Child Loss Elegies
Not all children outlived their parents in early modern England, and parents and grandparents sometimes wrote about the experience of losing a child. Pulter’s Jane poems join other notable elegies written about the death of a child in seventeenth-century England, including the following by Ben Jonson, Katherine Philips, Elizabeth Egerton, and Anne Bradstreet. Notice how each poem describes grief and appropriate mourning, as well as how each seeks or resists consolation.
- Here lies, to each her parents’ ruth,
- Mary, the daughter of their youth;
- Yet all heaven’s gifts being heaven’s due,
- It makes the father less to rue.
- At six months’ end she parted hence
- With safety of her innocence;
- Whose soul heaven’s queen, whose name she bears,
- In comfort of her mother’s tears,
- Hath placed amongst her virgin-train:
- Where, while that severed doth remain,
- This grave partakes the fleshly birth;
- Which cover lightly, gentle earth!
On the Death of my First and Dearest Child, Hector Philips, born the 23rd of April, and died the 2nd of May 1655
- Twice forty months in wedlock I did stay,
- Then had my vows crowned with a lovely boy.
- And yet in forty days he dropped away;
- O swift vicissitude of human joy!
- I did but see him, and he disappeared,
- I did but touch the rosebud, and it fell;
- A sorrow unforeseen and scarcely feared,
- So ill can mortals their afflictions spell.
- And now (sweet babe) what can my trembling heart
- Suggest to right my doleful fate or thee?
- Tears are my muse, and sorrow all my art,
- So piercing groans must be thy elegy.
- Thus whilst no eye is witness of my moan,
- I grieve thy loss (ah, boy too dear to live!)
- And let the unconcerned world alone,
- Who neither will, nor can refreshment give.
- An offering too for thy sad tomb I have,
- Too just a tribute to thy early hearse;
- Receive these gasping numbers to thy grave,
- The last of thy unhappy mother's verse.
In Memory of My Dear Grandchild Anne Bradstreet, Who Deceased June 20, 1669, Being Three Years and Seven Months Old
- With troubled heart and trembling hand I write,
- The heavens have changed to sorrow my delight.
- How oft with disappointment have I met,
- When I on fading things my hopes have set?
- Experience might ’fore this have made me wise,
- To value things according to their price:
- Was ever stable joy yet found below?
- Or perfect bliss without mixture of woe.
- I knew she was but as a withering flower,
- That’s here today perhaps gone in an hour;
- Like as a bubble, or the brittle glass,
- Or like a shadow turning as it was.
- More fool then I to look on that was lent,
- As if mine own, when thus impermanent.
- Farewell dear child, thou ne’er shall come to me,
- But yet a while, and I shall go to thee,
- Meantime my throbbing heart’s cheered up with this:
- Thou with thy Savior art in endless bliss.
When I Lost My Dear Girl Kate
My sorrow is great I confess. I am much grieved for the loss of my dear girl Keatty who was as fine a child as could be. She was but a year and ten months old when, by the fatal disease of the smallpox, it was God’s pleasure to take her from me, who spoke anything one bid her, and would call for anything at dinner, and make her mind known at any time, and was kind to all, even to strangers, and had no anger in her.
All thought she loved them. Her brothers and sister loved her with a fond love. She was so good, she never slept nor played at sermon nor prayers. She had received the sacrament of baptism which washed her from her original sin, and she lived holily. She took delight in nothing but me if she had seen me; if absent, ever had me in her words, desiring to come to me. Never was there so fond a child of a mother.
But she now is not in this world which grieves my heart, even my soul. But I must submit and give God my thanks that He once was pleased to bestow so great a blessing as that sweet child upon me.
Pulter did not take the counsel of Renaissance writers who urged mothers to contain their immoderate grief and experience the joy of their child being embraced by God in the afterlife. In the final stanza of his poem, “On the Death of a Fair Infant Dying of Cough,” John Milton, for instance, offers advice to a grieving mother:
On the Death of a Fair Infant Dying of Cough
- Then thou the mother of so sweet a child
- Her false imagin’d loss cease to lament,
- And wisely learn to curb thy sorrows wild;
- Think what a present thou to God hast sent,
- And render him with patience what he lent;
- This if thou do, he will an off-spring give
- That till the worlds last end shall make thy name to live.