Some more Brown poems
She knelt upon her brother’s grave,
My little girl of six years old — He used to be so good and brave, The sweetest lamb of all our fold; He used to shout, he used to sing, Of all our tribe the little king— And so unto the turf her ear she laid,
To hark if still in that dark place he played.
No sound! no sound!
Death’s silence was profound ; And horror crept
Into her aching heart, and Dora wept.
If this is as it ought to be,
My God, I leave it unto Thee.
As with many Victorian families, Thomas and Amelia Brown lost two of their seven children at a young age. The first, Amy, born in 1859, died at only two months and was buried in the Isle of Man. The second, a boy named Braddan after the Manx village, died in 1876 at the age of seven.
Dora was the youngest of Brown’s three surviving daughters and this very moving poem is really a cry from her father about the cruel loss of his sparkling young son. It was one of four of Brown’s poems included in the ‘Oxford Book of English Verse’ (1900) edited by Brown’s former Clifton pupil, Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch and it has been much anthologised elsewhere.
The most famous/notorious of the four poems included by Couch was ‘My Garden’ which starts “A Garden is a lovesome thing, God wot!” Much derided by cynics it has nevertheless been much anthologised and is very popular in cemeteries in the USA. Neither of Brown’s surviving sons married, nor did Dora or her two sisters, who acted as housekeepers for their father after the death of their mother. Dora died aged 84 in 1955. In 1930, when the Isle of Man celebrated the centenary of her father’s birth in very grand style and declared him to be the Manx National Poet, she wrote a memoir in which she said this about her brother Braddan, who was two years older:
“Little Braddan ruled us rather strictly. He was a fine bonny child and I have the most vivid picture at this moment of his having saved my life when my pinafore caught fire, as we three little wretches stretched over the nursery guard dangling long strings into the fire: my pinafore blazed up, Braddan instantly tore it off, stamped on it and hid it under the bed.”
One year after this incident Braddan died, almost certainly in Clifton and he was buried in the graveyard of Redland Chapel. Brown’s wife Amelia was buried in the same grave when she died in 1887 and because Brown died in Bristol in 1897 he was buried there as well.
A GRASSY field, the lambs, the nibbling sheep,
A blackbird and a thorn, the April smile
Of brooding peace, the gentle airs that wile
The Channel of its moodiness, a steep
That brinks the flood, a little gate to keep
The sacred ground —and then that old gray pile,
A simple church wherein there is no guile
Of ornament; and here the Hallams sleep.
Blest mourner, in whose soul the grief grew song,
Not now, methinks, awakes the slumbering pain,
While joy, with busy fingers, weaves the woof
Of Spring. But when the Winter nights are long,
Thy spirit comes with sobbing of the rain,
And spreads itself, and moans upon the roof.
Dating back to the 12th century, St Andrew’s Church was the burial place of the Elton family who bought the medieval manor house, Clevedon Court, in 1709 and live there still.
Julia, the daughter of Sir Abraham Elton, the fifth baronet, married Henry Hallam, a Lincolnshire priest and historian and had a son named Arthur, born in 1811. He was educated at Eton and Trinity College Cambridge where he was a contemporary of Alfred Tennyson. Finelooking, intellectually brilliant, a poet from an early age and blessed with a generous nature Hallam won many friends, especially Tennyson, whose sister Emily Hallam intended to marry.
Tragically, he died of a stroke while in Vienna in September 1833, aged only 22. Tennyson never forgot his friend and his poetic masterpiece ‘In Memoriam’, published in 1850 is dedicated to him. Brown would have known the poem well and the last six lines of his poem presumably refer to Tennyson, the ‘Blest Mourner’.