Songs on the Death of Children

On New Year’s Eve, 1833, the poet Friedrich Rückert’s daughter, Luise, died of scarlet fever. She was followed two weeks later by his youngest son, Ernst. In the next few months, he wrote some 428 poems about them. I include a few. I cannot read them without weeping. 

We today wonder how people felt about death, in a time when it was more common. We do not expect our children to die young. When it does come, it is unimaginable. How could they feel as we do? How could they go on living? Perhaps their grief was not so great as ours. Perhaps they were numbed. Perhaps they grew calluses against pain. Perhaps. Perhaps.

But it isn’t so. We know it isn’t so. They felt grief as strongly as we do. That they felt it more often does not diminish it — for as the love for a child is not diminished by the birth of their sibling, so too is the grief at the passing of a loved one not diminished by the passing of another. It is the same everywhere. In their capacity for feeling, all men are equals. 

In the past year, 462,000 children died from malaria. Could there be anything more important?