Sweet Auburn: The Magazine of the Friends of Mount Auburn Expanding our Educational Outreach | Page 22

People and Happenings
Mount Auburn Visit
By Florence Ladd
When copper-leafed November comes calling
for remembrance of saints and souls, I call on
New England’s late luminaries, the celebrated
dead in Mount Auburn’s parkland of graves,
avenues of monuments, tributes in granite
to painters, preachers, politicians, and poets
eminent in their time.
At rest on Bellwort Path, Amy Lowell
the cigar-smoking Brahmin Sappho
claimed a summit for sisters in poetry’s
high mountains, citing the Greek Sappho,
Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Emily Dickinson
“great… marvelously strange,” but, “none of you
has any word for me,” said Amy.
Florence Ladd at Mount Auburn
A Portrait of the Poet as a Neighbor
By Stephen H. Anable, Communications Coordinator & Writer
Dr. Florence Ladd is sitting in her sun-flooded
living room off Brattle Street, a veritable gallery of art­—
some purchased from painters she admires, others, sculp-
tures of ceramic hippopotamuses in jellybean-bright glazes
and an Egyptian-style hawk, the work of her husband,
Bill Harris. Florence taught psychology at Simmons and
Harvard, served as dean at the MIT School of Architecture
& Planning, dean of students at Wellesley College, and di-
rector of the Mary Ingraham Bunting Institute at Harvard.
She worked for Oxfam and the United Nations. She has
also nurtured, discussed and created art for most of her life,
being the author of the novel, Sarah’s Psalm, and numer-
ous stories, essays and poems. She has lived with Mount
Auburn Cemetery as her neighbor and muse for almost
five decades.
“Mount Auburn Visit” was written after a walk through
the Cemetery as a spontaneous expression of her feel-
ings. “I use those walks for inspiration,” Florence says, “and
20 | Sweet Auburn
She hoped “some other woman with an itch
for writing” would advance her poetic
trek. In our time she would have known
Rukeyser, Levertov, Jordan, and Lorde
who unbuttoned the Muse, unbound her feet
guiding her steady ascent to higher peaks
singing of sisterhood.
certainly going through the Cemetery brings me closer to
thinking what life is about.” She considers Mount Auburn
“the area’s most beautiful park. I know it best in spring and
fall. I go there with the intention of visiting old friends. I
used to take walks there with a friend, and I’d say, ‘Let’s go
visit the Longfellows.’ And certainly I’ve focused on those
buried there that were contributors to the arts and the lit-
erary heritage of New England.” Florence’s husband shares
her interest in the Cemetery, especially in Edmonia Lewis’s
statue, Hygeia, on the grave of Dr. Harriot Hunt, one of the
nation’s first female physicians. Lewis’s biographer, Marilyn
Richardson, is a family friend.
Says Ladd: “The history of a region is laid out in cem-
eteries. You can learn something about family relationships
from the monuments, about longevity when you look
at those dates, and about sociology by who’s there and
who’s not. I always have to see the enormous monument
(at Mount Auburn) dedicated to Mary Baker Eddy. Just
the scale of it speaks to me about the importance of one
woman—and about magnifying the presence of women.”