The Poet Who Told the Truth
Annie Fields
I RECALL an incident in a child's life which stirred a chord in my
own spirit at the time I heard it and prompted the feeling that
others too might be touched by it; though it is really such a
trifling incident that I confess to find myself rehearsing it with
a very faint-hearted kind of courage.
She was one of those thoughtful little girls,
the child I am recalling, who linger about their elder sisters,
sometimes with a book in a corner, sometimes running off by
themselves to play in the garden, flitting hither and thither
unnoticed as the twilight moths. Heeding, gathering, assimilating,
but seldom giving evidence of thought or power of speech. One day,
however, my little girl had listened to a good deal of anxious
consultation among a company of older girls about clothes, and
proposed pleasures, and disappointment for lack of opportunity,
and criticism of the lives of others. The talk was dreary,
purposeless, uninspired, and yet in the garden the birds were
singing and the trees waving and the spirit of love was abroad
making the heart of the child glad. Presently she spoke. "
Longfellow says:
Lives of great men all remind us
We may make our lives sublime."
The elder girls looked at each other and
laughed. "Nonsense, child, what put that into your head! That's
all very well for poetry, but it has nothing to do with us!"
The child hung her head and ran off. She had
heard Longfellow called "a true poet;" didn't that mean a poet who
told the truth ? Yes, she believed it still, though Henrietta was
ten years older than she was and ought to know what she was
saying.
Now this is all the incident; but you will be glad to know that
the child pondered it in her heart, and year by year remembered
the words of the true poet which sounded to her like the things
which were whispered among the trees in the garden, and she
believed them in spite of Henrietta. The lives of good and great
men and women were her best beloved reading and her chief study.
She loved to think of Washington because he was brave,
high-hearted, scornful of ease and ready to lay down his life
again and again that men might have a new great country free from
the oppression of the old and wicked governments of Europe. She
loved to hear about Mrs. Adams in Quincy, and of the hard brave
life of the women of that time. By and by too she heard about the
grey-headed poet, Bryant, a dignified old man who walked through
the gay world of New York with his solemn and sweet face, writing
his poems about the Future Life, and his Apple Tree, and making
speeches to crowds of men, urging them to think on serious things.
One day also the story of John Brown was told
her: "How he spoke his grand oration in the scorn of all denial"
and dauntless died between his sons. Then she heard of Garrison
and Whittier and her world began to grow more and more beautiful,
not less and less so as she herself grew. When many hard things
came to her, she would recall some of the busy women with troubled
lives who had been helpful to others and "made a low name
honorable." She grew glad as she grew older and light-hearted,
when she read the lives of Felicia Hemans, of Elizabeth Fry, of
Lydia Maria Child, and learned to know that every kind of work is
needed in the world, so it is well done, and that greatness is not
achieved without the overcoming of difficulties. Sometimes her own
share of burdens seemed small and she could dance with it, though
at other times it was heavy enough. Many and many a day and in
every strait of life she remembered the words, and would recite
them to herself, of "the true poet." They had been, she said, a
life-long inspiration to her in spite of the sad rebuff of her
childhood by one old enough to know better; and it is one of the
helpful things she loves to do for others to bring again to memory
that,
Lives of great men all remind us
We should make our lives sublime
-- Annie Fields.
"The Poet Who Told the Truth" appeared in the section, The
Contributors and the Children, Wide Awake 24 (December
1886) pp. 87-8.
Edited by Terry Heller, Coe College.