Adelaide Procter's Grave
Edsall, Richard Linn
THE recent redecoration of Adelaide Procter's grave in Saint Mary's Cemetery, Kensal Green, London, reminds one that it is high time for a renovation of her entombed fame. For a long time after...
...And, in them, present Adelaide Procter to the world once again, as the author of poems ^vhich the last sixty years have not been able to tarnish...
...She collected her work in 1858, in the two volumes of Legends and Lyrics, and in 1862 published A Chaplet of Verses, for the benefit of the Providence Row Catholic night refuge that was conducted for homeless women and children...
...In 1843 she contributed some verses to the Book of Beauty, and ten years later, under the non de plume of Mary Berwick, started sending poems to Dickens, who was then editor of Household Words...
...The stones are buried under a heap of rubbish, but will reward amply anyorie who will dig for them—stiU more amply, anyone who will separate them from the trash...
...So little known is she today that it is necessary to recall the meagre set of facts we can learn about her life, most of which arc preserved in Charles Dickens's introduction to her collected verse...
...Adelaide Anne Procter was born in 1825...
...Two other poems on this theme, A Crown of Sorrow, and Grief, are suggestive of Blake, a poet one would be even less likely to think of than Shelley, in connection with Adelaide Procter...
...The Sea...
...Her father was also a poet, forgotten today save for one rapturous poem...
...A Lament for the Summer...
...Such are A Doubting Heart...
...He was much taken with her poetry, and continued publishing it for a year and a half before he discovered the identity of his contributor, or the reason for her disguise—the fact, namely, that Dickens and her father were friends, and she wished her poems to be judged solely on their own merits...
...She did write poetry, but it is perhaps more closely akin to Longfellow's than to anyone else's...
...Strange though it be in a poet so nearly related to Longfellow, her best secular poems are written in elaborate stanzaforms of her own, with a rush and flow and airiness reminiscent of Shelley...
...The last three, together with The Angel of Death, and Evening Hymn, are in my opinion the crown of her poetry, for in them one finds a strength, a simplicity, a ring of finality rare in religious poetry, and rarer still in the verses of a Victorian spinster...
...Two years after coming into the Church, she visited a Catholic aunt near Turin, and gave herself over to an intensive study of the Piedmontese...
...She shares his passion for sugary legends and for trumpet-calls to serving mankind and seeing the rosy side of life...
...Finally, there is her religious poetry, some of which is scattered through Legends and Lyrics, but most of which is contained in A Chaplet of Verses...
...Worn out with overmuch work for the needy, she died in her thirty-eighth year, on the Feast of the Purification, 1864...
...His name was Bryan Waller Procter, but he is known by his pseudonym, Barry Cornwall...
...And she does not imitate either: I mention the likeness only to show that she is cousin germane to other and truer poets than Longfellow...
...Changes...
...Here she flowers out to the fulness of her talent and power, in poems of intense devotion, especially to Our Bkssed Lady and the Sacred Heart, and above all in prayers full of passion, with steady refrains resembling litanies—in The Storm, The Pilgrims, Kyrie Eleison, and Our Daily Bread...
...She is preoccupied with deserted brides and fiancees, with dying children, with father and child weeping by the mother's grave, with souls floating gently up to heaven, with angels fluttering all about, with dim cathedrals, with whispering trees, with misty scenes, with wedded hearts in parted bodies—all the paraphernalia of popular Victorian romance...
...This list contains a goodly portion of her best non-religious poems, and among them there is really only one theme, in varying forms—sorrow over the impermanence of earthly satisfactions and the defeat of earthly hopes...
...however, it must in fairness be added that it is also marked by more verve and dash than had been common in lyrics since the age of Elizabeth...
...In 1851 she followed Cardinal Manning and many others into the Catholic Church, after the Gorhain case proved that contradictory teachings were given equal authority in the Established Church, and that its doctrine was to be interpreted by the secular courts...
...poem, A Tomb in Ghent...
...Linger, O Gentle Time...
...and, a still better...
...Now, when she is no longer associated with one of the most maudlin of Victorian songs, the ground is clear to acquaint the world with her best poetry...
...Here are stones fitted to build a nobler monument to Adelaide Procter than the grave recently restored...
...Her chief occupation, however, was caring for the sick, the poor, the homeless, the degraded...
...The Triumph of Time (whose very title is taken from Shelley...
...she also shares his genuine ability in creating splendid poems on subjects of lasting interest...
...For a long time after people stopped reading her poetry, she lived on in their renditions of The Lost Chord, but in recent years that lyric has met a well-earned death...
...This connection with a Catholic institution naturally leads one to think of her religion...
...Few nowadays remember that Longfellow wrote not only The Psalm of Life, and Evangeline, but the magnificent sonnet on The Sea, and the still finer sonnet-series on Dante and the Divina Conunedia...
...She soon became proficient in French, Italian, German, music, geometry and drawing, an exceedingly broad education for a girl of those days...
...It is interesting to note that two of her sisters also became Catholics...
...and her religion, which was not one of the vague sentimentalities that were enjoying popularity at the time, but Catholicism, which is forever green...
...It is true that the vast majority of her poems are unreadable today, for the simple reason that they express ideas and emotions long consigned to the limbo of stuffed sofas...
...Though he was an ardent disciple of Leigh Hunt, his verse is full of moralizing and glorification of respectability...
...Nothing is known of it previous to 1851, save that she was a High Anglican, presumably a convert to that faith...
...and A Remembrance of Autumn...
...Besides her lyrics, there are two good "legends" or narrative poems, A Legend of Provence, whose story has become universally known since the production of The Miracle...
...Thereafter she lived in London, writing pxjems and mingling considerably in society...
...She often unjustly said: "I only write verses—I do not write poetry...
...She was one of the distinguished persons who formed the committee of the Association for the Promotion of Social Science, and she both edited and contributed to their anthology, Victoria Regia...
...There are two facts in her life which give her poetry more perennial vitality than the work of most Victorian poetesses: the experience that lay behind her moralizing and saved it from cant...
Vol. 6 • May 1927 • No. 3
