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.

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