Sweet Auburn: The Magazine of the Friends of Mount Auburn Mount Auburn: Chapters of Poetry & Prose | Page 5

Lowell Family Lot
The First Snow-Fall
The memorials for young children
scattered throughout Mount
Auburn’s historic landscape are a physical reminder of the
high child mortality rate during the 19th century. Roughly
one third of all burials at Mount Auburn during the 1840s
were for children five years or younger. James Russell Low-
ell, poet, critic, and editor, understood the grief that comes
from losing a child all too well: only one of his four
by James Russell Lowell (1847)
children survived to adulthood. In May of 1847 Lowell and
his wife buried their first-born, a 15-month old daughter
named Blanche, in their lot on Fountain Avenue. Later that
same year while observing the season’s first snow from the
window of his family’s home, he penned “The First Snow-Fall.”
Echoing the same sentiments as Mount Auburn’s founders,
Lowell’s iconic poem sees promise in the power of nature
to comfort and console during a time of immense sorrow.
The snow had begun in the gloaming,
And busily all the night
Had been heaping field and highway
With a silence deep and white. Up spoke our own little Mabel,
Saying, “Father, who makes it snow?”
And I told of the good All-Father
Who cares for us here below.
Every pine and fir and hemlock
Wore ermine too dear for an earl,
And the poorest twig on the elm-tree
Was ridged inch deep with pearl. Again I looked at the snow-fall,
And thought of the leaden sky
That arched o’er our first great sorrow,
When that mound was heaped so high.
From sheds new-roofed with Carrara
Came Chanticleer’s muffled crow,
The stiff rails softened to swan’s-down,
And still fluttered down the snow. I remembered the gradual patience
That fell from that cloud like snow,
Flake by flake, healing and hiding
The scar that renewed our woe.
I stood and watched by the window
The noiseless work of the sky,
And the sudden flurries of snowbirds,
Like brown leaves whirling by. And again to the child I whispered,
“The snow that husheth all,
Darling, the merciful Father
Alone can make it fall!”
Then, with eyes that saw not,
I kissed her:
And she, kissing back, could not know
That my kiss was given to her sister,
Folded close under deepening snow.
I thought of a mound in sweet Auburn
W here a little headstone stood;
How the flakes were folding it gently,
As did robins the babes in the wood.
There is more online! James
Russell Lowell was part of a
group of New England poets
known as the Fireside Poets,
so known because their poems
were written for a popular
audience and often read aloud
for entertainment as families
gathered around the fireplace.
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow,
another of the Fireside Poets,
never specifically mentioned
Mount Auburn in any of his
printed poems. He did, however,
use verse to celebrate the lives
of several friends and family
members now buried at the
Cemetery. Visit us online to
view a few examples.
www.mountauburn.org/
sweet-auburn-winter-2013/
Winter 2013 | 3