Free Angels and Absences: Child Deaths in the Nineteenth Century by Laurence Lerner Page B

arguments.
Coleridge and the Dead Infant
"Be rather than be called a child of God"
Death whispered. With assenting nod,
Its head upon its mother's breast,
The Baby bowed without demur
Of the kingdom of the Blest
Possessor, not Inheritor 4
If we read this poem as orthodox Christian, which it clearly is, Death is seen as helpful, listening to the words of the baptism service and offering to go one better, and so doing the infant a good turn. But no such poem can protect itself against the defiantly atheist reader, and if we give it an unchristian reading (if we pretend, say, that it was written by Hardy) then Death becomes not helpful but sardonic, and the poem is a chuckle, saying, "If that's what they think, let's act on it." Reverse the interpretative context, in other words, and we can reverse the poem. Our knowledge that Coleridge (who was orthodox enough by 1799, when these lines were written) did not mean it that way, and would no doubt have been indignant at such a reading, is knowledge extrinsic to the text, telling us not that it will not bear this meaning but that responsible historians would not dream (or would only dream) of propounding it.
That this reversal of meaning, if we insisted on imposing it, would not be mere whim is confirmed by the "Epitaph on an Infant" of 1811 (by which time Coleridge was even more orthodox):
Its balmy lips the infant blest
Relaxing from its Mother's breast,
How sweet it heaves the happy sigh
Of innocent satiety!

 

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And such my infant's latest sigh!
Oh tell, rude stone! the passer by
That here the pretty babe doth lie,
Death sang to sleep with Lullaby.
Once again, Death is doing the child a good turn, but not, this time, for Christian reasons. There is no Christianity at all in this proto-Freudian poem about the satiety of the child removed from the breast, which Freud would later compare with sexual satiety (and which in its turn has often enough been compared to death). The parallel with the first epitaph consists in the wiliness of Death. The baptismal service and the bliss of being breast-fed both contain a promise of ensuing happiness, that of heaven in the first, of sleep in the second. Death hears the service, sees the infant, and in both cases fulfils the promise in a way we did not expect but cannot logically object to. He has played a benign trick on usor rather a trick that should be benign to the Christian, and will seem a bad joke to the this- worldly reader.
In neither of these poems is there any statement that living in the world is a danger from which the child has been released, as there is in the earliest of Coleridge's three child epitaphs:
Ere Sin could blight or Sorrow fade,
Death came with friendly care:
The opening Bud to Heaven conveyed
And bade it blossom there .
The promise that Death decides to grant immediately, which was textual in the first poem and physiological in the second, is now presented through the image of plucking (or transplanting) a flower, with, this time, an explicit mention of the dangers of living on. Though these dangers are not mentioned in the other two epitaphs, it would not be misreading to import them: it could even be claimed that they are clearly impliedwhy else would Death be doing a kindly act? (In the reversal I have proposed, where Death's motive is malevolent, the view of life as a vale of tears and danger is still implied: In that case, Death is not rescuing the infant, but cunningly exploiting the logic of such a view).
What Coleridge merely implies is spelled out at great length by Hemans: her poem is a celebration of Death's benign rescue. It too uses the

 

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image of a flower being transplanted, and as in Coleridge's epitaph the flower blooms only in infancy; she then develops the implication that it can go on blooming in Heaven. The image clearly springs from otherworldliness, the conviction that what happens in this world is of only minor or temporary importance; or, more strongly still, that life on