Alfred H. Miles, ed. Women Poets of the Nineteenth Century. 1907.
By A Child’s Grave at FlorenceElizabeth Barrett Browning (1806–1861)
Born, July 1848; died, November 1849.
O
What country should we give her?
Instead of any on the earth,
The civic Heavens receive her.
In Tuscan ground we lay her,
While the blue Tuscan sky endomes
Our English words of prayer.
By months, not years, is reckoned
Born in one July, she survived
Alone to see a second.
Her little face still played in,
And splendours, with her birth begun,
Had had no time for fading.
No wonder we should call her;
She looked such kinship to the flowers,
Was but a little taller.
As Dante, in abhorrence
Of red corruption, wished aright
The lilies of his Florence.
Who perfumed with pure blossom
The house—a lovely thing to wear
Upon a mother’s bosom!
Our speech not worth assuming;
She sate upon her parents’ laps
And mimicked the gnat’s humming;
For tongues celestial, fitter:
Her hair had grown just long enough
To catch heaven’s jasper-glitter.
Behind the cloud that hid them.
“Let little children come to Me,
And do not thou forbid them.
And gently here have laid her,
Though winter is no time to get
The flowers that should o’er-spread her:
Rose, violet, daffodilly,
And also, above everything,
White lilies for our Lily.
Glad, grateful attestations
Of her sweet eyes and pretty acts,
With calm renunciations.
Should leave the place too earthy,
Saying, “The angels have thee, Sweet,
Because we are not worthy.”
The gardens in the frost are,
And all the heart dissolves in floods,
Remembering we have lost her.
To miss the July shining!
Poor heart!—what bitter words we speak
When God speaks of resigning!
Thou God, the self-existent!
We catch up wild at parting saints
And feel Thy heaven too distant.
Has ruffled all our vesture:
On the shut door that let them in,
We beat with frantic gesture,—
The outer life is chilly;
Are we too, like the earth, to wait
Till next year for our Lily?
My leaping, dimpled treasure,
At every word I write like these,
Clasped close with stronger pressure!
At every word beats fuller—
My little feet, my little hands,
And hair of Lily’s colour!
And Faith remembers promise,
And Hope itself can smile at length
On other hopes gone from us.
Through struggle, made more glorious:
This mother stills her sobbing breath,
Renouncing yet victorious.
With spirit unbereaven,—
“God will not all take back His gifts;
My Lily’s mine in heaven.
Not given to another!
The crystal bars shine faint between
The souls of child and mother.
Our love was well divided:
Its sweetness following where she went,
Its anguish stayed where I did.
And give her all the sweetness;
To us, the empty room and cot,—
To her, the Heaven’s completeness.
The mystic palm-trees spring in;
To us, the silence in the house,—
To her, the choral singing.
For us, to hope and bear on.
Grow, Lily, in thy garden new,
Beside the Rose of Sharon!
In love more calm than this is,
And may the angels dewy-lipped
Remind thee of our kisses!
These human tears now falling,
Till, after a few patient years,
One home shall take us all in.
Not mother, and not father!
And when, our dying couch about,
The natural mists shall gather,
In old Correggio’s fashion,
And bear a L
For death’s A