump his nose against his own face—which, indeed, was not his own, but his brother’s. No matter what his mission, east or west, by land or sea, he was sure to find himself employed in his brother’s business, one of the tributary lives which helped to swell the shining current of Adriance Hilgarde’s. It was not the first time that his duty had been to comfort, as best he could, one of the broken things his brother’s imperious speed had cast aside and forgotten. He made no attempt to analyse the situation or to state it in exact terms; but he accepted it as a commission from his brother to help this woman to die. Day by day he felt her need for him grow more acute and positive; and day by day he felt that in his peculiar relation to her, his own individuality played a smaller part. His power to minister to her comfort lay solely in his link with his brother’s life. He knew that she sat by him always watching for some trick of gesture, some familiar play of expression, some illusion of light and shadow, in which he should seem wholly Adriance. He knew that she lived upon this, and that in the exhaustion which followed this turmoil of her dying senses, she slept deep and sweet, and dreamed of youth and art and days in a certain old Florentine garden, and not of bitterness and death.

A few days after his first meeting with Katharine Gaylord, he had cabled his brother to write her. He merely said that she was mortally ill; he could depend on Adriance to say the right thing—that was a part of his gift. Adriance always said not only the right thing, but the opportune, graceful, exquisite thing. He caught the lyric essence of the moment, the poetic suggestion of every situation. Moreover, he usually did the right thing,—except, when he did very cruel things—bent upon making people happy when their existence touched his, just as he insisted that his material environment should be beautiful; lavishing upon those near him all the warmth and radiance of his rich nature, all the homage of the poet and troubadour, and, when they were no longer near, forgetting—for that also was a part of Adriance’s gift.

Three weeks after Everett had sent his cable, when he made his daily call at the gaily painted ranch-house, he found Katharine laughing like a girl. “Have you ever thought,” she said, as he entered the music-room, “how much these séances of ours are like Heine’s ‘Florentine Nights,’ except that I don’t give you an opportunity to monopolize the conversation?” She held his hand longer than usual as she greeted him. “You are the kindest man living, the kindest,” she added, softly.

Everett’s grey face colored faintly as he drew his hand away, for he felt that this time she was looking at him, and not at a whimsical caricature of his brother.

She drew a letter with a foreign postmark from between the leaves of a book and held it out, smiling. “You got him to write it. Don’t say you didn’t, for it came direct, you see, and the last address I gave him was a place in Florida. This deed shall be remembered of you when I am with the just in Paradise. But one thing you did not ask him to do, for you didn’t know about it. He has sent me his latest work, the new sonata, and you are to play it for me directly. But first for the letter; I think you would better read it aloud to me.”

Everett sat down in a low chair facing the window-seat in which she reclined with a barricade of pillows behind her. He opened the letter, his lashes half-veiling his kind eyes, and saw to his satisfaction that it was a long one; wonderfully tactful and tender, even for Adriance, who was tender with his valet and his stable-boy, with his old gondolier and the beggar-women who prayed to the saints for him.

The letter was from Granada, written in the Alhambra, as he sat by the fountain of the Patio di Lindaraxa. The air was heavy with the warm fragrance of the South and full of the sound of splashing, running water, as it had been in a certain old garden in Florence, long ago. The sky was one great turquoise, heated until it glowed. The wonderful Moorish arches threw graceful blue shadows all about him. He had sketched an outline of them on the margin of his note-paper. The letter was full of confidences about his work, and delicate allusions to their old happy days of study and comradeship.

As Everett folded it he felt that Adriance had divined the thing needed and had risen to it in his own wonderful way. The letter was consistently egotistical, and seemed to him even a trifle patronizing, yet it was just what she had wanted. A strong realization of his brother’s charm and intensity and power came over him; he felt the breath of that whirlwind of flame in which Adriance passed, consuming all in his path, and himself even more resolutely than he consumed others. Then he looked down at this white, burnt-out brand that lay before him.

“Like him, isn’t it?” she said, quietly. “I think I can scarcely answer his letter, but when you see him next you can do that for me. I want you to tell him many things for me, yet they can all be summed up in this: I want him to grow wholly into his best and greatest self, even at the cost of what is half his charm to you and me. Do you understand me?”

“I know perfectly well what you mean,” answered Everett, thoughtfully. “And yet it’s difficult to prescribe for those fellows; so little makes, so little mars.”

Katharine raised herself upon her elbow, and her face flushed with feverish earnestness. “Ah, but it is the waste of himself that I mean; his lashing himself out on stupid and uncomprehending people until they take him at their own estimate.”

“Come, come,” expostulated Everett, now alarmed at her excitement. “Where is the new sonata? Let him speak for himself.”

He sat down at the piano and began playing the first movement, which was indeed the voice of Adriance, his proper speech. The sonata was the most ambitious work he had done up to that time, and marked the transition from his early lyric vein to a deeper and nobler style. Everett played intelligently and with that sympathetic comprehension which seems peculiar to a certain lovable class of men who never accomplish anything in particular. When he had finished he turned to Katharine.

“How he has grown!” she cried. “What the three last years have done for him! He used to write only the tragedies of passion; but this is the tragedy of effort and failure, the thing Keats called hell. This is my tragedy, as I lie here, listening to the feet of the runners as they pass me—ah, God! the swift feet of the runners!”

She turned her face away and covered it with her hands. Everett crossed over to her and knelt beside her. In all the days he had known her she had never before, beyond an occasional ironical jest, given voice to the bitterness of her own defeat. Her courage had become a point of pride with him.

“Don’t do it,” he gasped. “I can’t stand it, I really can’t, I feel it too much.”

When she turned her face back to him there was a ghost of the old, brave, cynical smile on it, more bitter than the tears she could not shed. 

“No, I won’t; I will save that for the night, when I have no better company. Run over that theme at the beginning again, will you? It was running in his head when we were in Venice years ago, and he used to drum it on his glass at the dinner-table. 

He had just begun to work it out when the late autumn came on, and he decided to go to Florence for the winter. He lost touch with his idea, I suppose, during his illness. Do you remember those frightful days? All the people who have loved him are not strong enough to save him from himself! 

When I got word from Florence that he had been ill, I was singing at Monte Carlo. His wife was hurrying to him from Paris, but I reached him first. I arrived at dusk, in a terrific storm. They had taken an old palace there for the winter, and I found him in the library—a long, dark room full of old Latin books and heavy furniture and bronzes. 

He was sitting by a wood fire at one end of the room, looking, oh, so worn and pale!—as he always does when he is ill, you know. Ah, it is so good that you do know! Even his red smoking-jacket lent no color to his face. 

His first words were not to tell me how ill he had been, but that that morning he had been well enough to put the last strokes to the score of his ‘Souvenirs d’ Automne,’ and he was as I most like to remember him; calm and happy, and tired with that heavenly tiredness that comes after a good work done at last. 

Outside, the rain poured down in torrents, and the wind moaned and sobbed in the garden and about the walls of that desolated old palace. How that night comes back to me! There were no lights in the room, only the wood fire. It glowed on the black walls and floor like the reflection of purgatorial flame. 

Beyond us it scarcely penetrated the gloom at all. Adriance sat staring at the fire with the weariness of all his life in his eyes, and of all the other lives that must aspire and suffer to make up one such life as his. 

Somehow the wind with all its world-pain had got into the room, and the cold rain was in our eyes, and the wave came up in both of us at once—that awful vague, universal pain, that cold fear of life and death and God and hope—and we were like two clinging together on a spar in mid-ocean after the shipwreck of everything. 

Then we heard the front door open with a great gust of wind that shook even the walls, and the servants came running with lights, announcing that Madame had returned, ‘and in the book we read no more that night.'”

She gave the old line with a certain bitter humor, and with the hard, bright smile in which of old she had wrapped her weakness as in a glittering garment. That ironical smile, worn through so many years, had gradually changed the lines of her face, and when she looked in the mirror she saw not herself, but the scathing critic, the amused observer and satirist of herself.

Everett dropped his head upon his hand. “How much you have cared!” he said.

“Ah, yes, I cared,” she replied, closing her eyes. “You can’t imagine what a comfort it is to have you know how I cared, what a relief it is to be able to tell it to some one.”

Everett continued to look helplessly at the floor. “I was not sure how much you wanted me to know,” he said.

“Oh, I intended you should know from the first time I looked into your face, when you came that day with Charley. You are so like him, that it is almost like telling him himself. At least, I feel now that he will know some day, and then I will be quite sacred from his compassion.”

“And has he never known at all?” asked Everett, in a thick voice.

“Oh! never at all in the way that you mean. Of course, he is accustomed to looking into the eyes of women and finding love there; when he doesn’t find it there he thinks he must have been guilty of some discourtesy. He has a genuine fondness for every woman who is not stupid or gloomy, or old or preternaturally ugly. 

I shared with the rest; shared the smiles and the gallantries and the droll little sermons. It was quite like a Sunday-school picnic; we wore our best clothes and a smile and took our turns. It was his kindness that was hardest.”

“Don’t; you’ll make me hate him,” groaned Everett.

Katherine laughed and began to play nervously with her fan. “It wasn’t in the slightest degree his fault; that is the most grotesque part of it. Why, it had really begun before I ever met him. I fought my way to him, and I drank my doom greedily enough.”

Everett rose and stood hesitating. “I think I must go. You ought to be quiet, and I don’t think I can hear any more just now.”

She put out her hand and took his playfully.

“You’ve put in three weeks at this sort of thing, haven’t you? Well, it ought to square accounts for a much worse life than yours will ever be.”

He knelt beside her, saying, brokenly: “I stayed because I wanted to be with you, that’s all. I have never cared about other women since I knew you in New York when I was a lad. You are a part of my destiny, and I could not leave you if I would.”

She put her hands on his shoulders and shook her head. “No, no; don’t tell me that. I have seen enough tragedy. It was only a boy’s fancy, and your divine pity and my utter pitiableness have recalled it for a moment. 

One does not love the dying, dear friend. Now go, and you will come again tomorrow, as long as there are tomorrows.” She took his hand with a smile that was both courage and despair, and full of infinite loyalty and tenderness, as she said softly:

“For ever and for ever, farewell, Cassius; If we do meet again, why, we shall smile; If not, why then, this parting was well made.”

The courage in her eyes was like the clear light of a star to him as he went out.

On the night of Adriance Hilgarde’s opening concert in Paris, Everett sat by the bed in the ranch-house in Wyoming, watching over the last battle that we have with the flesh before we are done with it and free of it for ever. 

At times it seemed that the serene soul of her must have left already and found some refuge from the storm, and only the tenacious animal life were left to do battle with death. She labored under a delusion at once pitiful and merciful, thinking that she was in the Pullman on her way to New York, going back to her life and her work. 

When she roused from her stupor, it was only to ask the porter to waken her half an hour out of Jersey City, or to remonstrate about the delays and the roughness of the road. At midnight Everett and the nurse were left alone with her. Poor Charley Gaylord had lain down on a couch outside the door. 

Everett sat looking at the sputtering night-lamp until it made his eyes ache. His head dropped forward, and he sank into heavy, distressful slumber. He was dreaming of Adriance’s concert in Paris, and of Adriance, the troubadour. 

He heard the applause and he saw the flowers going up over the footlights until they were stacked half as high as the piano, and the petals fell and scattered, making crimson splotches on the floor. Down this crimson pathway came Adriance with his youthful step, leading his singer by the hand; a dark woman this time, with Spanish eyes.

The nurse touched him on the shoulder, he started and awoke. She screened the lamp with her hand. Everett saw that Katharine was awake and conscious, and struggling a little. He lifted her gently on his arm and began to fan her. 

She looked into his face with eyes that seemed never to have wept or doubted. “Ah, dear Adriance, dear, dear!” she whispered.

Everett went to call her brother, but when they came back the madness of art was over for Katharine.

Two days later Everett was pacing the station siding, waiting for the west-bound train. Charley Gaylord walked beside him, but the two men had nothing to say to each other. 

Everett’s bags were piled on the truck, and his step was hurried and his eyes were full of impatience, as he gazed again and again up the track, watching for the train. 

Gaylord’s impatience was not less than his own; these two, who had grown so close, had now become painful and impossible to each other, and longed for the wrench of farewell.

As the train pulled in, Everett wrung Gaylord’s hand among the crowd of alighting passengers. The people of a German opera company, en route for the coast, rushed by them in frantic haste to snatch their breakfast during the stop. 

Everett heard an exclamation, and a stout woman rushed up to him, glowing with joyful surprise and caught his coat-sleeve with her tightly gloved hands.

“Herr Gott, Adriance, lieber Freund,” she cried.

Everett lifted his hat, blushing. “Pardon me, madame, I see that you have mistaken me for Adriance Hilgarde. I am his brother.” Turning from the crestfallen singer he hurried into the car.

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Virginia Hamilton, author of “Liberation Literature” for Children

Children’s book writer Virginia Hamilton (March 12, 1936 – February 19, 2002) built an unparalleled legacy in American letters. She published forty-one books in the course of her writing career and was recognized with every major award in the children’s literature field.

The MacArthur Foundation described Virginia Hamilton “as a writer of children’s literature who wove Black folktales and narratives of African American life and experience into her work.” She was the first children’s book author to receive this award.

 

Early life and family storytelling

Virginia Hamilton was born, as she described it, “on the outer edge of the Great Depression” in Yellow Springs, Ohio, in 1936. She was the youngest of five children born to Kenneth James Hamilton and Etta Belle Perry Hamilton.

Hamilton grew up amid a large, extended family in the farmlands of southwestern Ohio. Her parents’ farm consisted of twelve acres and after her family’s farm ended, family members owned and farmed the land bordering her family farm. 

The farmlands had been home to her mother’s family since the 1850s, when Hamilton’s great-grandfather, Levi Perry, had arrived in Ohio via the Underground Railroad.

Hamilton considered her father “the sun around which my world revolved” and her mother as her universe. She listened raptly when her parents, both spellbinding storytellers, spun their family stories, absorbing the folklore of first and second-generation of African Americans.

There was one story that Hamilton’s mother, Etta Belle, would tell that she would come to regard as one the most influential of her parents’ stories: that of Levi Perry, her mother’s grandfather.

Etta Belle told how every year, Levi Perry would call his ten children to his side and tell the story of his mother, Mary Cloud. Mary escaped from slavery in Virginia in the 1850s with Levi when he was an infant, crossing the Ohio River and arriving in this farmland of southwestern Ohio, where other family members were expecting them.

Shortly thereafter, Mary Cloud disappeared and was never heard from again. 

Levi Perry grew up with the love and security and abundance of his extended family — but the story of his mother, Mary Cloud, and her startling disappearance when they settled in Ohio, shaped his life. 

Without Mary Cloud’s tremendous courage, Levi would tell his ten children, none of them would be living. Levi would tell his children, and they would later tell their children, that freedom was never to be taken for granted.

Virginia Hamilton credits her family storytellers as the foundation of her work. In a 1973 essay in the journal Literature, Creativity, and Imagination, she wrote: 

“Memory is what I have stored away, what did happen, what I think happened, what never happened but might have been great if it had, and what I fear could have happened — on and on. It is the essence of my mental and physical exploration brought to bear on a specific idea I wish to write. Smell, sound, sight are all part of memory this act of writing. And creative imagination plays an enormous role in how one uses them and how much of them one uses.”

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Virginia Hamilton: Speeches, Essays, & Conversations
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College years

Hamilton was a busy student. She competed in public speaking contests, sang at local events, played sports, and was the president of her graduating class. She had also earned a full scholarship to nearby Antioch College. 

In 1958, during Virginia’s third year at Antioch, she was advised by English professors to transfer to Ohio State University, Columbus to study with their writing program. 

While finishing her work in creative writing and literature, at Columbus, another professor advised Virginia that for the next step of her writing journey, Virginia needed to go where the writers and publishers were: New York City. 

 

New York City and marriage

Virginia embarked to New York City in the late 1950s and worked as a museum receptionist, a nightclub singer, and an accountant to pay the bills while she wrote. She studied the foundations of creative writing and took classes at the New School for Social Research with Hiram Haydn, one of the founders of the prestigious publishing house Atheneum Press.

Shortly after her move to New York City Virginia met Arnold Adoff, a young Jewish man from the Bronx. Adoff worked as a teacher, wrote poetry, and managed a few jazz musicians, including Charles Mingus.

Despite the expected societal disapproval, Hamilton and Adoff married in 1960. At that time, more than twenty states in the U.S. still prohibited interracial marriage. The marriage worked; Arnold continued teaching, and Virginia committed herself to writing. Eventually, Arnold Adoff would become a well-regarded poet, author, and anthologist.

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Photo from the Virginia Hamilton website
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A writer of “liberation literature”

Hamilton is considered a writer of “liberation literature,” that is, one who “liberates the reader” (and herself in the writing process) by expanding their understanding of worlds unknown and unseen by them.

Hamilton’s characters were Black, and her stories examined the history and cultural forces that shaped their lives. Her inimitable writing style never condescended to her readers, exploring the generational effects of systemic racism.

Hamilton’s inception of “liberation literature” was instrumental in opening doors and opportunities for countless writers and artists of color that shared a similar vision: one can change the world with words.

 

A return to Ohio, and last years

In 1969, Hamilton and Adoff returned to Yellow Springs, Ohio with their two young children, Leigh and Jaime, and built their dream house on the last remaining acres of the original Hamilton-Perry farm. It was a fine life of shared creativity and serious achievement.

In 2002, Virginia Hamilton died of breast cancer at age sixty-five. Arnold lived for nearly twenty years longer. Their son, Jaime Adoff, has taken up his mother’s trade as a writer of children’s and young adult literature, and his father’s as a poet and teacher. Leigh Hamilton Adoff, their daughter, is a dramatic soprano.

 

Awards, honors, and legacy

Virginia Hamilton was the first African American to win the 1975 Newbery Medal for her novel M.C. Higgins, the Great and the Edgar Allen Poe Award for children for The House of Dies Drear. 

She received multiple Coretta Scott King Awards from the American Library Association as well as the National Book Award, the Boston Globe-Horn Book Award, and the Hans Christian Andersen Award for Writing (the highest international recognition possible for writers or illustrators in children’s literature).

The ALA created a Virginia Hamilton Lifetime Achievement Award in her name, to honor a children’s book writer or illustrator for an outstanding body of work. 

In 1995, Hamilton became a MacArthur Fellow: the highly prestigious “genius” award with a substantial, no-strings-attached monetary prize given to those who have produced extraordinary work in the arts and sciences as an investment in their future work.

In addition to a treasure trove of brilliant books, Hamilton’s legacy comes from her essays on writing. In a much-quoted passage from one of them, she summarized what the writer needs to do: resonate with the reader:

“There is an essential line between us, a line of thoughts and ultimately of communication. Each book must speak: ‘This is what I have to say,’ in the hopes that each reader will answer ‘This is what I wanted to know.’”

Hamilton achieved that connection with her readers; and as she did, she transformed children’s literature.

Contributed by Nancy Snyder, who retired from the City and County of San Francisco and as a union officer for SEIU Local 1021/790. She writes about books and women writers to understand the world and her place in it.

More about Virginia Hamilton

Major works

This is but a small sampling of Hamilton’s works. Here is a more complete bibliography.

The House of Dies Drear (1968)The Planet of Junior Brown (1971)M.C. Higgins, the Great (1974)Arilla Sun Down (1976)Justice and Her Brothers (1978; the start of a trilogy)Sweet Whispers, Brother Rush (1982)The People Could Fly: American Black Folktales (1985)Drylongso (1992)

More information and sources

Virginia Hamilton official website The Pathbreaking Virginia Hamilton (Library of America) Virginia Hamilton’s Liberation Literature Continues to Open Doors for Young Readers Ohio Reading Road Trip NY Times Obituary

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The Impact of the Partition on Amrita Pritam and her Writing

In 2021, the government of India designated Partition Horrors Remembrance Day to be commemorated yearly on August 14. This is a fitting occasion to consider the impact of the India-Pakistan Partition of 1947 on the writings of litterateur/journalist Amrita Pritam, who lived through this horrific time.

For those of us who were born in independent India, there is not much recollection of what happened then, as perhaps our elders were trying to shield us from the sorrows of those times.

It is only through reading books like Larry Collins and Dominique Lapierre’s Freedom at Midnight and Amrita Pritam’s works in translation, including her autobiography, The Revenue Stamp that brought alive that terrible time.

 

Literature’s focus on the individual

Conventional meta-narratives of history can have limitations when they involve capturing a time, place, a people, or a life-changing moment. Without politicizing, there is a great need to be receptive to the literature of the time. It is this body of literary work that has the fullest potential in understanding the Partition historically.

The imagination of a writer has a different way of putting words, meanings, and shapes into emotions that cannot be easily labeled or understood. As an example, there is no historical record that conveys the loss and trauma of the Holocaust in such personal terms as does Anne Frank’s The Diary of a Young Girl.

Historical documentation might have a macro approach, while literature tends to focus on an individual and her private sphere, dealing with personal responses to major historical events. Studying the Partition from an individual’s point of view can reveal the enormity of the suffering. More and more, we have come to realize that the personal can also be political.

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Learn more about Amrita Pritam
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Poetry and story bear witness to the Partition

Since 1947, many poets across South Asia and even the diaspora have attempted to put into words the loss and terror that the Partition inflicted on them and the people around them.

They have struggled with and documented the legacy of that period through the lamentations reflected in their writings. They attempt to distill in a few lines the complicated history and the complex set of emotions that we are still wrestling with even today.

Pritam’s character, Puro, from her heartbreaking story, “Pinjar,” later made into a brilliant film, becomes representative of the plight of the women of the time and their helplessness at the cruelty they witness when their bodies become the targets of anger. It happened then and it happens even today, as we are seeing with the invasion of Ukraine. 

In her autobiography, The Revenue Stamp, Pritam contrasts the rebellious period of her life with that of 1947 and the Partition, “when all social, political and religious values came crashing down like glass smashed into smithereens from the feet of people in flight.”

Apart from the death, destruction, loss of property, displacement, cruelty, and loss of trust, Pritam also dwells on what it does to friendships, as suddenly people find themselves on two sides of the Radcliffe Line, drawn so callously by a British officer, who had no idea of the wounds that he was inflicting on a people.

The Radcliffe Line was the boundary demarcated between the Indian and Pakistani portions of the Punjab Province and Bengal Presidency of British India. It was named after its architect, Cyril Radcliffe, who, as the Joint Chairman of the two Boundary Commissions for the two provinces, received the responsibility to equitably divide 450,000 square km of territory with 88 million people.

Pritam’s friendship with the Pakistani poet Sajjad, whom she had known before the Partition, became a reason for her to receive flak for mentioning his name publicly. Sajjad requested that she avoid doing so, and she mourns that there is no space for the recognition of a friendship due to the partition of a country.

Still, her heart-wrenching poem on the Partition where she invokes Waris Shah (“Ajj Akhan Waris Shah Nun”), the writer of the romantic poem, Heer-Ranjha, spreads the message of love and touches many Pakistani poets.

 

“Ajj Akhan Waris Shah Nu”

One of the most famous poems capturing the loss of Partition is Amrita Pritam’s lament “Ajj Akhan Waris Shah Nu” (“Today I Ask Waris Shah”). In it, she implores thePunjabi poet Waris Shah, who wrote the romantic tragedy of Heer Ranjha, to rise from the dead and put into words the bloodshed of the Partition.  

In her lament, it becomes evident that the tragedy of Partition is too horrific for any living person to even put into words, let alone weave into poetry. Pritam hopes that Waris Shah will record and witness the miserable condition of Punjab and her people after the Partition and will turn over a new page in Punjab’s history.

In the poem, the river Chenab is bloody with the corpses of all those who lost their lives in the Partition. The poem also decries the violence against women in the communal riots at the time of the Partition when the warring communities abducted, raped, tortured, and sold women, or forced them to change their religion.

Pritam calls out to Waris Shah, who penned lyrics mourning the tragedy that befell Heer, to rise up from his grave and listen to the cries of thousands of brutalized women in Punjab.

Waris Shah I call out to you today to rise from your grave
Rise and open a new page of the immortal book of love
A daughter of Punjab had wept and you wrote many a dirge
A million daughters weep today and look at you for solace
Rise o beloved of the aggrieved, just look at your Punjab
Today corpses haunt the woods, Chenab overflows with blood
Someone has blended poison in the five rivers of Punjab
This water now runs through the verdant fields and glades
This fertile land has sprouted poisonous weeds far and near
Seeds of hatred have grown high, bloodshed is everywhere
Poisoned breeze in forest turned bamboo flutes into snakes
Their venom has turned the bright and rosy Punjab all blue
Throats have forgotten how to sing, the yarn is now broken
Friends are lost and the spinning wheel has gone silent
Boats released from the harbour toss in the rough waters
The peepul has broken its branches on which swings hung
The flute that played notes of love is now forever lost
Brothers of Ranjha have lost the hero’s devotion, his charm
Blood rains on the earth, even the graves are oozing red
The princesses of love are now weeping midst the tombs
Today all have turned into Qaidon, thieves of love and beauty
O where on earth do we go to look for a Waris Shah once more

(Translated from the Punjabi by Nirupama Dutt)

Amrita Pritam wrote this poem when she was only twenty-eight, while traveling to Delhi from Dehradun in search of work, just a few months after she had migrated to India.

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The Revenue Stamp: An Autobiography of Amrita Pritam
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Recollections from The Revenue Stamp

As she writes in The Revenue Stamp, Pritam herself was not spared the horrors of the Partition. In the darkness of the never-ending night, she sat holding her two children as she left her hometown of Lahore behind. She had to flee the city literally in the clothes that she was wearing when communal riots broke out in August 1947 during the Partition. She recalls the journey in The Revenue Stamp:

“Uprooted from Lahore, I had rehabilitated myself at Dehradun for some time. I went to Delhi looking for work and a place to live. On my return journey in the train, I felt the wind was piercing the dark night and wailing at the sorrows the Partition had brought. I had come away from Lahore with just one red shawl and I had torn it into two to cover both my babies. Everything had been torn apart. The words of Waris Shah about how the dead and parted would meet, echoed in my mind. And my poem took shape.”

She goes on to say in The Revenue Stamp that the poem founds its way to Pakistan. Sometime later, the late Pakistani poet, journalist, and writer, Ahmed Nadeem Kazmi, revealed in his foreword to a book by Faiz Ahmed Faiz that he had read the poem in jail. 

After his release, he recounts seeing copies of this poem with common men and women, who would weep when they read it. Pritam continues, “At a BBC interview in London (1972), I was introduced to Sahab Kizilbash, the Pakistani poetess, who exclaimed, ‘Arre.’ So this is Amrita … the writer of those lines. I ought to be embracing her …”

Strangely, among the musings in Pritam’s autobiography there are indirect reflections on Karma. The family that she was married into had inherited a carpet, which was said to have been looted by a Sardar during the melee of the Sepoy Mutiny in Delhi. Though in a tattered and torn state during Partition, a grandfather would insist on sleeping upon it.

“During the mass exchange of refugees in 1947, the move to Delhi became inevitable. But the head of the family — Grandfather that is — refused to leave. He could not bear to tear himself away from memories and possessions, handed down from generation to generation.  He had the firm conviction that the chaos and confusion would get sorted out in time. 

Governments could not seize people’s homes. He wanted to stay back. But when conditions worsened, the military packed him off in a truck to Delhi. All that he could carry as bedding was the tattered silk carpet. The anguish of leaving behind all his treasures and belongings and the discomforts of the journey was too much for him. 

He lived only a few days after reaching Delhi. He was lying on that carpet when he died and after his death, it was given away to a fakir. One thought came to all members of the family. ‘This carpet was looted from Delhi during the Mutiny. Today, accounts have been squared up.  What belongs to Delhi has been returned to it after a century.’”

Pritam muses, “If loot too is a sort of debt that one day has to be paid back, the fearsome thought that time and again surfaced in my mind was that I too might have to return something. What it was, to whom, and when, I could not guess.”

 

Premonitions of anguish

Even before the pain of Partition, Pritam had been weighed down by some sense of premonition perhaps when she wrote, “Fellow-traveler, we are parting company today. This distance between us will grow…”

Pritam wrote a lot of poetry that seemed to speak of love and romance. But the desolation and the sense of loss that seems to haunt many of these poems are probably a metaphor for a lack of rootedness; a sense of homelessness from being displaced by the Partition. I am quoting from the poems with a disclaimer for my English translations.

“Suraj ne aaj mehendi gholi,  hatheliyon par rang gayi humari dono ki takdeerein.” (The radiant sun mixed the mehendi colours that etched out the lines of our two destinies.)

 “Tumhari yaad iss tarah aayi, jaise geeli lakdi mein se gehra aur kaala dhuaan nikalta hai.” (Memories of you flooded back just like the thick and dark smoke that emanates from damp firewood.)

 “Yaadon ke dhaage kayanaat ke lamhe ki tarah hote hain.” (The threads of memory are but moments in the universe.)

“Aankhon mein kankar chhitra gaye, aur nazar zakhmi ho gayi kuch dikhai nahi deta, duniya shayad ab bhi basti hai.” (There is grit in the eye, which has dulled my vision. Perhaps the world still exists.)

“Ab suraj roz waqt par doob jaata hai  Aur andhera meri chhati mein utar aata hai” (Now the sun always sets on time and the darkness descends into my heart.)

The Partition of undivided India took its greatest toll on the women of the country on both sides of the divide. In The Revenue Stamp, Pritam speaks of the anguish felt most by the women. Their struggles, anger, affection, love, sorrow, loss, and gain are all reflected. 

Before Partition, Pritam writes of her friendship with a “wondrous soul,” Sajjad Haider.  The two met and talked often whilst in Lahore. Post-Partition, the friendship continued through letters of shared joys and sorrows and a chance visit from Sajjad to Delhi.

After seventy-five years, it may still be necessary to invoke the message of peace and love that Amrita Pritam and others of those times wanted to inculcate in those horrific times. We can surely learn from history without needing a Partition Horrors Remembrance Day.

Contributed by Melanie P. Kumar: Melanie is a Bangalore, India-based independent writer who has always been fascinated with the magic of words. Links to some of her pieces can be found at gonewiththewindwithmelanie.wordpress.com.

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The Early Poetry of Gabriela Mistral (Lucila Godoy Alcayaga)

Born in poverty, Lucila Godoy Alcayaga could never have predicted the lofty global reputation she would achieve as the Nobel Prize-winning poet Gabriela Mistral (1889–1957). Presented here are several of Gabriela Mistral’s early poems that appeared in regional Chilean publications, primarily from 1905 and 1908, when she was in her teens.

Though there was a gap in her published poetry from 1906 to 1907, she continued to write, contributing prose pieces to local publications, particularly La Serena.

These poems presented here in are in Spanish only, as it’s unclear whether they have ever been professionally translated into English or other languages until now. Perhaps someone will discover them and undertake this worthy task.

 

An impoverished childhood; a teen poet

Raised in the impoverished Andean village of Montegrande, Chile, three-year-old Lucila’s father abandoned her and her older sister, leaving their mother, Petronila, to raise them alone.

Lucila’s education was erratic, and not very promising — her teachers told her mother that her daughter had no intellectual promise and would do better to learn a trade. And yet, she began working as a teacher’s aide at age fifteen to help support her mother, who was often ill.

It was then that two of her three lifelong passions  — poetry and education — took root (the third, diplomacy, would come later). Her earliest poems were published in a local newspaper between 1904 to 1914 — taking her from her mid-teens to mid-twenties.

As a regular contributor to El Coquimbo and its offshoots, Lucila tinkered with various pen names like Soledad (“loneliness”) and Alma (“soul”), settling on Gabriela Mistral (“cold wind) by the time she was eighteen. It was the name that would carry her through the triumphs and tragedies of her life.

 

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Lucila / Gabriela, 1905
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Lucila was especially prolific around the ages of fifteen and sixteen. Her poems and prose from that period reveal a preoccupation with death and are tinged with sorrow. It’s as if they were a premonition of what would be the tragedy of her young life.

At age seventeen, she fell in love with a young railway worker named Romeo Ureta. After taking his own life, the only item found in his possession was a postcard Lucila had sent him. This horrific incident scarred her for a very long time.

But life had to be lived, and a living to be earned. She began teaching at a girls’ school and loved the work, paying special attention to the students from impoverished backgrounds. When this came to the attention of the directress of the school, she was taken to task. Her sideline of poetry writing came to light as well, and for some reason this was also a mark against her.

Echoing her childhood experience, the directress assured Lucila that she had no talent for teaching and that her writing endeavors would amount to nothing. She and the school staff harassed the young teacher until she was forced to resign.

Gabriela (when she dropped Lucila) refused to give up teaching or writing. Gradually, she earned official teaching credentials and continued to grow her poetic reputation. She found a teaching position at a secondary school near Santiago, Chile.

 

The start of a storied career

Never having forgotten the loss of her first love, Gabriela poured her pain into poetry, producing “Sonetos de la Muerte,” three of which would be published and would earn her a national prize for poetry in 1914.

Desolación was Gabriela’s first published collection of poems, published in 1922. After its publication, her fame grew rapidly. Reoccurring themes include love, deceit, sorrow, nature, travel, and love for children.

In 1922, she also accepted the invitation of Jose Vasconcelos, the Mexican minister of education, to create educational programs for students from poor backgrounds in Mexico. As part of this effort, she brought mobile libraries into rural areas to make literature more accessible.

Some of the themes carried through her work were those she explored from the time of her first collection, Desolación, which included, according to Arce de Vazquez: “ … The ideal teacher, the artist and artistic creation, motherhood and children, living beings and materials, the ecstasy of love, the passion of Christ, death, beauty, and the eternal.”

The poems presented here have been discovered via Gabriela Mistral en El Coquimbo, Direccion de Bibliotecas, Archivos y Museos.

 

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Read our full biography of Gabriela Mistral

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Canto Fúnebre (Funeral Song)

Hoja marchita que de un árbol muerto
El furor de los vientos arrancó,
Llevándola del mundo en el desierto,
Eso soy yo.

Violeta que al abrir fresca y florida,
El rigor del estío marchito
Y ni el riego ni el Sol le dan la vida,
Eso soy yo.

Gota de llanto que de un alma herida,
Como esencia de duelo se arrancó
Y entre oscuridad rodó perdida,
Eso soy yo.

Ave fatal que la tormenta impía,
Del ramaje su nido le arrojó
Y que vaga sin rumbo en noche fría,
Eso soy yo.

Queja doliente, de algún pecho triste,
Cuyo eco sólo el aire lo escuchó.
Fantasma errante que de negro viste,
Eso soy yo.

Astro eclipsado que un nublado cielo
No luce sus fulgores ni esplendor.
Fatal proscrita, pena sin consuelo,
Eso soy yo.

Cruz que sombreada por ciprés doliente,
Vela una tumba do no nace flor,
Faro sin luz, arroyo sin corriente,
Eso soy yo.

Estrofa amarga, fúnebre fragmento
De algún poema que escribió el Dolor,
Lóbrega noche, agudo y cruel lamento,
Eso soy yo.

(Signed Lucila Godoy Alcagaya, La Compaña, 25 de Febrero, 1905)

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Sonrisas de Alba (Smiles of the Dawn)

Todo vuelve a vivir: el alba blonda
Despierta al llano de su triste sueño
Y canta el ave entre la espesa fronda
Y el día asoma lúcido y risueño .

Se abre la flor al rayo que fulgura,
La sombra alza su denso cortinaje,
Y palpita la vida en la natura …
Y se estremece el nido en el follaje.

Aléjase la noche del paisaje,
Un nimbo de esplendor corona el monte
Se baña en luz la aldea aletargada …

¡Sólo de mi alma el lúgubre paraje
No viene a iluminar sus horizontes
El risueño fulgor de una alborada .

(Signed Lucila Godoy Alcagaya, La Compañía, 16 de julio, 1905)

 

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The Poetry of Gabriela Mistral: A Brief Overview and Analysis

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Delirios (Delusions)

Acérquenme a la luz, a mi ventana,
Quiero mirar el mar, mirar el Sol,
Contemplar el albor de la mañana,
Ver como a su fulgor se abre la flor.

Quiero aspirar la brisa de la tarde
Que viene a perfumarse en mi jardín,
Sentir su beso aquí en mi frente que arde,
Llena por una inspiración sin fin.

Acérquenme hacia allá, quieren mis ojos,
Mirar la noche, darle mi dolor,
Contarle mis tristezas, mis enojos,
Y que llore en su sombra el corazón.

Quiero sentir el canto de las aves,
Mirar los cielos con su manto azul,
Y en el silencio engrandeciente y grave
Cantar mi desolada juventud.

Quiero escuchar las quejas de las olas
Ver la lívida tarde agonizar,
Vagar como antes por la playa sola,
Y muchas cosas preguntarle al mar.

Si he de morir, quiero morir cantando
Al campo, y a sus flores; y al dolor,
No veis que junto al lecho está velando,
La sublime y amante inspiración?

Quiero morir la lira contra el pecho,
El ensueño en la mente como flor,
Y que miren mis ojos desde el lecho,
El alba, el mar, el campo, el cielo, el Sol!

(Signed Soledad, La Compañía, septiembre, 1905)

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Del Pasado (From the Past)

¿Por qué pasaron, mi querida Delia,
las dulces horas, los tranquilos días
en que fue tu amistad campo de flores
que ante mis tristes ojos entendías?

¿Dónde quedó, perdida en los zarzales
de mi suerte de paria, aquella vida,
como la del Edén dulce y serena,
como la del Edén, también perdida ?

¡Ya no puede tornar!
Así lo dice cruel en mi oído un eco misterioso;
no vuelve nunca aquello que se llama,
cae en la muerte cuanto ha sido hermoso.

Veré empezar y terminar los años,
y morir una y otra primavera,
y seguiré aguardando… pero en vano,
te he perdido por siempre iquién creyera!

Otro es mi hogar, y será el tuyo en breve
otro nuevo también, bajo otros cielos;
otro es tu corazón, otros los seres
a quienes tu virtud dará consuelos.

Nada queda del fúlgido pasado
un recuerdo, es verdad, pero en mí solo,
pues de mi cruzamiento en tu camino
borras las huellas, cual se borra un dolo.

Y las flores de bien, que derramaste
en mi existir, no fueron, no, perdidas,
y gratitud te guardo, aunque eres otra,
y mi afecto también, aunque me olvidas.

¡Soy muy falta’! Parezco una maldita
Mi martirio aventaja a otros martirios
Es sin luna mi noche, y es mi invierno
sin violetas, sin juncos y sin lirios.

Hay inmensa razón en tu abandono:
¿qué harías compartiendo mi existencia
si no sentir al par de mi desdicha
y sollozar al par de mi dolencia?

¿A do irías conmigo? Al hondo abismo
en él, al fin se detendrán mis pasos,
otra mártir serías, como aquella
que ha veinte años me apoya con sus brazos.

¡No existe la amistad! Es fugaz lampo
que un instante ilumina y desaparece;
no existe esa amistad eterna y noble que
encontrar en el mundo nos parece.

Hoy comprendo bien, hoy, presencio
la ruina de mi sueño más querido
hoy que asisto al trastorno de tu alma,
toda ternura ayer, y hoy toda olvido.

¡Ah! déjame llorar, así aferrada
a mis recuerdos caros y angustiosos.
Puedo pasar el resto de mi vida
esos lapsos cantando, tan dichosos!

(Signed Gabriela Mistral, La Serena, 23 de julio 1908)

 

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Rimas (Rhymes)

De mi fatalidad para el auxilio
      hacia el cielo clamé,
y, por un largo tiempo, la quimera
      luminosa aguardé.

Cansada de esperar, me dije: Indigna
      soy de tal protector
y al averno grité, fue tan sensible,
      como el otro a mi voz.

Quise en la confusión de las ciudades
     mi angustia adormecer;
a ellas fui, y autómata, aturdida,
      por sus calles vagué.

Y me hirió su avalancha febricente
      como un yunque brutal;
y huí enloquecida hacia mi madre,
      mi madre Soledad.

Y es mi vida de calma y de silencio
    cayó el cuervo dolor,
festín no interrumpido hace hora a hora
      aquí en mi corazón.

¿A do iré? Negra sombra me persigue.
      A Jehová no oí
maldecir mi existencia, pero siento
     que, en verdad soy Cain.

(Signed Gabriela Mistral, La Serena, 20 Octubre de 1908)

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Después de la  Lluvia

Cesó la lluvia de caer. La brisa
ora la humedad de la llanura:
la huella de mis llanto y mi amargura
en mi rostro no borra la sonrisa.

Como si fuera un fardo de dolores,
dejan caer las rosas su rocío.
y yo le digo al cielo: “El fardo mío
hacer pudiste cual el de esas flores”

El Dios Invierno con su mano artera
luto dio al cielo azul y al alma mía:
ése, lo ha soportado sólo un día,
ella, lo ha de llevar la vida entera!

(Signed Gabriela Mistral, La Serena, 27 de Octubre, 1908)

 

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9 Poems by Gabriela Mistral on Life, Love, and Death
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Images in this post courtesy of Wikimedia Commons

 

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Brigid Brophy, British Novelist, Essayist, & Activist

 Brigid Brophy (June 12, 1929 – August 7, 1995) was a British novelist, cultural commentator, and essayist. She was also a keen activist for animal rights and a leading campaigner for social issues including LGBT rights, prison reform, divorce reform, and equity for authors.

She was the prolific author of novels and nonfiction works, including essays and commentary, many of which espoused her social stances. Her activism has had a lasting impact, and her books are still being read and studied.

 

Early life

Brigid Antonia Brophy was born in London. Her father was the Irish novelist John Brophy; her mother, Charis Grundy, was a teacher and novelist. Their first child died in infancy, so Brigid grew up as an only child.

She was particularly close to her father, and often referred to her Irish roots in her writing and life. In the essay “Am I an Irishwoman,” (1965) she wrote:

“The geography and history of Ireland hold my imagination in a melancholy magic spell…I seem to have made more Irish choices than chance would warrant…”

According to her daughter, Kate Levey, “Brigid wrote of her infancy that it was ‘lapped about with Irishness, with framed reproductions of paintings of Irish mountains on the walls and books about turf-cutters’ donkeys on my bookshelves.’”

Brigid Brophy’s mother was a devout member of the Church of England, and her father was a lapsed Protestant. She once described herself and her father as “natural, logical, and happy atheists.” She remained an atheist all her life and would later argue against faith schools and compulsory religious education, saying that both were “unjustifiable”.

 

An early passion for reading and writing

Brophy’s father taught her to read and write from an early age, first introducing her to William Shakespeare, George Bernard Shaw, and John Milton. She spent time in several different schools, including the Abbey School in Reading, St. Paul’s Girls’ School, Camberwell School for Arts and a secretarial school.

She received a scholarship to St Hugh’s College, Oxford and lasted four terms reading Classics before being effectively expelled for ‘indiscretions’: in her own words, she:

“… acted in the belief that I had more to learn by pursuing my personal life than from textual emendation, with the result that the authorities could put up with me for only just over a year: I came down at the age of 19 without a degree and with a consequent sense of nudity which I have never quite overcome.”

She always refused to elaborate on what the ‘indiscretions’ might have been, saying that “I won’t risk reliving the distress I suffered.”

Brophy took a variety of clerical jobs before turning to writing. A volume of short stories titled The Crown Princess was published in 1953, just prior to her first novel, Hackenfeller’s Ape. The latter won the Cheltenham Literary Festival Prize for a first novel, and which centered on the ethics of sending a captive ape, Percy, into space.

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Michael Levey and Iris Murdoch

Brophy met Michael Levey, an art historian and later director of the National Gallery in 1953, and the couple married in 1954. It was a happy marriage, in which both parties felt creatively inspired and supported. It was also unconventional enough to accommodate Brophy’s long affair with the novelist Iris Murdoch, and their joint distrust of the institution of marriage itself.

Brophy wrote of the ‘immorality’ of marriage and railed against the social expectation for young girls to marry, saying that society “imposed monogamy on those who have not chosen it.” Brophy and Levey had one daughter, Kate, in 1957.

The relationship between Murdoch and Brophy, which also began in 1954, was also one of the most important of Brophy’s life. The two met at the Cheltenham Festival prize awards, at which Murdoch came second to Brophy. The two quickly became close.

Murdoch’s biographer Peter Conradi wrote that “the friendship grew when the Leveys visited the Bayleys [Murdoch and her husband John Bayley] at Steeple Aston, and Murdoch saw both in London; for years Brophy and Murdoch would go away for a weekend break. Neither husband felt excluded…”

Murdoch’s husband, John Bayley, was also aware of her extramarital affairs, although she kept the details secret. During the years of their relationship, Murdoch wrote a thousand or more letters to Brophy, some of which are collected in the book Living on Paper: Letters from Iris Murdoch 1934-1995.

Brophy’s letters to Murdoch, however, do not survive. The relationship eventually broke down in 1967 over Murdoch’s refusal to commit to it on a long-term basis. Brophy later had a more stable extra-marital relationship with the writer Maureen Duffy, which ended in 1979.

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“Determinedly experimental”

Brophy’s writing covered a broad range including fiction, non-fiction, criticism, and biography, and even her topics for her fiction were wildly disparate.

The most accessible novel (and the most autobiographical) is arguable The King of a Rainy Country (1956), which tells the story of Susan, a young woman who lives in post-war London, and her friend Neale — a friend who turns out to have fewer benefits that might be assumed at the start.

In contrast, the experimental 1969 novel Transit is slippery and hard to grasp, as the central character, Pat O’Rooley, becomes stuck “in transit” at an airport. Lost in a kind of liminal space, O’Rooley begins to forget who and what they are, even their gender, and the only footing both O’Rooley and the reader have are short interactions with other characters. It was probably Brophy’s most overtly political novel, and challenges both gender stereotypes and the capitalist, patriarchal system that holds them in place.

Brophy was deeply influenced in her writing by Sigmund Freud, George Bernard Shaw, and Mozart. Mozart the Dramatist (1964) is her analysis of the dramatic themes in Mozart’s work, and her novel The Snow Ball, published the same year, takes the opera Don Giovanni as its main theme (Irish Murdoch described the novel as “sheer artistic insolence”).

Fellow author Peter Parker called her “determinedly experimental as a writer” whose works still “constitute a highly coherent and distinctive oeuvre.”

Brophy never shied away from forthright or unpopular opinions in her writing. In 1967, together with her husband and Charles Osborne, she wrote Fifty Works of English and American Literature We Could Do Without. The book caused a storm of controversy and was widely criticized on both sides of the Atlantic. It did, however, result in several universities updating their reading lists to include more contemporary fiction.

 

Animal rights and social reform

Brophy’s activism was a major part of her life, and The Times later noted that she was “devoted … wholeheartedly to the role of public crusader.” She was a passionate vegetarian at a time when it was considered “cranky,” was outspoken in her defense of animal rights. She campaigned fiercely against vivisection and blood sports.

She also argued against the Vietnam War, and was a devoted advocate of LGBT rights, demanding equal marriage rights for gay couples shortly after homosexuality was legalized in Britain in 1967.

In 1972, together with her husband Michael Levey, Brophy formed the Writer’s Action Group to campaign for Public Lending Right, by which authors would be paid a small amount from central government funds each time their books were borrowed from public libraries. PLR was accepted into law in 1979, despite several delays, and the first payments were made in 1984.

 

Brigid Brophy’s last years and legacy

In 1983 Brophy was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis, which eventually left her in a wheelchair. Her collection of nonfiction, Baroque-n-Roll (1987), included an account of her illness:

“The chief curse of this illness is that I must ask constant service of the people I love most closely … Its sporadicness destroys the empiricism by which normal people proceed without noticing they are doing so … I have in part died in advance of the total event.”

Her husband stepped down from his role as director of the National Gallery to care for Brophy, and when she was placed in an MS-specialist care home in Lincolnshire, he moved from London to be with her. She died at the care home in August 1995, at the age of sixty-six.

Brophy’s activism has had a lasting impact. She has been credited with igniting the modern animal rights movement, and the Public Lending Right Bill is still in force, ensuring that writers are paid whenever their books are read.

There has been a resurgence of interest in Brophy’s writing, with numerous academic analyses of her work. In 2015, a Brophy conference was held at the University of Northampton. Some of her writings have been brought back into print, and her work is increasingly studied on university courses.

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Contributed by Elodie Barnes. Elodie is a writer and editor with a serious case of wanderlust. Her short fiction has been widely published online and is included in the Best Small Fictions 2022 Anthology published by Sonder Press. She is Books & Creative Writing Editor at Lucy Writers Platform, she is also co-facilitating What the Water Gave Us, an Arts Council England-funded anthology of emerging women writers from migrant backgrounds. She is currently working on a collection of short stories, and when not writing can usually be found planning the next trip abroad, or daydreaming her way back to 1920s Paris. Find her online at  Elodie Rose Barnes. 

More about Brigid Brophy

Major works: Novels

The Crown Princess and Other Stories (1953)Hackenfeller’s Ape (1953, reprinted 1991)The King of a Rainy Country (1956)Flesh (1962)The Finishing Touch (1963, revised 1987)The Snow Ball (1964)In Transit: An Heroi-Cyclic Novel (1969)The Adventures of God in His Search for the Black Girl: A Novel and Some Fables (1973)Palace Without Chairs: A Baroque Novel (1978)

Major works: Nonfiction (selected)

Black Ship to Hell (1962)Mozart the Dramatist: A New View of Mozart, His Operas and His Age (1964) Don’t Never Forget: Collected Views and Reviews (1966)Fifty Works of English and American Literature We Could Do Without
(with Michael Levey and Charles Osborne, 1967)Religious Education in State Schools (1967)Black and White: A Portrait of Aubrey Beardsley (1968)The Rights of Animals (1969. Animal Defence and Anti-Vivisection Society)The Longford Threat to Freedom (1972)Cruelty to Animals (London Review of Books, 1981)A Guide to Public Lending Right (1983)Baroque ‘n’ Roll and Other Essays (1987)Reads: A Collection of Essays (1989)

Biographies, criticism, and letters

Brigid Brophy: Avant-Garde Writer, Critic, Activist by Richard Canning and Gerri Kimber
(Edinburgh University Press, 2022)Living on Paper: Letters from Iris Murdoch 1934-1995, edited by Avril Horner and Anne Rowe
(Princeton University Press, 2018)

In addition to the works listed above, Brophy also wrote plays and a children’s book, and contributed essays to a number of publications.

More information

Brigid Brophy website Brophy’s fiction Iris Murdoch’s love letters to Brigid Brophy Discussion of Brophy’s works on Goodreads New York Times obituary Humanist Heritage

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The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett (1911)

Though Frances Hodgson Burnett (1849 – 1924) wrote more than forty novels, The Secret Garden (1911) remains one of her most enduring works, along with A Little Princess (1905).

Burnett was a poet and playwright in addition to her prolific output of novels and short stories for adults and children. Quite successful professionally, she had a difficult, sometimes tragic life.

The Secret Garden was published in 1911 after an original version was first serialized in The American Magazine in 1910. The story follows the journey of Mary Lennox, a sickly and unloved ten-year-old girl born to wealthy British parents in India.

After a cholera epidemic kills her parents, Mary is sent to England to live with her Uncle Archibald in an isolated, mysterious house. The tale follows the spoiled and sulky young girl as she slowly sheds her sour demeanor after discovering a secret, locked garden on the grounds of her uncle’s manor.

Mary befriends Dickon, one of the servant’s brother, a free spirit who was able to communicate with animals, and Colin, her uncle’s son, a neglected invalid. The Secret Garden has remained a timeless classic for its themes of friendship and the power of nature to heal the body and spirit.

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See also: A Little Princess by Frances Hodgson Burnett

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An original 1911 review of The Secret Garden

From the original review of The Secret Garden in The Times Dispatch, Richmond, VA, October 29, 1911:

Readers of all the many charming books that Frances Hodgson Burnett has written to delight the world and make it better will find The Secret Garden full of sweet and unexpected pleasures.

It’s a portrayal of the joyous laughter of childhood, the scents and sounds of fragrant growing things, and the bloom of roses,  and the magic that heals and comforts and makes the weak and sick strong. 

The titled garden was secret because the door to it had been locked and the key buried — along with its secrets. A long time before the book’s story began, the lady of the manor — a wife and mother — bent above its borders and tended its flowers. But because her life ended tragically early, it was barred, and the flowers were left untended and forsaken.

Introducing the contrary Mary Lennox

After years had passed, a little girl named Mary Lennox, whose parents had died in India from cholera, cat to Misselthwaite Manor in Yorkshire, England, the place were the secret garden stood.

Archibald Craven, the owner of the manor, was Mary’s uncle. She was a thin, sallow child, with thin light hair and a sour expression. She had never enjoyed any affection from her thoughtless, carefree young mother, and became a disagreeable child even before the untimely death of her parents.

Before Mary came to Misselthwaite Manor, she had had none of the amusements of a healthy childhood. 

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Quotes from The Secret Garden

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Discovering the secret garden and meeting Dickon

Soon after coming under the care of her uncle, Mary discovered the secret garden. She picked up the key, pushed aside an overhanging curtain of ivy, and went inside the ancient walls.

Once she had been working in the garden for a tie, her little peaked face began to grow round and rosy. 

Mary found a playmate, a boy named Dickon, who was a brother of the housemaid. Dickon was the son of a kind, motherly woman named Susan Sowerby and was versed in all the nature lore of the Yorkshire moors.

Dickon had made friends with many of the wild things and taught Mary a great deal about the ways of birds and squirrels and lambs. He taught her how to plant and tend flowers, too.

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Charles Robinson illustration from The Secret Garden, 1911 edition
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Everyone finds their own contentment

Mary had begun to feel the good effects of her changed surroundings, thriving and growing in a natural, healthy way. Then, she happened upon her cousin Colin Craven, who was the son of her Uncle Archibald. An invalid, he was over-doctored, over-nursed, and over-indulged. 

Colin was brought to the point of believing that he couldn’t walk, run, or participate in any of the games that children love. Instead, he had a highly developed set of nerves and an undeveloped spine due to lack of exercise and fresh air.

As to what the garden did for these two unhappy children, Mary and Colin, readers of the book will discover. Perhaps it did more for Colin’s father than for anyone else. 

But it might not have done so much had it not been for Dickon and Susan Sowerby and the encouragement they gave in making the weak grow strong, and the unhappy to find contentment.

The Secret Garden will have a place in the affections of the world along with Little Lord Fauntleroy and A Little Princess.

More about The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett An analysis of a classic children’s book Full text on Project Gutenberg Audio recording on Librivox Various film adaptations listed on IMDB

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On Rereading A Wrinkle in Time: A Fifty-Year View

I gave myself the best holiday present ever: rereading A Wrinkle in Time by our new Christmas tree. Rereading Madeleine L’Engle’s masterpiece was like visiting my oldest and dearest friend. 

A Wrinkle in Time is the book that ignited my reading obsession more than fifty years ago, and for that, I’m forever grateful.

I first experienced A Wrinkle in Time as it was read aloud by my fourth-grade teacher, Ms. Lloyd, at Overland Avenue elementary school. The book had received the Newbery Medal a few years earlier and captured the attention of thousands of elementary school librarians and teachers.

Ms. Lloyd must have been one of those teachers who welcomed the innovation of the outcast characters traveling in space — her rendition of A Wrinkle in Time was delightful and enthusiastic: after I listened to my teacher, I knew I had to reread the book on my own.

 

A Wrinkle in Time as constant companion

I wasn’t satisfied after Ms. Lloyd had finished reading A Wrinkle in Time nor did I want to return the book to the library. I needed A Wrinkle in Time to be my own to satisfy my own reading needs.

For $3.25 I bought my first book, the beautiful first edition of A Wrinkle in Time. The book had lime green tinted pages at the top, with the golden Newbery Medal seal on the blue cover that depicted Meg, Calvin, and Charles Wallace trapped in their own bright green concentric circles.

My first book became my first accessory. A Wrinkle in Time was always alongside my fifth- and sixth-grade homework papers. My dirty thumbprints were imprinted on the clean white back cover from playing basketball: this book accompanied me everywhere for the next few years.

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A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L’Engle
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Compelling characters and the art of tessering

I was never a science fiction or fantasy enthusiast; I simply believed that everything in A Wrinkle in Time had the potential of being possible and real.

What compelled me about the story then, as it does now, is the thrilling adventure of being hurtled through space to find Meg and Charles Wallace’s missing father, hidden on the planet Camazotz.

Will the children and their dear friend Calvin O’Keefe find Mr. Murry before it’s too late to return to earth? Or, will they be consumed by the CENTRAL Central Intelligence Unit and their minds absorbed by the evil IT?

Such a thing as intergalactic travel was possible: all one had to do was master the art of “tessering” and become acquainted with Mrs. Whatsit, Mrs. Who, and Mrs. Which. Simply because most of us had not had this opportunity didn’t rule out that such a journey could be achieved.

The character of the always-impatient, slightly angry Meg Murry juxtaposed against the steadying calmness of her friend Calvin O’Keefe that had me turning the page. Everyone always loved the preternaturally brilliant and charming youngest Murry, Charles Wallace.

 

The prescient metaphors of Camazotz

What captured my attention in this latest reading was the planet Camazotz and its residents who were quite happy to substitute freedom for security: L’Engle created a prescient environment of blind submission to an evil authority.

The danger of Camazotz is with us today; not long ago, there was an American president who told us not to believe anything unless he says it; anything else; according to him, is fake news. And there were plenty of people who agreed with forfeiting one’s freedom in exchange for the illusion of comfort.

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Madeleine L’Engle’s Long Years of Literary Rejection
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The challenges of parenting are universal

My recent reading of Wrinkle offered another personal revelation: how parents unknowingly (and almost certainly) disappoint their children. Meg was angry that upon the rescue of their father, he couldn’t immediately solve their current crisis: rescuing Charles Wallace from the evil IT and safely returning to earth.

After a few bouts of meanness and insolence towards her father, Meg recognized that her unrealistic expectations — to make everything correct again and to do so immediately — weren’t possible. She apologized.

Meg confessed to him, “I wanted you to do it all for me. I wanted everything to be all easy and simple … So I tried to pretend that it was all your fault … because I was scared, and I didn’t want to do anything myself.” 

“But I wanted to do it for you,” Mr. Murry said. “That’s what every parent wants.”

Little did I know, over fifty years ago, that A Wrinkle in Time would bring me solace and insight into parenthood. Madeleine L’Engle’s brilliance never ceases to amaze me.

The last four pages of the book were particularly affecting. I had tears falling freely down my face — the same yet not the same tears spilled over fifty years ago — when Meg attempts to rescue Charles Wallace from the evil IT.

“Charles, I love you. Come back to me, Charles Wallace, come away from IT, come back, come home. Charles Wallace, you are my darling and my dear and the light of my life and the treasure of my heart.”

And thus, Charles Wallace is freed from IT, and he, Meg, Calvin, and their beloved father find themselves back on earth. The best part of a safe and happy childhood is the unconditional, pure love given to a child by their parent. Such love has the possibility to change everything that may plague you.

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Can a Wrinkle in Time Ever Be Successfully Filmed?
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Relating to Meg Murry, a complex heroine

From my first reading decades ago to my most recent rereading, I have seen myself as Meg. I have stayed angry at the social and economic injustices that permeate our world, perceiving my anger as a necessary element to challenge and overcome such injustice.

Meg Murry is an incredible character. However, I also admire the skills of Calvin O’Keefe as a great communicator and an incredibly calm person. I also aspire to the great intelligence of Charles Wallace, but remember the warnings of Mrs. Whatsit.

Charles’ magnificent mind may be accompanied by arrogance and pride, something we need to check ourselves of when we’re convinced our intelligence is infallible.

There was a great deal of anticipation for the 2018 film adaptation of A Wrinkle in Time. But despite its stellar cast and director, the movie failed to capture the essence of the book. I heard that there is another film, this time a musical, being developed, to which I respond, why bother? Read the book. The book is always better.

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Contributed by Nancy Snyder. Nancy Snyder retired from the City and County of San Francisco and as a union officer for SEIU Local 1021/790. She writes about books and women writers to understand the world and her place in it.

The post On Rereading A Wrinkle in Time: A Fifty-Year View appeared first on Literary Ladies Guide.

The Life and Letters of Madame de Sévigné

Who was Madame de Sévigné (1626 – 1696) and why are we still reading her collected letters more than three hundred years later? She lived in complicated times— during the reign of Louis XIV — and she was a gifted chronicler. 

To this day, 1,372 of her letters survive, mostly written to her beloved daughter, Françoise-Marguerite de Sévigné.

Thanks to this correspondence, we have detailed insight into French history, politics, and culture, not to mention gossip — about the King’s love life, the Rennes tax revolt, or details of the corruption trial of finance minister Nicolas Fouquet. 

Madame de Sévigné writes about the events of her life with flair, faith (she was a good Catholic), and spice. The true events of her life would make a juicy novel.

 

Early life and education

Born Marie de Rabutin Chantal in Paris at the Place des Vosges, her father was from an aristocratic Burgundian family, and her mother from the noble Coulanges. While still young, her father was killed in a battle against the English on the Ile de Rhe and her mother died a few years later. 

After the death of her grandparents, at the age of ten, the young orphan was sent to live with her uncle Christophe de Coulanges, the Abbe of Livry. This proved fortuitous.

She was served well by her guardian; de Coulanges offered a good home, guarded her fortune, and made sure she was well-schooled in Christian values, Italian, Spanish, and Latin. Such an education was uncommon for women of the time.

Building on this solid foundation, young Marie studied philosophy, history, religion, and literature, including the works of Rabelais, Pascal, and La Fontaine.

 

An unhappy marriage and early widowhood

In 1644, at the age of eighteen, Marie was married off to Henri, Marquis de Sévigné, scion of a respected Breton family, as his third wife. Now, as Madame de Sévigné, she settled down to marital bliss and the raising of children. However, the bliss was short-lived — the Marquis was a gambler, spendthrift, and adulterer.

Seven years into the marriage, he was killed in a duel fought over his mistress, a prostitute named La Belle Lolo. At the age of twenty-five, the widow was left with two young children, a daughter named Francoise-Marguerite and a son named Charles.    

In summing up her loveless and only marriage, de Sévigné wrote, “Matrimony is a very dangerous disorder; I had rather drink.”

 

Madame de Sévigné’s iconic correspondence begins

The correspondence for which she became famous started when her daughter, Françoise-Marguerite, moved to Provence with her husband Comte de Grignan, where he could serve as viceroy. 

The separation from her daughter was shattering. Seeking solace, Madame de Sévigné often wrote to Françoise-Marguerite three times a week, twenty to thirty pages a day. The tone of the letters may seem hurried as she covered a lot of topics in each; however, she had to make the post on Wednesdays and Fridays.  

The letters, covering some fifty years, were written either from her home in Paris (now the Musee Carnavalet), her estates in Burgundy and Provence, the homes of relatives and friends, or Versailles. 

“My dear girl, don’t stop loving me, for love is my life and soul; as I said to you the other day, it makes all my joy and all my grief.  I declare that the rest of my life is overshadowed by gloom and sadness when I think that so often I shall spend it away from you.”

At the time, letters were meant to be read aloud, and narrators could leave out anything personal about family and friends. Madame de Sévigné often parodies Corneille and Moliere in her writing, and she makes many historical and literary references throughout. 

In letters to her daughter Francoise-Marguerite, Madame de Grignan, she alternated between offering loving advice on childrearing and health, and nagging her about how she and Comte Grignan spent and gambled too much (de Sévigné was always having to bail them out financially).

Similarly, in letters to her son Charles she offered kind, encouraging words when she wasn’t lecturing him on his unbecoming appetite for actresses and partying. In her correspondence, she gossiped about scandals at the Court, report on political events, or complain tediously about aches, pains, and loneliness. 

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Observations on Madame de Sévigné’s correspondence

Madame de Sévigné’s correspondence has been described as important and influential as that of Voltaire. Authors such as Elizabeth Gaskell, George Eliot, and Virginia Woolf considered her a model for future women writers. 

It has been a joy to read these epistles, especially those in the Penguin Classics collection, Madame de Sevigne, Selected Letters, for which Professor Leonard Tancock translated and published fifty complete letters with excellent notes for historical context. This book presents many letters to her daughter as well as those to or from her son Charles (with whom she wasn’t as obsessed) and her cousin Roger de Rabutin, among others.   

Readers can appreciate the colorful bon mots and turns of phrase: “Take chocolate so that the most unpleasant company seems good to you.”  “I always think people can read my thoughts through my bodice.”  “It is freezing fit to split a stone.”

It’s no wonder that Madame de Sévigné became a popular figure at Versailles as well as in Parisian salon society, and that her letters have become treasured literary gems.    

The letters are not only observant and witty, but they’re written with lots of puns and epigrams.  Moreover, she is considered a forerunner to the romantics, portraying the world of Mother Nature — its peace and spirituality. In one letter, she describes trees as being “decked in pearls and crystal.”  In another letter:   

“These woods are always beautiful; their greenness is a hundred times more beautiful than that of Livry. I do not know whether it is due to the quality of the trees or to the freshness of the rains, but there can be no comparison. Everything today has the same green it had during the month of May. The leaves which fall are dead but those holding on are still green. You have never gazed at such beauty.”

Despite the span of time between Madame de Sévigné’s and my own life, I can empathize with many of the emotions in her letters, particularly when she writes as a mother who misses her daughter (as I do mine).

I also appreciate her love and kindness as a grandmother and friend. De Sévigné was a genius in the art of friendship and counted respected wordsmiths Francois de La Rochefoucauld and Madame de La Fayette as among her closest friends.

As the late author Francine du Plessix Gray wrote in a review of Frances Mossiker’s biography, Madame de Sevigne, A Life and Letters, the correspondence reveals:  

“… A woman whose need for solitude creates a constant tension with her love of society, a devout Catholic whose Jansenist brand of faith tends to austere pessimism, a bonne vivante whose conversation leans toward the bold and racy, a narcissistic coquette addicted to spa cures and dietary fads to maintain her figure, a flirtatious tease who enjoys men’s attention and yet is reported to be frigid.”

Modern-day critics are often harsh, judging Madame de Sévigné’s thoughts and attitudes by contemporary mores. Given the brutal times of torture and war that spanned her life, more context is needed.

When King Louis XIV revoked the Edict of Nantes to deprive all Protestants of liberty unless they converted to Catholicism, she approved of their persecution and exile insofar as she considered them traitors. More than two hundred thousand Huguenots fled France during this period.  

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Preservation and destruction of Madame’s letters

How did so many of her letters survive? Madame de Sevigne’s cousin Rabutin published many of them in a memoir he wrote just following her death. Over time, others published her correspondence, sometimes edited.

The biggest blow to historical preservation was when Madame de Simiane (daughter of Françoise-Marguerite, and granddaughter of de Sévigné) printed her grandmother’s letters and reportedly burned most of her mother’s responses.  Evidently, de Simiane was troubled by her mother’s unorthodox Cartesian views espoused by René Descartes, the controversial rationalist.

“You ask me, my dear child, whether I am still fond of life. I admit that I think it has some acute sorrows. But I am even more repelled by death, and I feel that I am so unfortunate to have to finish all this by death, and that if I could go backwards I would ask for nothing better.”

Madame de Sévigné died of smallpox at her daughter’s chateau on April 17, 1696. Her daughter, fearing the disease, was not at her deathbed, the sad irony being that she died nine years later from smallpox as well.  

Further reading and sources

The Sun King: Louis XIV at Versailles by Nancy Mitford (1966)King of the World, The Life of Louis XIV by Philip Mansel (2019) Britannica Madame de Sevigne, Selected Letters, with an introduction by Leonard Tancock (1982) Quotes by Madame de Sévigné

Contributed by Tyler Scott, who has been writing essays and articles since the early 1980s for various magazines and newspapers.  In 2014 she published her novel The Excellent Advice of a Few Famous Painters. She lives in Blackstone, Virginia where she and her husband renovated a Queen Anne Revival house and enjoy small town life.

More by Tyler Scott on this site:

A Tribute to Claudia Emerson, Poet and Friend Anita Brookner, Author of Hotel du Lac

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Don’t Tell Alfred By Nancy Mitford (1960)

Don’t Tell Alfred (1960) was the last novel by British author Nancy Mitford (1904 –1973) and the final installment of the loose trilogy encompassing The Pursuit of Love (1945) and Love in a Cold Climate (1949). 

Like the two previous novels, Don’t Tell Alfred is narrated by Frances (“Fanny”) Wincham. It takes place some twenty years after the previous two (whose timelines were more or less concurrent) and focuses on the narrator herself.

The Pursuit of Love and Love in a Cold Climate are told from her perspective but have different main characters, both of whom are cousins of Fanny.

And like most of Mitford’s other novels, Don’t Tell Alfred gently satirizes the mores and manners of the British upper classes.

As the novel begins, Fanny is middle aged with two teenage sons. Alfred, her stable, staid husband is still an Oxford don, but has suddenly been appointed as the British ambassador to France. The family moves to Paris, and from there, various complications ensue.

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See also: The Pursuit of Love by Nancy Mitford

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A brief description of Don’t Tell Alfred

From the publisher of the 2010 edition (Vintage books): In this delightful comedy, Fanny—the quietly observant narrator of Nancy Mitford’s two most famous novels—finally takes center stage.

Fanny Wincham—last seen as a young woman in The Pursuit of Love and Love in a Cold Climate—has lived contentedly for years as housewife to an absent-minded Oxford don, Alfred. But her life changes overnight when her beloved Alfred is appointed English Ambassador to Paris.

Soon she finds herself mixing with royalty and Rothschilds while battling her hysterical predecessor, Lady Leone, who refuses to leave the premises. 

When Fanny’s tender-hearted secretary begins filling the embassy with rescued animals and her teenage sons run away from Eton and show up with a rock star in tow, things get entirely out of hand. Gleefully sending up the antics of mid-century high society, Don’t Tell Alfred is classic Mitford.

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See also: Love in a Cold Climate by Nancy Mitford

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A 1960 review of Don’t Tell Alfred

From the original review by Harriet Hill in The Gazette, Montreal, Quebec, Canada, December 10, 1960: Like snails, Nancy Mitford is a cultivated taste. Once a reader has acquired the taste. almost anything that comes from her pen proves edible. Sometimes she drips acid, at others, honey. 

In her latest she moves in ambassadorial circles. (She frequented them in Paris for a good many years and now maybe she feels safe in paying off a few old scores.) Somebody once said, “You can tell a person almost anything if you smile when you say it.”

Nancy Mitford smiles blandly when pinpointing her attack on the foibles of the upper crust. Her Majesty’s Government pitched Fanny Wincham’s husband, Alfred, from the bucolic simplicity of Oxford into the UK Embassy in Paris. 

Fanny embarks on her new wifely career in the world’s most chic capital with misgivings, ranging from her lack of smartness to absence of mental swiftness. 

From then on, the Winchams take hold of problems ambassadorial and sons who keep appearing and converting the embassy into as outlandish a “home from home” as any reader would wish. 

Fanny, a permissive parent in her own view (and certainly she could be called that in the view of others) has to put up with a son who starts to make quick money escorting elderly English people to the Costa Brava, another who is a Zen Buddhist and appears at the embassy complete with new wife and Chinese baby (not theirs) and two young teenagers who take French leave from Eton.

The other young problem — beautiful Northey who comes to Paris as Lady Wincham’s secretary and from then on has a string of elderly French parliamentarians to contend with as well as such unlikely pets as a rescued badger in the Embassy garden.

The Winchams move from crisis to crisis, public and private, in hilarious succession. The duel between the generations is as funny as anything in modern writing. If at times the nonsense threatens to become top heavy. remember this is Nancy Mitford and nobody else moves in her highly specialized groove as well.

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Original cover of the 1960 edition
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More about Don’t Tell Alfred by Nancy Mitford

Review by Evelyn Waugh in London Magazine Review in Kirkus Reviews Reader discussion on Goodreads

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