My Kate

I found this a couple of years ago flipping through a book of poetry. It's a little-known poem by the well-known poetess Elizabeth Barrett Browning (author of Sonnets from the Portuguese). I have to wonder if it was written about an actual friend of hers.

This poem caught my attention because it is a tribute to a woman that does not include romantic love--rather unusual in poetry. In fact, romance does not even appear to have entered her life. In it we see the portrait, drawn by a friend, of a young woman now dead, and find glimpses of the influence she had on others.

This poem made me think about the influence I am having. Often influence is so quiet no one, even the influenced, notices it.

What kind of influence are you having? You may not have any idea of your power; I doubt Kate often thought about hers. What will people say about you when you die? Will even people who hardly thought about you sit up and wonder what is different, what's missing?


My Kate

She was not as pretty as women I know,
And yet all your best made of sunshine and snow
Drop to shade, melt to nought in the long-trodden ways,
While she’s still remembered on warm and cold days—
My Kate.

Her air had a meaning, her movements a grace;
You turned from the fairest to gaze on her face;
And when you had once seen her forehead and mouth,
You saw as distinctly her soul and her truth—
My Kate.

Such a blue inner light from her eyelids outbroke,
You looked at her silence and fancied she spoke;
When she did, so peculiar yet soft was the tone,
Though the loudest spoke also, you heard her alone—
My Kate.

I doubt if she said to you much that could act
As a thought or suggestion; she did not attract
In the sense of the brilliant or wise; I infer
’Twas her thinking of others made you think of her—
My Kate.

She never found fault with you, never implied
Your wrong by her right; and yet men at her side
Grew nobler, girls purer, as through the whole town
The children were gladder that pulled at her gown—
My Kate.

None knelt at her feet confessed lovers in thrall;
They knelt more to God than they used—that was all;
If you praised her as charming, some asked what you meant,
But the charm of her presence was felt when she went—
My Kate.

The weak and the gentle, the ribald and rude,
She took as she found them, and did them all good;
It always was so with her—see what you have!
She has made the grass greener even here with her grave—
My Kate.

—Elizabeth Barrett Browning

John Milton, a devoted Christian and a poetic genius, became blind at the age of forty-three. He chronicles his struggle with the prospect of what seemed limited usefulness, and reminds us of what God really desires from us.

When he was fifty, he began a new work...Paradise Lost.

Sonnet on His Blindness, by John Milton

When I consider how my light is spent
Ere half my days, in this dark world and wide,
And that one talent, which is death to hide,
Lodged with me useless, though my soul more bent
To serve therewith my Maker, and present
My true account, lest He, returning, chide:
“Doth God exact day labor, light denied?”
I fondly ask; but Patience, to prevent
That murmur, soon replies, “God doth not need
Either man’s work, or His own gifts; who best
Bear His mild yoke, they serve Him best. His state
Is kingly. Thousands at His bidding speed,
And post o’er land and ocean without rest;
They also serve who only stand and wait.”

On the Way to the Funeral of a Dear Friend

Death—
the final triumph,
the glad bursting into radiant glory,
the beginning of the great endlessness

for which the life we have here—
or so we call it—is only a dim reflection,
an off-stage rehearsal,
without lights, costumes, or set,

the afternoon before the Eternal Play begins,
never to leave off.

I mean not that the life we have here is not beautiful—
far from it!—
but that the life we know is only the prologue

to the things that shall come after.

No one attends a play for the prologue,
or reads a book for the introduction.
They go and read for what follows.

Why should we shrink from death?
Life is but the foreword, incomplete,
senseless,
without it.
If the prologue is so glorious,
why would we wish to flee the tale of which the prologue speaks?
The prologue exists for the play:
the play is not some freakish, tragic accident that by chance succeeds it,
the play is the event.

And the nervousness we feel between the prologue and the play,
when the lights are out and the curtains drawn,
is but the nervousness of the height of anticipation,
the last moment of uncertainty before

the longed-for joy shines forth fulfilled.