"Dead in the cold" (from SingSong)

Dead in the cold, a song-singing thrush,
Dead at the foot of a snowberry bush, -
Weave him a coffin of rush,
Dig him a grave where the soft mosses grow,
Raise him a tombstone of snow.
(1869)

This is the first of three poems I'll be writing about written in the collection "SingSong" for children (if you can believe that!). First, a general note by Marsh on the overall collection: "Early in 1870 CGR completed a collection of poems for young children - her own Nursery Rhymes - which she submitted to DGR's publisher F.S. Ellis as 'a marketable proposition,' with thumbnail sketches for each piece indicating how she conceived the volume. her illness and Ellis's inexperience led to trouble and delay, and in 1871 CGR negotiated a new contract with the Dalziel Bros, who produced SingSong (title suggested by FLR) for George Routledge. Arthur Hughes made attractive and much-praised illustrations - CGR particularly liked his image of a black crow turning grey in the wash - and the book was published for Christmas 1871. It is carefully structured, from waking rhymes at the beginning to bedtime rhymes at the end, and includes over 120 separate poems; many, as WMR noted, 'are perfectly suited for figuring among her verse for adults, and evenfor taking an honoured place as such' (PW, p. 490). In 1878, hearing her cousin Teodorico Pietrocola Rossetti was aiming to translate the text into Italian, CGR made her own attempts at thirty-three of the rhymes, which figure among her most accomplished and witty Italian poems. Not all critics have shared WMR's assessment; according to the Pelican Guide to English Literature (1958, vol. 6, p. 89), SingSong 'contains too much talk of death and transience to be useful in the nursery.'"

Well, this poem is indeed about death - today an odd subject for the nursery. Yet the poem is beautiful and in an age of higher child and infant mortality rates, there must have been an odd comfort about it. From both biographies I've read on CGR, I've learned of her own first-hand experience burying a dead animal. It seems as a child she buried a small rodent or mole in the ground and was horrified when she went to dig it up three days later to find it decomposing with a beetle crawling out of it's stomach.

In its own right though, I think the poem is beautiful. The imagery is cool and spare, but the action of the poem is a caring one - as children, we often will bury a dead animal and hold a funeral of sorts. This funeral, however, seems more related to nature than the divine; the tombstone is of snow - which will melt away with the coming spring. The bird is also associated with winter - dying, where once it sang the spring and summer before. Despite her work in the anti-vivisection movement (which showed her obvious care for animals) she does not confuse souless animals with immortal humans. There is a reward for humans, but animals return to the earth. The gentle repetition makes for a nice rhythmic song in the bird's honor. The first two lines focus on the death and the last three on the preparations for its burial. I think it is a poem children would be more comfortable with than adults - children understand death more honestly.