13 AT DINNER IS BAD LUCK

American author Nathaniel Hawthorne came to New Hampshire for his health. He died here. The same thing happened to poet John Greenleaf whittier. Coincidence? Of course. But how else can we entice you to read the story of the death and burial of a minor romantic poet? Here is the story of the popular poets final days and journey home.

READ: Whittier in NH and Visit Poet's Grave

Sensing his approaching death in the 1890s, poet John Greenleaf Whittier began burning letters from his famous friends. He could hear the vile biographers scratching at his door, and as a Quaker and deeply private man, Whittier planned to leave them few tasty scraps. He urged his friends, like island poet Celia Thaxter, to burn his letters in return. She didn’t. Whittier was among the last of the romantic Victorian poets, enormously popular, and his words were just too precious for her to destroy.

Today Whittier’s words are nearly as dead as his friends. Few people read "Snow-Bound" or "Maud Muller" or "Barbara Frietchie" anymore, even in school. But at his death on September 7, 1892, John Greenleaf Whittier of Amesbury, Massachusetts, was a pop icon, as beloved as a modern rock star. Schools closed to honor his passing and for years after, his birthday was celebrated as a local holiday.

Whittier died here in New Hampshire, a state he dearly loved, and of which he wrote many of his best poems. He was especially fond of Center Harbor, the White Mountains and the Isles of Shoals, and remembered a time when one could pitch a tent and camp out for days on a sparsely populated Hampton Beach. But late in the summer of 1892 the poet was too weak to travel further than Hampton, Falls, NH where he settled into his favorite room at Elmfield. The 1787 house with its two distinctive chimneys and lush gardens exhibited the finest architecture in the town. The Gove family who owned the house were also Quakers and could trace their roots on this land back to the late 1600s. From his simple room on the second floor Whittier had a view of the gardens, the marsh and the distant beach. He often sat in a wooden rocker on a small balcony reading or composing letters. The last photograph of Whittier shows him there, a tiny figure drinking in his last view of the seacoast scenery.

CONTINUE to read about DEATH & BURIAL 

 
 POETIC DEATH AND BURIAL  (continued)

Here in coastal New Hampshire, Whittier wrote his last poem at 84, a short congratulatory verse to his friend Oliver Wendell Holmes. Holmes, best known for his poem "Old Ironsides" was about to celebrate his 80th birthday. Both men outlived their colleagues Hawthorne, Tennyson, Longfellow, Lowell, Emerson, Whitman, Poe and Thoreau. But Whittier and Holmes have since been classified as "popular" poets, less worthy of serious academic study and locked outside the literary canon of their New England contemporaries.

Before the Civil War Whittier was known largely for his Abolitionist poetry and activism. His popular career skyrocketed with the appearance of "Snow-Bound" in 1865 when he was already in his 50s. Always critical of his own work, Whittier maintained a love-hate relationship with his growing fan club. Although he basked in the attention, the aging bachelor was discomforted by aggressive autograph hounds and constant requests for private meetings, speeches, dedicated poems, loans, contributions and even locks of his hair.

While at Elmfield,Whittier was happy to announce to other guests that he had managed to elude the pesky "pilgrims" for almost three weeks. He was unaware, when he suffered a stroke in early September, that a reporter from the Boston Globe was hiding in the bushes outside the Hampton Falls house. At the moment of the poet’s death a nurse signaled the reporter by placing a lamp in the bedroom window.

Samuel T. Pickard, related to Whittier by marriage and his literary executor, tells a wonderfully creepy tale from the poet’s last days. Whittier, the story goes, was last to dinner one night at Elmfield where a dozen guests were already seated. Thirteen visitors at one table was considered bad luck, so Whittier’s niece Elizabeth, Pickard’s wife, moved her plate to a small table In the corner of the room.

"Why, Lizzie, what has thee been doing that they put thee in the corner?" Whittier said jokingly as he entered and sat at the large table.

Then another guest arrived unexpectedly and took the 13^th position at the table. Without explanation, the Pickard’s son Greenleaf, moved quickly to sit with his mother, but the curse was cast. Whittier suffered his stroke the next day while dressing, and never dined with the guests again. When he walked up the stairs to his room for the last time, Pickard adds, an old clock struck once as he passed it. The clock had not sounded for years and, despite their efforts, no one at Elmfield was able to make it chime again.

Whittier’s last whispered words reportedly were "I love all the world". On the morning before his death, attended by three physicians, Whittier gestured weakly in protest when the nurse tried to lower the window shade. It was his final sunrise.

CONTINUE to read about FUNERAL & GRAVE SITE 

 
 BACK TO AMESBURY  (continued)

After weeks of cherished privacy in his New Hampshire hideaway, Whittier’s funeral was a highly public affair. At least 5,000 guests passed through the entrance of the poet’s home in Amesbury, now a museum. Stepping into a small central room, mourners turned sharply to the right where Whittier’s tall lanky body lay in state in the small parlor, stretched below portraits of his mother and sister Elizabth. A photograph taken from the second floor shows at least a thousand visitors crammed into the back yard during a funeral oration. Many mourners, including Celia Thaxter, can be seen wiping away tears.

Despite rumors that the poet was buried in New Hampshire, Whittier rests in the Quaker section of Union Cemetery in Amesbury. As many as 2,000 pilgrims a day came looking for his grave following the funeral. The simple rounded gravestone reads "Here Whittier Lies". His is the tallest in a row of stones of family members. His sister and mother are buried to the right of the poet’s headstone. Niece Elizabeth and biographer Samuel Pickard are buried to the left. For decades a high neatly trimmed hedge surrounded the family plot. A series of signs were erected directing visitors down the "Whittier Path" to his grave. Another sign on a metal pipe hovers at least 12-feet in the air so that it could be seen over the great hedge. But the hedge was recently torn down after it became infested with poison ivy leaving the Whittier plot open and exposed.

Elmfield, like Whittier, has left New Hampshire. Despite efforts to preserve the historic colonial house, it was sold in 1996. The new owners disassembled the building and moved it to Greenwich, Connecticut. That still leaves us with two Whittier house museums intact. The poet’s birthplace in Haverhill and his long-time home in Amesbury are open to the public. The Amesbury house, lovingly preserved down to the smallest details, still looks like Whittier left if the day he departed for that final New Hampshire vacation in 1892.

KEY SOURCES: Whittier-Land by Samuel T. Pickard (1904) and John Greenleaf Whittier: A Biography by Roland H. Woodwell (1985).

Copyright © 2005 by J. Dennis Robinson. All rights reserved.