The Poetry Woodland Series: "Thank God for Little Children"
Public domain poetry readings & analysis. Vol. 2 | Frances Ellen Watkins Harper's poems 🪶
Thank God For Little Children*
by Frances Ellen Watkins Harper
Thank God for little children,
Bright flowers by earth's wayside,
The dancing, joyous lifeboats
Upon life's stormy tide.
Thank God for little children;
When our skies are cold and gray,
They come as sunshine to our hearts,
And charm our cares away.
I almost think the angels,
Who tend life's garden fair,
Drop down the sweet wild blossoms
That bloom around us here.
It seems a breath of heaven
Round many a cradle lies,
And every little baby
Brings a message from the skies.
Dear mothers, guard these jewels.
As sacred offerings meet,
A wealth of household treasures
To lay at Jesus' feet.*This poem is in the public domain!
Frances Ellen Watkins Harper (September 24, 1825 - February 22, 1911) was a poet, journalist, teacher, activist, and fiction writer born free in Baltimore. Frequently thought of as the mother of Black journalism in the US, she wrote for many anti-slavery and abolitionist newspapers and published several books and collections. This blurb hardly scratches the surface, so please read more about her incredible work and life here and here.
My heart hasn’t left these lines:
It seems a breath of heaven Round many a cradle lies, And every little baby Brings a message from the skies.
A breath of heaven…a breath from heaven—perhaps from a lost child to a newborn—bringing “a message from the skies” to remind us of their tender example. And although the last stanza addresses mothers, it’s a message for the mother within each of us. We forget that “Thank God for___” can be a request rather than a rhetorical statement.
I’m thinking of how many children have been murdered in 2024 alone. Killing children is one of the most sinister features of genocidal violence, and it makes me think about why their deaths so deeply move us. They’re everything this poem mentions—the seeds of a new generation. I wonder if feeling such pain when they die is not only spiritual but evolutionary. I’m curious whether fragments of evolutionary theory have a place, given the racism embedded in it. Does any part of evolution—particularly biological—align with spiritual practices centred around collective kinship? I’m not sure whether Frances Ellen Watkins Harper intended to loop these questions in, but even inadvertently it forces me to see the cruelty of overriding any of these instincts.