Cape Ann and Beyond the Cut Bridge. Sharon R. Chace

Mountain peak (I’m assuming she meant Mount Washington) in silence eloquent for God’s presence.

      Ocean dangers seem ever present in Larcom’s outlook, although mountains can be dangerous but not as constantly threatening. Larcom expressed strong contrast in her poem “From the Hills,” where she described the hills as religion and the sea as “doubt’s unanswered moan to thee.”18 There is incongruous beauty in Larcom’s crisp thought in well-honed words that bleed grief from lives lost at sea in “Rafe’s Chasm” and “At Georges.”

      Lucy Larcom is most famous for her book A New England Girlhood: Outlined from Memory, republished by Northeastern University Press in 1986. This classic book is about her role as a textile worker, her friendships, memories of place, and the literary papers that she and other young women produced. She was sixty-five when she wrote about her girlhood days. No wonder in her poem “October,” she states that Septembers promise more than they can deliver and that “our latest years may be our best.”19 Likewise, my senior citizen days are my best writing years. She also stated in A New England Girlhood that her most natural expression was in poetry.20 In her letter to Phillips Brooks dated January 17, 1893, Larcom wrote, “I can truly say that the last ten years of my life have been better and happier than all that went before.”21 My last years here in Rockport are also my most productive and happy.

      Larcom had another late-in-life accomplishment that blossomed from her earlier experiences. In 1846, at the age of twenty-two, she moved with her sister Emeline and Emeline’s husband to Illinois. Larcom taught school and then enrolled in Monticello Female Seminary in Godfrey, Illinois. She graduated in 1852 and went on to teach in Wheaton Seminary, now Wheaton College, in Norton, Massachusetts. She continued to write. Wheaton alumna, United Church of Christ minister and member of First Congregational Church of Rockport, the Reverend Dr. Elizabeth Rice-Smith and I shared many conversations and e-mails. In summary, she says:

      The legacy of Lucy Larcom is enduring. Her legacy continues to matter because her writings about her life, her faith, and her interests in nineteenth-century labor issues make her accessible to girls and women today. She inspires her readers through her character and activities. I became aware of Lucy Larcom’s presence on the North Shore as a girl growing up in Central Massachusetts, and then was delighted as an undergraduate student majoring in Religion, living in Larcom, to discover that the dormitory was named after her at Wheaton College in Norton, Massachusetts! Sharon Chace enlivens Lucy Larcom for us here on Cape Ann, and for readers throughout the world.

      For Lucy Larcom and for me, beauty is revelatory. Addison noted Larcom’s poetic hermeneutic:

      Poetry, to her, was vastly more than word-shaping, or combinations of accented and unaccented syllables; it was an attitude of mind and soul towards all existence, a view-point of her being, from which she saw such visions, and heard such sounds, that the impulse was irresistible to record in recognized poetic form her ideas and feelings. She found poetry in everything around her; it was the atmosphere she breathed, the medium, like imponderable ether, through which she saw life. Nature had a more profound meaning to her than the charm of color, or the changing pleasures of the land or the sea. It was the visible evidence of the unseen, the prophecy of a greater fulfillment, the proclamation of the spiritual element within, which the senses of themselves could not perceive. She once said, “Nature is one vast metaphor through which spiritual truth may be read:”—

      “The Universe is one great loving Thought,

      Written in Hieroglyphs of bud and bloom.”22

      In her poem “A Strip of Blue,” Larcom wrote: “Thy universe, O God, is home, / In height or depth, to me; / Yet here upon thy footstool green/ Content am I to be; / Glad when is opened unto my need/Some sea-like glimpse of Thee.”23 Looking at a world in snow, Larcom wrote: “A new earth, bride of a new heaven, / Has been revealed to me.”24In her poem “One Butterfly,” Lucy wrote about seeing colors hidden by sunshine yet revealed by shadows of clouds: “To read that revelation / There’s none save thou and I, / In all this noon-lit silence, / My white-winged butterfly.”25

      I also have written about white butterflies in my poem, “Butterflies Braiding.” Over the years, white butterflies have given me delight and assurance of friendly beauty and even ongoing life beyond earthly existence. After my father-in-law’s graveside service, my husband, Ernest, and I stopped on the way back to Rockport from Mansfield, Massachusetts, at what must have been one of the last Howard Johnson restaurants. I seldom drink soda, or as older Rockporters say “tonic,” but that day I had a Coca-Cola. The restaurant was crowded, so we sipped our sweet drinks outside in the warm sunshine. A white butterfly landed on my check and stayed so long, it was as if he had something to say.

      Color played an important part in Larcom’s spiritual life, as it does in mine. She told Whittier that she saw the original painting of “Dante and Beatrice” by Schoeffer at the Athenaeum. While she preferred the engraving to the colorful painting, she added that there would be much of the beauty of colors in the hereafter to make us glad. She believed that the soul sees the subtlest shades of beauty, and that in the hereafter the soul’s eyes will be fully open.

      Oh, dear Lucy, I wish I could tell you about March 6, 2014. So in my imagination, I will speak to you. My husband Ernie and I went to the Haverhill Public Library so that I could read your letters to the Whittiers. That morning your poetry was mentioned by poet John Ronan, former Gloucester poet laureate, in the Gloucester Daily Times. The sun was shining and warmed our faces as we rode in our Prius, a vehicle that would be hard for you to imagine—a horseless carriage that runs partly by gasoline and partly by electricity. Most trolley-trains have disappeared. The Merrimack River that sustained you during you working days at the mill was a perfect shade of sapphire. I thought of the harebells you found on its banks, and remembered your sense of sacramental beauty in flowers.