"Lines": Ellen Murray's 1862 Elegy for Francis Barnard, Teacher of the Freed

The poet and her subject

Ellen Murray, a co-founder of the Penn School on St. Helena Island, South Carolina, wrote this elegy, which appeared in The New South on November 1, 1862.

Its subject, Francis Everett Barnard, was born on April 8, 1836, in Dorchester, Massachusetts, and lived there until the Civil War. In the spring of 1862, the Educational Commission for Freedmen sent him and 29 others from Boston to South Carolina for the Port Royal Experiment. On Edisto Island he was superintendent of 10 plantations, overseeing about 600 newly freed people; he handed out reading primers and tried to start a day school.

That summer, U.S. troops were pulled back from Edisto to help defend Hilton Head Island. The freed people of Edisto moved to St. Helena Island, and their superintendents went with them. Soon after, in September, Barnard fell ill with "bilious fever." He died on October 18, 1862, aged 26.

The poem

On the death of F. E. Barnard, which occurred on St. Helena Island, S.C., October 18th, 1862.

He slept; the burning agony had passed,
The struggle and the pain;
The brow, relieved of anxious trouble, took
Its childhood's calm again,

Which deepened on and ever, till it grew
Into eternal peace;
Into a rest where painful dreams are o'er,
And restless tossings cease.

It seems as if that still face had not known
A suffering or a care,
So legibly and so unalterably
The peace of God is there.

And we who look, forget the darksome way,
And almost ask to be
Sharers in such a perfectness of rest,
Such deep tranquility.

These Islands give him all they have to give;
A few bright autumn flowers,
To light the darkness of the coffin lid,
With thoughts of Springtime hours;

And more than these, heart tears from those who shared
His guardianship and love;
Such tears are counted blessings in yon world
All other praise above.

Most honored! thou, first called from midst our band,
'Tis said, no cause can be
On earth victorious till its martyrs die;
And so we think of thee,

As if thy death had consecrating power,
To bid the work proceed,
'Till many laborers reap the harvest in,
Where thou has sown the seed.

— Murray

Reading it

Murray's elegy moves from the sickbed to consolation: Barnard's face, freed of fever and worry, seems to show God's peace so plainly that the mourners almost envy his rest. The islands can offer only autumn flowers — and the tears of the freed people he served, which the poem counts as the highest praise. In the last stanzas Barnard becomes the first martyr of the teachers' band, his death consecrating a work that others will carry to harvest.

The series: Half-Way (previous) · The First Day of January, 1863 (next)

Sources

Based on "Lines," in the series Poems by Ellen Murray, National Park Service, Reconstruction Era National Historical Park; the introduction is a work of the United States government and the 1862 poem is in the public domain. The poem's line breaks, lost where lines ran together, are restored; its "occured" is corrected to occurred, and the introduction's "Educational Commission for Freedman" to Freedmen.