The Death of a Child
The most famous early modern poems about children’s deaths focus on babies and young children. See, for example, Ben Jonson, “On My First Son.” Of Katherine Philips’s two poems about her “first and dearest child, Hector Philips,” who died shortly after his birth May 2, 1655. I have chosen this one because of its use of Pulterian tropes and diction. The next selection, from the biography of Elizabeth Cary, documents the extraordinarily long and eventful reproductive lives of seventeenth-century gentlewomen, like Pulter and Cary, who had many pregnancies—and many losses.
Epitaph: On Her Son H.P. at St. Syth’s Church, Where Her Body Also Lies Interred
- What on earth deserves our trust?
- Youth and beauty both are dust.
- Long we gathering are with pain,
- What one moment calls again.
- Seven years childless, marriage past,
- A son, a son is born at last;
- So exactly limbed and fair,
- Full of good spirits, mien, and air,
- As a long life promised;
- Yet, in less than six weeks, dead.
- Too promising, too great a mind
- In so small room to be confined:
- Therefore, fit in Heaven to dwell,
- Quickly broke the prison shell.
- So the subtle alchemist,
- Can't with Hermes’ seal resist
- The powerful spirit's subtler flight,
- But ’twill bid him long good night.
- And so the sun, if it arise
- Half so glorious as his eyes,
- Like this Infant, takes a shroud,
- Buried in a morning cloud.
[On Cary’s journey back to England from Ireland in July 1625]
By a violent tempest at sea, they were once driven back, being in great danger to be cast away, the child at her breast (she sitting upon the hatches) had his breath struck out of his body by a wave, and remained as dead a quarter of an hour. After arriving safe, and having first kissed her majesty’s [Henrietta Maria’s] hands (who was not long before coming into England), she retired to her mother’s for fear of the plague (then very hot), carrying with her, besides the rest, her married daughter [Katherine], great with child, who, in the journey, being carried over a narrow bridge by a gentleman of her mother’s, who out of particular care desired to carry her, his foot slipping, fell into the water. But he in the fall, taking only care of her, cast himself so along in the water, that she fell upright with her feet on his breast. And she seeing them all troubled for fear of her, and he especially, who had long served her father and mother, much afflicted at it, she would not acknowledge feeling any hurt nor being frightened, but at the end of her journey the same night fell sick, and within a week died, being first delivered, almost three months afore her time, of a daughter, which lived three hours and was christened. Had it lived, the mother [Elizabeth Cary] was resolved to have nursed her daughter’s child together with her own, not yet weaned. Her daughter died in her arms.
She [Elizabeth Cary] never gave much way to grief in any such occasion, and did here comfort herself the more through her daughter’s affirming (being perfectly awake, as they thought, and as perfectly in her senses, for all they could perceive) that there stood by her bed a bright woman clothed in white having a crown on her head, which she then assuredly believed to be our Blessed Lady, and persuaded her daughter the same. But yet a little after, dying, she often repeated with a sad lamentable mournful voice, “Woe is me. Is there no remedy?” which her mother (not judging to be only the apprehension of death, she having showed herself all the time, and when she was most in danger, much more desirous of and careful for the preservation of her child’s life than her own), did persuade herself was some sight she had of what she was to suffer (as she hoped) in purgatory.