In Memory of Charlie Spaulding
"In Memory of Charlie Spaulding" is an elegy by Ella Wheeler Wilcox mourning the death of Charlie Spaulding, a child of six years and five months who died on July 4, 1875. The poem is addressed to the bereaved family and meditates on grief, loss, and the consolation of Christian faith and the promise of heavenly reunion. Wilcox frames Charlie's brief life as a divine loan: he descended from an angelic realm, was mistakenly believed to belong permanently to his earthly family, and was then recalled by God before reaching his seventh year. The imagery throughout is celestial — Charlie is a cherub who strayed from the angel band surrounding God's throne, and Christ's summoning of him is presented not as tragedy in the ultimate sense but as a return to his proper, eternal home. The poem's emotional core is the devastation of the surviving family and, specifically, the contrast drawn between Charlie and his brother Arthur, who remains alive. Arthur faces a life of thorns, grief, woe, and sorrow — the ordinary sufferings of earthly existence. Charlie, by dying young, has been spared all of this and dwells in uninterrupted joy "through an endless morrow." This contrast is not callous but rather a grief-management theology common to Victorian mourning literature: the dead child is the fortunate one, shielded from suffering, while the living must endure. The consolation offered to the grieving parents is the anticipation of reunion. Heaven is recast as the true home precisely because Charlie is there; no earthly wealth, honor, or happiness can compete with the pull of where their child now dwells. Each morning and night their thoughts turn toward heaven and their boy. The prospect of meeting him again on "that shore" is described as the only force keeping despair at bay. The poem closes by inverting the conventional dread of death: because they have a child waiting beyond the grave in "fields of living bloom," death has lost its chill and the grave its gloom. Grief becomes, paradoxically, a source of longing for one's own death — not from despair but from love and the certainty of reunion through Christ's redeeming grace. Wilcox's craft here is disciplined and formally regular: quatrains in iambic tetrameter with alternating rhyme, a meter and structure that lend the lament a measured, hymn-like solemnity appropriate to its commemorative purpose. The diction is simple and accessible, consistent with Wilcox's broader popular appeal, and the theological framework is mainstream Protestant — heaven, Christ, angels, redemption — making the poem legible and comforting to a wide nineteenth-century readership.
By Ella Wheeler Wilcox · First published 1905 · Genre: Elegy, Religious Poetry, Memorial Poetry · 469 words
First lines
Aged 6 years and 5 months; died July 4, 1875.
With eyes that scarce can see for tears, / We look back o'er the little space / Of baby Charlie's life. Six years / Since first we looked upon his face.
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In Memory of Charlie Spaulding is listed on Textopian as a poem by Ella Wheeler Wilcox, dated 1905 CE.
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- Work type: Poem
- Author: Ella Wheeler Wilcox
- Date: 1905 CE
- Language: English
- Genres: Elegy, Religious Poetry, Memorial Poetry, Sentimental Poetry, Grief Poetry
- Length: 469 words
- Structure: 1 section, 12 paragraphs
- Reading fit: Easy (6th Grade)
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- Work identity for In Memory of Charlie Spaulding by Ella Wheeler Wilcox
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Genres
- Elegy — A formal poem mourning the death of a specific individual, embodying the classical elegiac tradition of expressing grief, loss, and commemoration of the deceased.
- Religious Poetry — Centered on Christian theological imagery and themes including angels, heaven, Christ's redemption, and the consolation of faith in an eternal afterlife.
- Memorial Poetry — Explicitly composed to commemorate and preserve the memory of Charlie Spaulding, recording the speaker's emotional relationship and recollections of the child.
- Sentimental Poetry — Characterized by tender emotional expression, nostalgic detail of the child's physical beauty and innocent nature, and prioritization of feeling over intellectual analysis.
Tags
poetry · memorial · elegy · tribute · grief · loss · remembrance · death · mourning · consolation · sentimental · emotional