A Persistent Voice: Lydia Maria Child’s Short Story ‘Wergeland, the Poet’

A poet, who died young, captured the collective Norwegian imagination with his nature-focused work.

The countryside lush with colorful lupines in Aurland, Norway. PositiveTravelArt/Shutterstock

In a world centered around materialistic ideas, poets serve as guides to redirect people towards truth, goodness, and beauty in life. As Lydia Maria Child showed in her short story “Wergeland, the Poet,” poets help others find these virtues by specifically directing their attention back to nature.

A People’s Poet

Child tells of a poet named Henrik Wergeland (1808–1845), who lived in Norway. He was one of Norway’s most talented poets whom the people loved immensely. In return, he loved his people and “wrote a great number of verses for the peasantry, in all the peculiar dialects of their various districts.”

What made Wergeland so special was his love of nature. He wrote poetry that seemed to bring the very nature that he wrote about to life. His writing lends life and personality to nature, personifying, for example, the waves and granting them feelings of vengeance and anger.

"Henrik Wergeland," 1842, by Carl Peter Lehmann. Norwegian Museum of Cultural History. Oslo, Norway. Public Domain

Wergeland also loved life and the people and animals around him: “His soul went forth with warm spontaneousness to meet all forms of being; and this lively sympathy seemed to attract both men and animals toward him magnetically,” Child wrote. Along with the people, the menagerie that he owned lived in harmony and accord with each other.

A Persistent Voice

However, Wergeland died in middle age. Yet, even as he lay in wait for death, continued to write wonderful poems that called forth the beauty of nature.

In his “Supplication to Spring,” he begs spring to save him from death. He asks the plants and creatures to pray for his healing and sends up a petition:

Plead with the Maker of the rain! That he will chilling showers restrain; And my poor breast no longer feel Sharp needle-points of frosty steel.

He tells of how he loves spring the best and begs that it may remember him as he lay dying and intercede for him.

Two days before he died, Wergeland wrote another poem, “To the Guldenlak,” in which he addresses a flower about his death. Despite his sorrow at death, he still finds comfort in the beauty of nature:

Sweet flower! before thy reign is o’er, I shall be gone, to return no more

...

Open the window, and raise me up! My last glance must rest on her golden cup. My soul will kiss her, as it passes by And wave farewell from the distant sky.

Though he faced death, Wergeland didn’t grieve over the material things he was losing. Rather he turned and addressed the beauty around him. In that moment, he remembered the friendly flowers that had kept him company throughout the years.

Wergeland entreated the flowers to remember him. (Diana Draginova/Unsplash)  

Through this story, Child presents Wergeland as a worthy poet who sought nature and its beauty over the world’s materialism. Even in death, Child shows, Wergeland’s persistent voice carried across the centuries, bidding readers to look outside at the wondrous nature around them.

Child demonstrates, as L.M. Montgomery wrote in “The Story Girl”: “The world calls them its singers and poets and artists and story-tellers; but they are just people who have never forgotten the way to fairyland.” Poets serve as the guides that remind people of the beauty and magic in the world around them.

Thus, in a busy, materialistic world, poets and writers awaken people’s love and desire for nature. Through nature, they harken back to the true, the good, and the beautiful.

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