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

and the higher reason? or the honest reason and another form of wish-fulfillment? No scholarly study can settle that for us.
Reversals
In discussing Coleridge's epitaphs I used the term "reversal" to claim that the same poem could, if we shift the way we look at it, turn into something like its opposite. A well-known graphic figure, that of the duck-rabbit, produces this effect in experiments on perception. A blink or other minor stimulus can cause the long ears to turn into a bill and, thus, the same drawing to turn from one animal into the other. Such a cartoon figure, for

 

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use in a joke or a simple experiment, may suggest triviality, but it is so apt that I offer it, quite seriously, as an image for this reversal of meaning. Here, for instance, is a simple example, unfictitious, blunt and moving:
"I have none but God left now!" said a poor widow, who had been freely pouring out her troubles to an aged friend. By the poor widow's account, she had passed through deep waters of affliction, and endured, as she said, more than her "share of trouble." One of her two children had been drowned, and the other was then in a lunatic asylum. She had lost her brother and sister, and only three weeks before had buried her husband, being left alone, and in poverty. ''All the day long," said she, "I am grieving; and when I wake in the morning, my pillow is wet with tears. Everything seems to have melted away, and I have none but God left now." 22
The author of this improving anecdote in The Young People's Treasury of 1896 points out to her (or, more probably, his?) readers that the poor widow could have no greater blessing than the Lord, who is her strength and shield, and urges her:
Up and be doing, broken hearted pilgrim. Onward and upward, desolate widow. If thou hast God left, then hast thou more need to praise Him on an instrument of ten strings, than to hang thy harp on the willows.
We are listening here to an exhortation that must have been delivered innumerable times in the cottages of the poor by well-meaning Christian comforters. The comforter in this case has seen that the duck of despair can be made a rabbit of consolation, and his hectoring tone is designed to produce this reversal. But the shift can run in either direction; and the old widow's remark, if we hear it as a response to the comforter, turns the rabbit into a duck, pointing out that God is a concept offered to those who have lost everything else.
The old widow spoke with the inadvertent accuracy of despair. There must have been thousands of occasions when her remark would have sounded to the "broken hearted pilgrim" like a palpable hit. Since we have not many records of such actual visits, I will turn to a poem (anonymous, dating from the mid-century) that is clearly intended to serve the same function:

 

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The Gathered Flower
A Gardener day by day had watched with care
A favourite rose, so fragrant and so fair,
That when to full perfection it should come
He thought to send it to his master's home:
It was the rarest flower the tree had borne
He marked its glaring beauties every morn;
But ah! one day he missed his garden gem;
A hand unknown had plucked it from the stem.
Some servant stole the rose, the gardener thought,
And he, with angry brow, the culprit sought;
But soon his feelings of displeasure turn'd
To joy and satisfaction when he learn'd
That 'twas his master who had pass'd the bower,
And for its special beauty cull'd the flower:
Now at his mansion, in some gorgeous room,
The gardener's favourite sheds its rich perfume.
Then said his master, "You with gladness spare,
To grace my home, your rose so bright and rare;
And yet, because my hand of late removed
From your home bower one blossom that you loved,
Your heart rebels; you are unreconciled
To God's wise will in reference to your child;
Think rather is it not an honour given
That he should take your flower to bloom in heaven?"
How often parents, like this gardener, find
Rebellious