"THE CHANGELING"
BY LOWELL
Whittier's "Changeling" Version
About the Author
More Seacoast Ballads, Poems & Songs
THE CHANGELING
By James Russell Lowell
I had a little daughter,
And she was given to me
To lead me gently backward
To the Heavenly Father's knee,
That I, by the force of nature,
Might in some dim wise divine
The depth of his infinite patience
To this wayward soul of mine.
I know not how others saw her,
But to me she was wholly fair,
And the light of the heaven she came from
Still lingered and gleamed in her hair;
For it was as wavy and golden,
And as many changes took,
As the shadows of the sun-gilt ripples
On the yellow bed of a brook.
To what can I liken her smiling
Upon me, her kneeling lover,
How it leaped from her lips to her eyelids,
And dimpled her wholly over,
Till her outstretched hands smiled also,
And I almost seemed to see
The very heart of her mother
Sending sun through her veins to me!
She had been with us scarce a twelvemonth,
And it hardly seemed a day,
When a troop of wandering angels
Stole my little daughter away;
Or perhaps those heavenly Zingari
But loosed the hampering strings,
And when they had opened her cage-door,
My little bird used her wings.
But they left in her stead a changeling,
A little angel child,
That seems like her bud in full blossom,
And smiles as she never smiled:
When I wake in the morning, I see it
Where she always used to lie,
And I feel as weak as a violet
Alone 'neath the awful sky.
As weak, yet as trustful also;
For the whole year long I see
All the wonders of faithful Nature
Still worked for the love of me;
Winds wander, and dews drip earthward,
Rain falls, suns rise and set,
Earth whirls, and all but to prosper
A poor little violet.
The child is not mine as the first was,
I cannot sing it to rest,
I cannot lift it up fatherly
And bliss it upon my breast;
Yet it lies in my little one's cradle
And sits in my little one's chair,
And the light of the heaven she's gone to
Transfigures its golden hair.
Poem and Illustration Source:
The Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell, Riverside, 1879.
For more on Changelings read this essay by Professor D.L. Ashliman
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About James Russell Lowell (1819-1891)
Lowell was another of the literary elite from Cambridge, Mass who came to visit Celia Thaxter at her summer salon on Appledore Island. A man of letters and Harvard professor, Lowell was known as a romantic poet, a humorist, critic, and editor of Atlantic Monthly and author of 50 abolitionist articles. Lowell retained a fascination in the occult and wrote an extensive essay on witchcraft in his 1871 collected essays "Among My Books."
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