"Let the Light Enter!": Illuminating the Newspaper Poetry of Frances Ellen Watkins Harper

Nineteenth-century poet Frances Ellen Watkins Harper understood that no single interpretation of an event has the last word. Thirty-nine years after Johann Wolfgang von Goethe died, Harper included a short poem about his death in her 1871 collection Poems. According to popular nineteenth-century legend, when the German philosopher was dying he asked for more light in his room. The request (if Goethe made such a request at all) might have sounded as prosaic as "please open the window," but Goethe's admirers soon embellished his dying moments in popular lore. In their version of the story, Goethe's final request for more light signified that the great thinker was devoted to the pursuit of knowledge (or "light") until his dying breath. Decades later, Harper's poem "Let the Light Enter!" capitalized on this myth and responded to it.¹

In her poem, Harper acknowledges the way Goethe enthusiasts interpreted his last words but also gives the figure of light her own cast:

"LIGHT! more light! the shadows deepen,        And my life is ebbing low,Throw the windows widely open!        Light! more light! before I go.

"Softly let the balmy sunshine        Play around my dying bed,E'er the dimly lighted valley        I with lonely feet shall tread.

"Light! more light! for death is weaving        Shadows round my waning sight,And I fain would gaze upon him        Through a stream of earthly light."

(lines 1–12)

In these first three stanzas, Harper's Goethe articulates a desire for specifically "earthly light" rather than any grand philosophical or religious illumination. The "him" in line 11 supposedly refers to death, the only figure mentioned in the poem thus far. In framing the first three stanzas this way, Harper suggests a simple interpretation of Goethe's words: he wants light to comfort him when facing death.

The second half of the poem, however, employs a third-person perspective to acknowledge the prevailing mythology of Goethe's last words, to unsettle that perspective, and to illuminate the meaning of the legend differently by reinterpreting the figure of "light":

Not for greater gift s of genius,        Nor for thoughts more grandly bright,All the dying poet whispers        Is a prayer for light, more light.

Heeds he not the gathered laurels,        Fading slowly from his sight;All the poet's aspirations        Centre in that prayer for light.

Blessed Jesus, when our day dreams        Melt and vanish from the sight,May our dim and longing vision        Then be blessed with light, more light!

(13–24)

Here a second, unknown voice both acknowledges and explicitly dismisses the Romanticist version of Goethe's dying moments. Goethe does not pine for "greater gift s of genius" or "thoughts more grandly bright," as his enthusiasts had claimed. Rather, genius, revelation, and accolades all recede in the face of an all-consuming desire for a light associated specifically with Christianity. In fact, in the final stanza this interpreting voice speaks directly to Jesus, consigning earthly desires to the realm of "day dreams" in contrast with the light that Jesus gives. The poem's final emphasis, then, is on the heavenward gaze of the pious individual and that individual's direct and personal relationship to Jesus—the true light before which all earthly gift s and achievements pale.

In this second half of the poem, then, Harper illuminates the event of Goethe's death for nineteenth-century readers who would have been well acquainted with deathbed scenes in novels, poems, and Sunday school tracts. In such works, dying moments—often of children or women—feature a complete surrender to God and a loosening of ties to worldly things. Randi Lynn Tanglen describes them as "pedagogical tools," and they were meant to inspire many to higher ideals of morality and faith (85). In drawing a teaching illustration from Goethe's death, Harper aligns her own work with that of the poem's final speaker. As the voice in the latter half of the poem infuses Goethe's words with Christian meaning, Harper turns a popular account of a philosopher's dying...